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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

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tricholysis said:
Between 露 and 蓼 there are connotations of hardship or ephemerality, which can be paired with a word like yu4 逾 for overcome, or 余 for a surplus, so it becomes either overcoming hardship or surplus dew, or, well, surplus hardship. So maybe not yu4. Instead sheng4 is an option, which doesn't have such options available to my knowledge. There's 胜 for victory, surpassing, a beautiful view, 圣 for holy or sacred, 盛 for flourishing or magnificent or famous (and is adjacent to flowers with 盛开, for 'in full bloom'), 晟 for brightness or splendour...
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So if we wrote Shenglu like so:
晟蓼

It would mean Bright Dew with a connotation of ephemerality?

Or 胜蓼 for something like Beautiful View of Dew?
 
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Lena27 said:
Can you break that down in layman's terms? Like as I understand it, it would be pronounced "shun-lue"?
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I wasn't being strictly accurate, and was a little sloppy in my phrasing. as the immediate context shows, sheng does have a nasal ng at the end, and non-mandarin chinese maintains the older consonantal endings (so cantonese has things like siu yuk which is cvv vc) but the reason I said 'cvvv pretty consistently' is that n and ng are the only viable consonant enders that remain in modern mandarin. but they do exist so my bad on the sloppiness, I was focusing on the leading head. the part that I wanted to emphasize was just that the (optional) consonantal head is single and never doubled, followed by up to three vowels. this would disallow 'glu', and contrasts with english, which sometimes allows very complicated groups of three or more consonants all together, like in the word 'strength'.

if you're looking for a pronunciation guide, sheng4 is pronounced with the sh from shot, the uh from...uh, or the a in about, and the ng from -ing, in a falling tone from high to low, like if you were saying 'Stop.' to a bunch of rowdy kids. lu4 is said in the same tone and uses a vowel that doesn't exist in english, but if you're familiar with german it is ue as you used, or the u umlaut which that represents. to say this vowel with no reference, start with loo as in waterloo or the name lou, and round your lips more and push the vowel further forward in your mouth.
Glau said:
It would mean Bright Dew with a connotation of ephemerality?
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You'd want to use 露 for dew, 蓼 literally means a kind of plant (knotweed iirc). You can tell one is related to weather or water and one is a plant by looking at the radicals at the top, but I do realize that's a pretty big ask if you aren't familiar with Chinese characters
The ephemerality or difficulty connotations of 露 specifically come from more metaphorical or poetic uses of the word like 霜露 (frost and dew, things that are difficult to bear) or 朝露 (morning dew, which ofc evaporates). 露水 is the more common form of the word in spoken language and refers to the dew more literally. Using 露 as a single character to mean dew is kind of literary/old fashioned nowadays, but would have been common practice in more historical Chinese. (Chinese's transition from single syllables for words to the now-more-common two-syllable words is a long historical process tied to the syllable consonant/vowel stuff up above, actually but that's an aside) Nowadays 露 as a single character reads more as 'to expose' or 'to reveal', but in that meaning you actually pronounce it differently (lou).

胜 likewise has its meanings related to beauty as parts of phrases like 名胜, on its own it's more typically a noun or verb (success or to overcome respectively) than an adjective, though it is still useable as an adjective. So 胜's more prominent part of the melange of meanings is more along the lines of the overcoming difficulty part, so it'd be written with 胜(霜)露 implied for a literal equivalent of Overcoming (Frost and) Dew, or in the beautiful part of the word it's something like 胜露 for Scenic Dew, which in English doesn't render very well.

晟 sort of indicates the brightness of the sun, alongside splendour. An English rendering using this would indeed be something like Bright Dew, or Splendorous Dew, or Sun-sparkling Dew if you wanted to include the sun part of it and took a little poetic license, but most of those are a mouthful.
As you can see Chinese characters can be very complicated if you're trying to be clever with them (thusly wordplay is so highly valued in chinese culture), and that's part of why I wrote Sacred Dew as the simplest translation that would maintain the sounds and meanings I wanted. 圣 also has some usage in the Taoist tradition from which cultivation stories/xianxia originates (xian 仙 means immortal, 圣 means sage or saint and was one of the ways to refer to immortals, sometimes the two characters are used together or in the same context) so it's my preferred character for sheng

麓 also exists as a reading for lu, actually, which is 'foothills', so Sacred (or any other combination) Foothills is another viable rendering of the name...
 
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tricholysis said:
I wasn't being strictly accurate, and was a little sloppy in my phrasing. as the immediate context shows, sheng does have a nasal ng at the end, and non-mandarin chinese maintains the older consonantal endings (so cantonese has things like siu yuk which is cvv vc) but the reason I said 'cvvv pretty consistently' is that n and ng are the only viable consonant enders that remain in modern mandarin. but they do exist so my bad on the sloppiness, I was focusing on the leading head. the part that I wanted to emphasize was just that the (optional) consonantal head is single and never doubled, followed by up to three vowels. this would disallow 'glu', and contrasts with english, which sometimes allows very complicated groups of three or more consonants all together, like in the word 'strength'.

if you're looking for a pronunciation guide, sheng4 is pronounced with the sh from shot, the uh from...uh, or the a in about, and the ng from -ing, in a falling tone from high to low, like if you were saying 'Stop.' to a bunch of rowdy kids. lu4 is said in the same tone and uses a vowel that doesn't exist in english, but if you're familiar with german it is ue as you used, or the u umlaut which that represents. to say this vowel with no reference, start with loo as in waterloo or the name lou, and round your lips more and push the vowel further forward in your mouth.
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Ahh I said layman's terms lol... as I understand it, its pronounced "shung-lue"
Lets just go with that.
 
tricholysis said:
Sorry, I'm chronically unable to stay concise once I start talking about things. But yes, more or less
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It wasn't the wordiness, it was just very technical and made it seem like you have a background in linguistics or something, or at least really know stuff lol. Anyways, no worries! I know I'm unable to give concise answers when talking about things in my field haha.

I agree with Glau, Sun-sparkling Dew really is pretty.
 
Stuff like Sun-Sparkling Dew is where all those 5 word attack names come from, or like when people start talking about Prismatic Ten-thousand-year Vital Left-lung-acupuncture-opening Knotweed Root or whatever, each of those modifiers renders down to like one character each and is a historical reference to the time in this one ancient novel...etc etc
 
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tricholysis said:
Stuff like Sun-Sparkling Dew is where all those 5 word attack names come from, or like when people start talking about Prismatic Ten-thousand-year Vital Left-lung-acupuncture-opening Knotweed Root or whatever, each of those modifiers renders down to like one character each and is a historical reference to the time in this one ancient novel...etc etc
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So the explanation of Naruto basically.
 
Can anyone remind me what part of a Cyan beast we need for the elixir? Is it the core or just a part of the body?

I'm trying to figure how this will play out if we're going the Thunderhoof route for our Cyan breakthrough no matter what.
 
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