Harakeke

It looks like maybe... "ohosh" or "ohath"?

Making progress... I think the key is starting to come together. Looks like Alethi glyphs are syllable-based, with vowels denoted by how you rotate the letter. The a- syllables (aR, aS, etc.) seem to correspond closest to how the consonant is written in Thaylen. Pretty sure my futzing with the tattoos earlier today was all wrong though. =P

Ah, good to know. I didn't like the placement of that J anyway. I assume the same is true of "Freedom"? This is my bridge. There are many like it, but this one is mine. In lieu of being productive this morning, I attacked the kholin/tanat glyphs. I think kholin is written in the negative (white) space, and tanat is written in the positive (black) space. So they can sort of partially overlap. Alternately, I could just be wildly overreaching -- but anyways: What I really ought to do is finish my key using the highprince glyphs before I go haring off on these sorts of speculative translations, but I felt like playing around with some of the more legible glyphs.

Now that I'm consciously looking for them, I notice glyphs popping up all over the place: Way of Kings Surgebinding Chart Voidbinding? Chart (warped versions of Surge glyphs) Silver Kingdoms Era Map Roshar map c. 1167 Map of Alethkar Alethi Warcamps Kharbranth Map of the Battle of the Tower The hair and flames surrounding the Voidbinding? chart and map of Shadesmar are suspiciously symmetrical. It wouldn't surprise me if they were heavily stylized glyphs. The Alethi Codes of War also have a very suspicious pattern running along the sides. It doesn't appear to be Alethi or Thaylen though. Words of Radiance Bridge 4 Tattoos Frostlands Map Sword forms Battle Map Example of how to decipher a glyph (BRJ = Bridge): edit: incorrectly! =P

Thanks -- although those look like the same files I've seen on Isaac Stewart's website. They're certainly handy, but the fine detail of the glyphs gets lost in the pixelation. They've all got "webres" in the filename, which leads me to believe there are high-res versions somewhere... What I was hoping for was more images along the lines of this: http://www.inkwing.com/freebies/wallpapers/roshar_map/map_roshar_2560x1600.jpg so that I could zoom in close on the glyphs.

From what I can tell, there seems to be a method to writing glyphs in which the first sub-glyph is written in the top center, and the other sub-glyphs nest down and out from there. So while there is a lot of freedom, there's a general pattern that they seem to follow. I haven't worked through the Kholin and Tanat glyphs in the tattoo yet, but I do notice some very subtle differences between them. I think they were deliberately designed to look very similar.

Preliminary Alethi glyph translation key: Still very much a work in progress. Does anyone know if there are high-resolution copies of the WoK illustrations floating around somewhere? I'm noticing glyphs all over the place now, but most of them are very hard to make out the details on. @Natans - Nope, I just do this for fun/procrastination! I have taken one or two linguistics classes though.

Well, the distance between the degrees of latitude would depend entirely on the circumference of Roshar.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but in my search for glyphs to translate, I noticed that Navani's "Map of the Battle of the Tower" gives a scale in feet. You could conceivably use this to measure the size of landmarks in the various maps, chaining upwards until you reach the full Southern Hemisphere map that shows all of Roshar. You'd have to deal with projection distortions, but georeferencing the maps first would take care of that.

I should be able to, but I'll need to make a better key. I'm betting it uses Thaylen graphemes and Alethi orthography. For the big pointy glyph in the middle, I'm reading something along the lines of W/V N/M ? K D <vowel> ? Which is nothing but figgldygrak, but I can at least make out the component graphemes -- which is always the hardest part. edit: @Pattern Exactly. Though the Alethi version looks like it has vowels.

I just realized that this key can also be used to read Alethi glyphs. They're heavily stylized, but the basic forms are there! edit: It works really well for Kaladin's Sas tattoo, but the more elaborate glyphs are trickier. Alethi may have more/different letters, and I bet the dots are represent vowels somehow. I have to head to work now, but I'll play around with this some more later.

Sorry for the double post, but I think this merits a post of its own: Alethi glyphs use Thaylen orthography! an orthography that is similar to Thaylen. You can read the glyphs using the key I made for the frostlands map! Edit: Okay, the more complex glyphs have some letters that don't show up in my Thaylen key. I'll have to play around with a glyph translation key after work.

