flying_shadow she/her Posted September 13, 2017 Report Share Posted September 13, 2017 Oh. I didn't know that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pagerunner he/him Posted September 14, 2017 Report Share Posted September 14, 2017 (edited) 20 hours ago, PeterAhlstrom said: The symbol sets are all based on historical place of articulation (and articulating tongue part), and there have been some sound changes over the centuries so they don't currently all line up exactly. The t/d/r/th/l group (historically alveolar) is articulated with the tip of the tongue, and the s/z/n/sh/h group (historically postalveolar) is/was articulated with the blade of the tongue. The modern h sound (like h in English) used to appear only in the palindromic locations, and was written only with the diacritic. This diacritic is mirrored on the top and bottom of the character. Some writers may use only the top or bottom because lazy. Also, sometimes the diacritic can be left out entirely and people just know to pronounce it as h because it's a very common word or name. The h character used to stand for a weakly-voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative. This later shifted backward to a velar fricative (first weakly-voiced, later voiceless) as in Kholin. In modern times the h character is usually for the same h sound that we have in English. Sometimes kh is written using a combination of the k and h characters, and sometimes it's written just as h for historical reasons. Different regional dialects also shift the pronunciation one way or another. The L sound has also shifted. It used to be a voiced alveolar lateral fricative, and this is still seen in names like Lhan. It's now a regular L sound. The final group, k/g/y/ch/j, used to have dual articulation, similar to velarized postalveolar. Now the articulation has separated, with some velar and some postalveolar. Currently y and j are pronounced the same or differently based on class and regional dialect. So, a darkeyes name like Jost or Jest will be pronounced with a regular j sound, while with the upper class it has merged with y so that Jasnah and Jezerezeh are pronounced with a y sound. Historically they were always separate sounds. Wow! This is all very cool to know, and answers a lot that I had been wondering about (like why Yenev wasn't spelled with a J). I'd been trying to approach the women's script like the Greek alphabet, where when it's mapped to an English keyboard there are some correlations that don't make sense phonetically (like Y and Ψ). But it looks like Alethi basically shares our alphabet, it just has a bit of a different history. A couple of follow-ups, if you don't mind: Does this look right for IPA sounds for modern Alethi consonants? There are several articulations that don't have their own Alethi letters (KH for /x/, KK for /q/, LH for /ɮ/, presumably NG for /ŋ/ even though I haven't found it in any Alethi words yet). And then, there are ones like /w/, which I believe is represented by a vowel. Do the Alethi have a typical way to write /ð/ or /ʒ/, for example? Or any additional sounds that are by and large unfamiliar to English speakers? I'm trying to map historical pronunciation to IPA, as well; does this look right for L and H? I'm trying to teach myself how double-articulated consonants work, but I'm not having much luck, since velar and alveolar seem to be a pretty rare combination. Or is the velarization more of a secondary articulation? Could you share IPA for the historical k/g/y/ch/j family? Eshonai thinks of Alethi as a guttural language. But it looks like, aside from the KH, Alethi isn't any more guttural than modern English. And neither is what we've seen of the Parshendi language - they've got quite a few instances of velar consonants (Narak, Klade, Gangnah). Is that KH all that makes Eshonai think that way? Or do the Parshendi actually articulate some of those consonants closer to the front of the mouth? Edited September 14, 2017 by Pagerunner Tables did not copy into post. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jofwu he/him Posted September 14, 2017 Report Share Posted September 14, 2017 1 hour ago, Pagerunner said: Does this look right for IPA sounds for modern Alethi consonants? Is something missing here? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pagerunner he/him Posted September 14, 2017 Report Share Posted September 14, 2017 9 hours ago, jofwu said: Is something missing here? Hopefully not anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tesh Posted September 16, 2017 Report Share Posted September 16, 2017 Ohhhh, this is very interesting. I'm going to have to read all of the replies later... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 5, 2017 Report Share Posted October 5, 2017 I love this topic and I love languages reading along with what everyone is doing, but has anyone made any notions of writing some of the Quote's, from Nohadon's "The Way of Kings"? Or perhaps, the First Ideal of the Knights Radiant? This thread dissects and categorizes, but is there any accurate fan made phrases or sentences one could perhaps look at or should I write out some of the ones that come to mind, and bring them here for "Proofreading" to make sure they are accurate? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 5, 2017 Report Share Posted October 5, 2017 (edited) On 5/5/2017 at 3:33 AM, Harakeke said: Temporary image dump until I get a chance to fix the first post: Do you have blank pages we can print out and ream ourselves? Maybe even condensed so that we can write it smaller, cutting the lines up into smaller sections, fitting more than 10 lines on a page lol. Btw I know it's a dying thread but it is going to get big again in the wake of the 3rd book. Edited October 5, 2017 by Knghtstlker 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harakeke Posted October 6, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 6, 2017 17 hours ago, Knghtstlker said: I love this topic and I love languages reading along with what everyone is doing, but has anyone made any notions of writing some of the Quote's, from Nohadon's "The Way of Kings"? Or perhaps, the First Ideal of the Knights Radiant? This thread dissects and categorizes, but is there any accurate fan made phrases or sentences one could perhaps look at or should I write out some of the ones that come to mind, and bring them here for "Proofreading" to make sure they are accurate? I think I dabbled with something like that a while back, but if I recall it had a bunch of typos because I kept swapping my Ls and Rs. If you wanted to write some out, that'd be awesome, and I'm sure folks (myself included) would be happy to take a look! I think there are also some examples of fanart with women's script in the Stormlight image gallery. 12 hours ago, Knghtstlker said: Do you have blank pages we can print out and ream ourselves? Maybe even condensed so that we can write it smaller, cutting the lines up into smaller sections, fitting more than 10 lines on a page lol. Btw I know it's a dying thread but it is going to get big again in the wake of the 3rd book. Sure! If you print the .jpegs out in"multiple images per page" mode, you should be able to get 20-40 lines per page. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 6, 2017 Report Share Posted October 6, 2017 So awesome Thank you! I’ll have to email it to myself so I can print it st work tomorrow! I plan on printing it out. I’m assuming in the Image dump the L’s and R’s are correctly placed? I plan on writing at least the first ideal of The Immortals words with a straight edge, I’m no artist sadly, but copy pasting images seems seriously tedious. Lol. I don’t know how you’ve managed to get so many images built of them. I have awesome respect for you. Lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Argent he/him Posted October 6, 2017 Report Share Posted October 6, 2017 I don't know of how much value this would be, but Isaac designed some glyphs for me. I wouldn't take them for 100% canon, as it looks like they not only have vowels, but are also a lot more phonetic than what we are used to. But (to me) they are also unquestionably cool, so I'll share them here. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jofwu he/him Posted October 6, 2017 Report Share Posted October 6, 2017 My expert analysis of Argent's glyphs! Just the make up, no speculation on what they represent. Editing to say: My main goal here was to compare the two versions of the glyphs. The differences are pretty notable! Particularly interesting to me is the idea that the characters can be mirrored (horizontally or vertically) or swapped. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pagerunner he/him Posted October 6, 2017 Report Share Posted October 6, 2017 So, Argent bribed Isaac to making him glyphs out of his name. Let's see if we can crack the code with this extra info! (You may need to zoom in to see some of the detail on the Highprince glyphs.) I'll some up some of what Jofwu, Argent, and I discussed on Discord. I did some thinking about it, trying to work from scratch, not from Harakeke's guide. (No offense!) It looks like you can include vowels, but you don't have to. That explains why we have so many crazy "screw you" lines in that one Kholin verison, and in our Radiant order glyphs. It's because they include vowels, not just the consonants. Unfortunately, that means most of our glyphs don't have any vowels to compare with Argent's glyphs. The biggest obstacle is that Argent has repeated vowels in both his first name and his last name. But we have six unique characters in the first glyph, and seven in the second. No duplication. (Except for the grey glyph in the more elaborate version, of course. But that wasn't present in both.) This made me wonder if there were multiple symbols for vowels, depending on how many there are or in what syllable they fall. So, a "first e" is different than a "second e", or a "first syllable e" is different than a "third syllable e." But, since so many Alethi glyphs appear to only include consonants, we're a little sunk on trying to go anywhere on the vowel front. But there's some good stuff in consonants. First of all, the three consonants I'm sure of. Using gesheh (bridge), we could find the G, the yellow letter. (The other letter in the gesheh glyph matches with the shash glyph, so it's our sh.) Roion gives us our R (which also matches the Roshar and Urithiru glyphs, which I haven't included here, but which Harakeke has already deciphered.) N, the only other letter in Roion, fits very well with Roion, Kholin, and Evgeni, but not with the nahn glyph. But we've had that problem for a while. Second, there are two characters in common between the two glyphs: light green, and dark blue. One of them is definitely V; I'm leaning towards blue for no particular reason. The other one must be some sort of I... but it's not one of the new letters in the expanded Kholin glyph, so I don't see where to go from there. And if pink and orange are actually the same character, which is "first I," then I still have an extra character that's in both glyphs. That leaves only vowels in Evgeni that I'm having a hard time with. Moving to Kirilov, there's not much more I can narrow down on consonants, either. V