Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
As much as I don't object to Older Mathilde being Yor, when was that agreed upon?
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
NuclearConsensus
Herald of the Thorned One
- Location
- the Philippines
I don't know about agreed upon, but it was first brought up in this exchange by none other than Boney.
TimEd
Meteor maker
(READ RIGHT TO LEFT)
There's also this bit of masterful edit for the Mathilde = Yor
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The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
A while back, I suggested Bocchi.
Oh no.
You know how Eike's Seen but not Heard trait? And how her lack of a poker face is a way of compensating for that?
As Boney says:
Boney said:
So.
Eike is an awkward person using her interests and knowledge as a way to bypass to her social anxieties.
... I don't suppose Eike plays a musical instrument, does she?
EDIT: I don't know whether the logic there still applies, given time and character development, but it felt good back then.
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I'm not super familiar with Bocchi—but from her reputation I would have thought that her anxiety was worse than Eikes?
Fern works for a few reasons:
- insanely high potential for magic, but only knows simple spells
- being mentored by an OP goofball who doesn't age and drags her all over the world into weird situations
- adopted and raised by a friend of goofball mentor
- quiet and low confidence due to early childhood trauma
- tends to be blunt when communicating
- understands the elven mindset
- is taller than her mentor
Thebigpieman
I've got this, I think.
- Location
- United States
I just can't see it. Bocchi isn't just an anxious mess, she goes full on public breakdown at the slightest provocation. She is absolutely pathetic at her best even with all of the character development she does get. She regularly gets distracted by her own delusions of grandeur. Eike has some anxieties sure but what we've seen of her character does not add up to Bocchi.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I cannot stress just how bad an idea it could be to invite a Caledorian dragon, a faction that has a mutual hatred with Wind Dragons, to a Karak with an Ice Dragon living in it and making frequent visits to library housing the Vault containing the writings we're hoping for him to translate. I would just ask Cython if they know Old One and if the answer is no table the idea of draconic translation for now.
That said this has significantly increased my interest in learning Old One, previously the temptation was the reconstruction of a dead language with little value outside of academic curiosity and possibly being a more efficient casting language than Lingua Praestantia. But now we have a concrete payoff at the end of it. I still don't believe we should actively dedicate AP towards learning it but if we stumble across appropriate opportunities I feel like we should take them. Things like if we were to do a favor for Ulthuan and one of the rewards is learning Anoqueyan, or use a WEB-MAT to learn High Nehekharan alongside Egrimm in preparation for investigating the Nehekharan Waystone network, and we always have that standing offer to learn Arcane Khazalid for two gallons of AV worth of favor. If we're lucky we might find an excuse to study scythian or if we're luckier, Dark Tongue to get languages closer to Old One on the Daemonic branch of the linguistic family line. Not Daemonic itself though, not touching that with a ten foot pole even if we didn't have the Fated trait. Point is we should minimize AP expenditure by waiting for opportunities to learn come to us instead of spending AP actively seeking them out. It should be a long term project that we should likely expect to finish after the Waystone Project is concluded.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
I feel like this is ignoring some of our resources. Couldn't we cal upon Linguists and Crptologists of the empire and make it a WEB-MAT project to reconstruct the language so Mathilde can just learn it with 1-2 AP rather than trying to do everything herself. As our Waystone action proved Empire do have pretty good group of scholars capable of unpicking Elven stuff. Old One Language would be a more of a challange but our library has pretty decent Linguistigs wing so I feel like they might be able unpick some stuff for us.
xamaplak
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE @SOUP?
- Location
- the Soup Store
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My issue with making it a big project is that it is dangerous. Isn't it like, the programming language of the universe? Having it be a WEB-MAT project would be fine, but bringing in cryptologists and scholars might speed up the timeframe but it also has a chance of leaking the knowledge to untrustworthy parties.
If we keep it in house, only people whose trustworthiness is beyond reproach like Egrimm Van Horstmann would be party to the knowledge.
- Location
- Leeds
No?
We don't know what it is. It might be the programming language of magic. But its not the programming language of the universe.
It might not be the most fundamental way to interact with magic either, it might just be the most elaborate ever developed.
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The problem I see is that empire scholars do know elvish... But not magical elvish, or magical dwarfish or any other magical language that isn't empire magic language (I have stopped caring to much about the actual names now)
And as far as we know these are the languages we need to disassemble and reassemble to get old one tongue
And as far as we know these are the languages we need to disassemble and reassemble to get old one tongue
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
I was not thinking they would know those languages, But from past updates we know humans have a pretty big adavantage over elder races when it comes to studying Linguistics since they can observe it all over the place in human societies. That is what I want to tap in to. Not seeking knowledge but expertise to puzzle it out. Knowledge exist in our library after all, problem is putting it together and Empire scholars could do it.
It might take some time for them to spin up and familirise themselves with source languages but depending the number we recruit it might be as short as a year lead up time before we can start which is fine. Not too long. We just need to make our interest known.