I think we're looking at the key to decoding Alethi glyphs! Now that you guys are finding all these palendromes, I think it's unlikely that the code is split like on Floorboard 17. I really like the ketek theory. Take a look at Navani's ketek glyph from p.1081 -- it's a series of repeating shapes. If I were to try to describe the glyph using numbers, I'd break it down into the component symbols, like so: Ketek half: Alight winds approach de- Visual approximation: l.l.l.l. nnn h.h.h. uuuu >>> IIIIIIIIIIIIIII .D.D.D ! C W C i b 7 2 L Arbitrary numeric notation: 1111 222 333 4444 555 666666666666666 777 8 9 10 9 11 12 13 14 15 Condensed numeric notation: <sub-glyph> <# of repeats> 14 23 33 44 53 615 73 18 19 111 112 113 114 115 Remove spaces: 1423334453615731819111112113114 115 This feels very similar to the sort of patterns we're seeing in the actual code.

Ah, Thaylen! I was hoping someone would know the proper name for it! (I'd been calling it Frostish in my head!) Asul helpfully posted the images here: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6471-spoilers-interior-art/ If it's an issue I can blur out the picture and just leave the text.

Considering that the book's only been out for a matter of *days*, I think we've made remarkable progress.

This one was a lot easier to decipher than Alethi because there was more context to go on. Once I realized the scale and orientation of the map, everything came together really quickly. The first thing to do is to figure out what the letters are. I spent a while just copying the words to get a feel for how they were written, making a list of all the unique characters. Once I was confident I knew what the letters looked like and how they could be arranged to form words, I started trying to crack the cipher. While trying to crack the Chapter 84 number code, I developed a handy spreadsheet that automates the find/replace process, so I recoded the Frostlands letters into number pairs plugged it in. Basically, I tell the spreadsheet : "Okay, I think symbol 11 is A", and it goes through and turns all the 11s into As. I alternated between jotting notes by hand and consulting the spreadsheet. The lack of vowels threw me for a while, but as I examined words with double-letter pairs, I quickly deciphered that one of the little buildings was labeled "THe SHaLLoW CRyPTS". This was the same basic process I used to decipher the Alethi script last time. The first thing I did was sort out all the possible Alethi graphemes (written letters) and give them labels. They come in three sizes: small, middle and long; and 6 shapes: left, right, hatch, swoosh, diamond, and fancy (plus the special "sentence start" symbol). I wrote them all out individually so I had a blank key to work with. The single line symbols: swoosh(vowels) and hatch (the second half of Th, Ch, etc.) were particularly tricky to decipher, because I lumped them all together at first. I played around a bit at first with a numeric notation to try and quickly correlate the emotion bracelet labels with information from the Ars Arcana, thinking that maybe they were gemstone names. Things like 2D 113 2 1R = Ruby? , 2D 113 2 1R = Chach? etc. But that didn't work (turns out it actually says "fear"), so I had to brute-force it. I went through the illustrations and copied out all the words that were only 2 or 3 letters long that repeated multiple times in the text. There are only so many words that are that short (the, is, of, etc.) so I played around with assigning English letters to the various Alethi graphemes, going back and forth between my key and the list of short words. I'd pick a short word and say, "Okay, let's assume this word is "AND". So then the first shape is an A, that one's an N, and that one's an D. Which means that this similar two-letter word must be AN. And then this one ends with the same letter, so it must be ON or IN." And so forth. In practice it wasn't nearly so elegant, and I did a lot of erasing. The vowels and the graphemes for Alethi letters that don't exist in English (such as "Th") threw me for a bit of a loop. I had this klugy system where all the -h graphemes were split in two, and F was written as PH. But eventually I worked out a partial key based on the short words that was self-consistent (T, H, E, I, S, N), and could start attacking the longer words. The first word I was able to translate properly was "spren". When I got that, I knew I was on the right track! Things accelerated quickly from there, and once I could start to get information from a word's context, it was just a matter of filling in the blank spots in the key. e.g.: "Okay, this part here says "[long diamond]AIN KNIFE" Rain knife? Main knife? Pain knife! Yeah! So [long diamond] must be P!" And so forth.