is one of our repeated characters. L... has been giving me trouble just from the Highprince glyphs. I can see the dark pink in Sebarial and Aladar, but not in Kholin. I can see something kind of like dark blue in Kholin, Sebarial, and even Aladar if I squint, but there's one of those in Evgeni, which doesn't have an L. And the K... well, we don't actually have a K in any other glyphs. We have a KH, which is a different letter in Alethi. So, K could be anything else I've not seen. I'm leaning towards pink, since the duplication of grey makes me think of those I's. So, at the end of the day, I've got a really good idea for the G, but aside from that, I'm about where I was from just the Highprince glyphs again. I tried to put Argent's letters on Navani's ketek glyph. Doesn't mean much, since we don't know the Alethi version of the ketek, just the English one. (I'm assuming that Isaac worked from an Alethi phrase, but maybe it was English.) 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harakeke Posted October 7, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 (edited) That's some great analysis! It's got me wondering again if we should really be considering the glyph components in terms of consonant-vowel pairs. There might be something going on with how consonants are rotate/reflected that's determined by the surrounding vowels? Edited October 7, 2017 by Harakeke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Argent he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 2 hours ago, Harakeke said: That's some great analysis! It's got me wondering again if we should really be considering the glyph components in terms of consonant-noun pairs. There might be something going on with how consonants are rotate/reflected that's determined by the surrounding vowels? Didn't the earlier translation efforts consider something like that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harakeke Posted October 7, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 (edited) 1 hour ago, Argent said: Didn't the earlier translation efforts consider something like that? I recall playing around with it early on, but we didn't have as many high-resolution images and transliterated words to go on back then. Now we have vev gesheh, most of the highprince names, and now Evgeni Kirilov! There are also three sets of related glyphs that I think correspond to the ten fundamental glyphs (whatever that means...), ten Essences, and ten Radiant Orders/Heralds. I think each set translates to something along the lines of Jes/Jezrien/Jezerezeh, Chach/Chana/Chanarach, etc. That's still a working theory, but so far it seems somewhat self-consistent, and it gives me more letter combinations to play with. What got me thinking about the syllable pairs again was how Isaac said making the glyphpair took a huge amount of time. Under the current model we've been using to attack the glyphs, we assume you throw out all the vowels, draw the basic consonant shapes, and then add a bunch of decorative lines. Pretty simple. But if that was true, it should have been pretty easy to make a new glyph -- just lift the consonants from the secret master key (since they're all letters we've seen before in official art), add some decorative flair, and call it done. But what if instead of only 15 or so consonants, the secret master key actually has something like 75 consonant-vowel pairs -- only a few of which have actually been used so far. Maybe any pair that hadn't been used yet had to be created from scratch... That'd take a long time! This would also explain why after all this time, we still haven't satisfactorily cracked the glyph translation -- we only have a tiny correspondence between written glyphs and the sounds they represent. If that's the case, then most of the glyphs in the artwork represent unknown syllables, and we can't even assume they necessarily follow a pattern! Just because the glyphs share a common root with Thaylen doesn't mean they necessarily work the same way, and just because we don't seem to see any vowels doesn't mean they aren't there -- maybe they're hidden! So with that in mind I went poking around the glyphs we know the pronunciation of looking for patterns of syllables. It turns out there are very few instances where we actually have multiple different vowels both before and after the consonant for comparison. It seems the Alethi like their letter A almost as they like their symmetry. (For now, I'm going to assume for the sake of my sanity that sub-glyphs don't represent 3-letter pairs, because that'd require something like a 300-400 symbol key...) After spending way too much time staring at obscure, highly-pixelated glyphs, I think the most compelling candidate for a syllable pair is *L. We have AL in aladar, sebarial, (and palah, if my hunch is correct), OL in kholin, and now IL in Kirilov. It always bugged me that the L in Aladar was so different from the L in Kholin. My idea now is that the basic L subglyph is sort of a step shape with three line segments. To write AL, you add a third step at the top. To make it decorative and calligraphic, you can round off the corners so it's more like a flowing squiggle. To write OL, you add a curliecue to the top. To make it decorative, you can throw in some warping and extra lines at the bottom (which don't matter, because the important information is coded at the top). To write IL, you add a curliecue going in the other direction. *N is also a good candidate for comparison, because there are examples with contrasting vowels before and after. We have -N (with no preceding vowel) in Nahn and Nan, AN in nahn (assuming the