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The problem there is again, that they do not know the languages to puzzle over, hell one of them we are explicitly not allowed to teach them. How do you get people to puzzle out a language, with the help of 3 other languages none of which they speak and one which they aren't even allowed to learn?
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
You hire the scholars, bring them to Library and let them learn over a year before they start the project. We have the books for them to learn and a Scholar presumably knows how to learn and doesn't requare handholding whole way.
That was the point of my last post. Did I not explain myself properly?
edit:Wait what language they are not allowed to learn?
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We have exactly one language they can learn anoqyuian (spelling is hard) and the empire language is a descendents of it. So we got exactly one language they could learn to figure out a whole nother language. A year is a very optimistic timeframe I would say...
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Elvish, Anoquieyan, High Nekheran, and Scythian.... You hire one scholar to learn at least one of them each then sit them down with Cryptlogoists and the Old One docments for them to work a team to try and translate them.
I know IRL several languages were translated this way from only knowing one word in said language they extroplated the rest.
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Then you don't know how the Rosetta stone worked. The Rosetta stone allowed the translation because it's the same text, 3 times, in different languages. One is old Greek, one is common Egyptian (also old but you know) and one is in hieroglyphics.
As both old Greek and common Egyptian where understood languages it was very easy to translate the hieroglyphics.
We don't have 3 times the same text, we have one text and 3 to 5 language with which to cobble together one final language.
I don't doubt it's possible but I very much doubt it's as easy as " so some guys learn the language and then just sit together and figure it out."
Edit: also another thing I just realized, these languages we have all describe things the scholars never have seen or experienced or have ever had a frame of reference for. They are all made to describe magic, so that other magic users can understand it and use it.
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deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
No it wasn't. It took twenty years to fullly decipher the Rosetta Stone.
Fair enough, I have realized the German wiki has some dating differences to the English version (which is a problem, but not one im willing to solve) which made it seem faster.
But honestly twenty years is not a bad time to translate hieroglyphics one a stone in London by a scholar in France while the Napoleonic wars are actively raging.
And it still proves my point that language deciphering is hard work even if you have 3 times the same text.
There really isn't much information about the language of the Old Ones. However, Sword of Caledor, the second book in the Tyrion & Teclis trilogy, describes the language of the Slann. They are certainly related, if they aren't the same thing. The White Tower has scholars who can translate it, but it takes elves decades to gain even the basics of the language. You need to understand magic to even have a chance of translating the texts. The characters themselves shift meaning depending on their closeness to other characters. High Loremaster Morelian believes that only the Slann and Skink Priests are capable of understanding the language. It's for a people with a very alien psychology. Caledor achieved the most proficiency of any known elf. Morelian suspected that part of his proficiency with magic came from that knowledge.
As you might image, Teclis did not take decades to learn the basics. He also wanted to master the language after learning that Caledor did.
Edit: Corrected some wording. Also I thought of an analogy. You know how Eltharin is writing with emojis? Slann is that, but even more complex. It doesn't even go left to right, up to down, or vice versa. A smiling emoji can mean tree if it is at an angle of 161° in relation to the closest brick emoji and 5cm away from a backpack emoji. But if it is 4.999999235564cm away from said backpack emoji it will instead mean deep sea predator.
As you might image, Teclis did not take decades to learn the basics. He also wanted to master the language after learning that Caledor did.
Edit: Corrected some wording. Also I thought of an analogy. You know how Eltharin is writing with emojis? Slann is that, but even more complex. It doesn't even go left to right, up to down, or vice versa. A smiling emoji can mean tree if it is at an angle of 161° in relation to the closest brick emoji and 5cm away from a backpack emoji. But if it is 4.999999235564cm away from said backpack emoji it will instead mean deep sea predator.
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Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Not talking about rosetta stone;
Orkhon inscriptions - Wikipedia
This was translated by knowing single word "Tengri" meaning "God" proving that it can be done.
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We have an understood descendant language but (IIRC) no comprehension of the parent language, so probably the closest well-known comparison I can think of is the deciphering of Linear B (the script used by the Late Bronze Age Mycenaeans) in the mid-20th century. That took groundwork from several archaeologists and other scholars working for about three decades, followed by some very inspired scholarship from Dr Alice Kober and Michael Ventris over about two more. Ultimately, this kind of deciphering work typically happens very slowly, then all at once, which means that it can't be given a reliable timeframe - especially since, from what you say, MrHobbit, the language of the Old Ones is much more complex than Linear B ever was. It's worth noting that Linear A, the precursor to Linear B, has not yet been deciphered despite being archaeologically identified at the same time.
Basically, this would be another We-silk project. The benefits at the end might well be immense (if somewhat more difficult to grasp in this case) and setting up an effort to decipher the language might, therefore, be extremely worthwhile but we can't be confident that we'd see any of those benefits in decades if not centuries (particularly given that the elves, known for their longevity and thus their ability to commit to such projects, struggle to apply themselves to it). Whether that matters to Mathilde is up to us!
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- Pronouns
- he
So, we shouldn't start the Old One translation project until after we get those damned silk sheets, got it!