Greetings, friend. You may have noticed that many of the illustrations in the Stormlight Archives contain strange markings. I have determined that these markings are writing, and I have undertaken to decipher their messages. Crazy? Perhaps. But these markings are not simply decorative. They contain information about the Cosmere, hidden in plain sight. In The Way of Kings, we are introduced to the Alethi script. This is the writing system used by female scribes and scholars in Alethkar, understand? It shows up in the labels of Navani’s Notebook: Since the novel was first published in English, the labels were also “translated” into English, but Alethi letters were used to preserve the feel of the original diagrams. Each symbol stands for one letter – however Alethi has some letters that are not found in English (Th, Sh, Ch), and English has some letters that are not found in Alethi (C, Q, X, W). In Words of Radiance, we learn more about the languages of Roshar. Alethi script reappears, with greater variety. Navani’s Notebook again provides straightforward diagram labels directly transliterated from English into Alethi: (Translation credit goes to cris34b: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6418-navanis-notebook-page-406-translation/?hl=navani) Shallan’s sketchbook provides more cryptic text, friend. First spotted and translated by jcoop513, the text here is hidden, and is written phonetically so that each letter is an approximation of how it sounds when spoken aloud. Based on the context, this is most likely a page of Jasnah's notes that Shallan appropriated to use as sketchpaper. Note that the transliteration of Jasnah's writing is very different from that of Navani's. Read aloud, the passage would be thus: Translation efforts are ongoing at http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6619-shallans-drawing-page-354-alethi-script-translation-spoilers/. KalynaAnne traced over the partially-obscured letters by hand and was able to reconstruct several missing words: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/6487-thaylen-and-alethi-glyph-translation-glyph-key-revised-418/?p=233114 Alethi is not the only language spoken on Roshar. That would be crazy. The Map of the Southern Frostlands introduces us to the written language used in Thaylenah: As with Alethi script, the Thaylen in this illustration is simply transliterated English, and can be deciphered using the following key: Thaylen people are renown for smashing their consonants together when they speak, and this is reflected in their writing. Written Thaylen has no vowels and is written vertically, understand? Both the Alethi and Thaylen pages include numerals. Just as many different nations on Earth employ Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) is quite possible that all Vorin peoples (indeed perhaps most inhabitants of Roshar!) use the same numerals, even if their written languages differ. The numbers are written as follows: And now we come to glyphs, friend. Glyphs are written in syllables, with each syllable corresponding to a certain subcomponent of the glyph. Glyphs can be written three ways: a “standard” blocky form with syllables somewhat similar to Thaylen consonants, a “radial” form in which the glyph is warped to form a circular shape, and a “calligraphic” form in which the glyph can be warped into any shape. Often, the shape of a calligraphic glyph is reminiscent of the word it contains. Extra lines that do not represent syllables can be added to enhance the effect. For instance, a bookseller might advertise the name of his shop with a glyph shaped to resemble a book, understand? Many men in Alethkar are illiterate, relying on their wives or sisters to read documents to them aloud, but most can recognize certain important glyphs based on their shape alone. Alethi glyphs are not simply transliterations of English, but represent words in the Alethi language. The esteemed jofwu has compiled images of all known glyphs in another thread. Edit: The next bit is obsolete, as of Oathbringer. See p.519 for a key directly from the Calligrapher's Guild, courtesy of Nazh. My efforts to decipher the Alethi glyphs are ongoing, friend, but I present here what I speculate thus far: Please refer to the further pages in this thread for the latest developments in the 17th Shard's ongoing efforts to decipher these glyphs. Original first post, for posterity:

And to Frostish. Though if somebody wants to give that a try, by all means... Yeah, that's a great point. I hate to say it, but now I'm wondering how the lengths would work out if you were to write those passages out in Alethi... Or maybe there were dummy characters that were left out of the decrypted text. We should probably also keep in mind (per Peter's post) that whatever the cipher algorithm is, it's something that can be applied to other languages as well without being a huge headache.

Not enough to build a key off of, I think. All we really have are Kaladin's tatoos, some noble house glyph pairs, and to a limited extent the essence/surge glyphs. For the same reasons that Navani's notebook uses English words written with Alethi letters, I think the code is ultimately based in English as well.

I've always imagined that Shardplate looked rather over-the-top -- a lot like Al from Fullmetal Alchemist: So I thought these illustrations were spot on!

I went ahead and translated the Frostlands map into English: edit: Here's a quick & dirty translation key: Basically, from what I can tell Frostish? is written vertically and doesn't use consonants. There's probably a more elegant way to organize the key (my working key used a grid layout with base forms and affixes), but this covers the gist of what I deciphered.

Ooh! Color! That's helpful! Note that p. 138 has a complete set of Rosharian (I'd say Alethi, but they seem to be universal) numerals from 0-23.

Well done! It also seems like Navani has found a source of better-quality drafting ink! The individual letters are much easier to make out this time!