h is unwritten), nan, and tanat, IN in Kholin, ON in Roion, and EN in Evgeni. I don't think the syllable pair is based on the following vowel (e.g. NA), because of the difference between NAhn and NAn/taNAt. -N has four lines, AN has 3 lines, and IN, EN, and ON are variations on a simplified circular swoosh. We also seem to have two variations of *G. There's a similar -G in both Gesheh and Evgeni (since the letter before the G is a consonant). There's also a fairly similar sub-glyph in one of the scroll stance glyphs, except it has a curliecue on the end going in the opposite direction (similar to the proposed IL vs. OL). Assuming that each sub-glyph corresponds to a vowel-consonant pair, I would guess your glyphpair comes out something like this (drawing the righthand side only) It still feels a little off, but I'm happier with the pairs than I am with the single letters. Maybe you can rotate the subglyphs and they keep their meaning? Here are some other notes I jotted as I looked over the glyphs, much of which is highly speculative. *R and *V also seemed like promising avenues, though the explanations there are more difficult to articulate -- largely because the Highprinces seemed to go "Storm it, Rs are tricky. My signature is now officially a squiggle instead. Any scribes who complain will be reassigned to bridge duty." Edited October 7, 2017 by Harakeke 11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Extesian he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 I'm pretty glad one of the greatest threads on this site is back in gear. It's all way over my head but today seems like remarkable work! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 So, what would be needed to further our understanding? Do we just need to eventually see more Glyphs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 (edited) I'm trying to print them out, but the spaces and stuff are messing me up, I've gotten a bunch of lines per page, but the colors are too distorted. I don't have very good software, anyone think they can take a better shot at it then me? I'm trying it's just not working very well. HAHA. This is the basic crop I took to remove the borders from the image so I can lay multiples next to each other. Unfortunately, it's gotten too distorted. Ideally, they would be landscaped. Because that seems to favor the Alethi script more. Since the spacing and neatness is paramount. Also cant figure out how to print multiple on the same page. Edited October 7, 2017 by Knghtstlker Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ccstat he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 I'm a little surprised that the -G matched in gesheh and Evgeni. I would have pronounced gesheh with a "hard g" [g] Evgeni with a "soft g" /dʒ/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pagerunner he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 6 hours ago, Knghtstlker said: So, what would be needed to further our understanding? Do we just need to eventually see more Glyphs? Yeah, we need more data points. More glyphs would be good, but the best would be the Alethi names for the glyphs on the Surgebinding chart. The Surges, especially, have some very clear lines, but we just don't know what words they are! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harakeke Posted October 7, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 (edited) I took a crack at organizing my notes a bit. It's mostly guesswork, but I think I like it better than the current single-letter key. : Edited October 7, 2017 by Harakeke 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Argent he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 7 hours ago, ccstat said: I'm a little surprised that the -G matched in gesheh and Evgeni. I would have pronounced gesheh with a "hard g" [g] Evgeni with a "soft g" /dʒ/ Both are hard, though Isaac didn't have that information (or didn't get it from me). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 7, 2017 Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 Top line is missing last word. Don’t know if this is correct. It’s letter for letter. But I’ll have to size it differently. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as it could be. Standardizing the size would help. Then a stencil could be made. Thinking about printing the book mark on card stock and gluing it on top of several pieces to make a makeshift stencil, then printing a size to roughly match. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Harakeke Posted October 7, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 7, 2017 1 hour ago, Knghtstlker said: Top line is missing last word. Don’t know if this is correct. It’s letter for letter. But I’ll have to size it differently. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as it could be. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knghtstlker he/him Posted October 8, 2017 Report Share Posted October 8, 2017 (edited) Nice. I'm going to have to start writing practice sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." So that I use every letter when writing. I can now recognize most characters just from writing these few phrases, It's slow'ish for now, but will be easier in time. If I can get one cleanly enough and dumbproof enough, "And maybe some additional confirmation from canon approvals". I'm thinking about tattoo Ideas. Something I believe has gone over my head. should I strike through the symmetry line to signify beginning and ends of words? Edited October 8, 2017 by Knghtstlker Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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