Timewaster's Guide Archive
Local Authors => Brandon Sanderson => Topic started by: Mad Dr Jeffe on April 27, 2005, 08:59:09 PM
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Cause I think TWG East might be up to that challenge after we read the book... gotta talk to Eric of course... :D
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Lol.
I'm not sure how well Elantris lends itself to role playing. MISTBORN, now...well, that would be fun.
Actually, as for RPGs, I've always kind of thought that my style of writing would lend itself well to creating a 'Brandon Multiverse' style system. One that incorporates all the wacky magic systems from my books.
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That would be interesting. We could use the one big system. We could put TW(i)G in the system too (as the only non-sanderson setting).
/me pontificates this.
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The Aons are a lot like the Illumian language from D&D. In that, there is this huge alphabet of like 1000+ symbols, and each symbol is a syllable rather than a letter. Each syllable has its own meaning, and all the words come from the appropriate syllable combination. That seems the same way that the Aon language works.
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Also how Chinese and Japanese work.
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Pictograms!!
Well, not really. But a little closer than letters.
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Actually, I think the term is 'Logograms.' Am I right, Ookla?
(And yes, the strange Chinese-Korean hybrid language used in a lot of Korean writing was my inspiration for the Aons.)
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logograms would be a whole word as one symbol. That would be like Chinese, which are also used in japanese and korean (I think its called kanji in japanese).
Syllabary would be where each symbol is a syllable (I think this is called kana in japanese). Traditionally there is no meaning to them at all, its just represents the sound its supposed to make. But with the D&D Illumian language, they also have some kind of definition besides just the sound. Which kind of makes sense for a magical language. Thats kind of how I was assuming the Aons worked, but now I don't think it does... I guess that's what I get for reading d&d rulebooks while reading a novel.
Then there is alphabetic. I think that covers all the kinds of writing systems. (I believe its called romaji for japanese... yeah, they got a lot of kinds of writing systems. I think they actually have two kinds of syllabary, broken and smooth).
That reminds me of something. In part of the book it seemed like Raodin was saying that the symbol for Aon can be found in every other Aon. And it does seem to be in all of them at the back.
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Eagle, i didn't know you were into lingustics.
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Actualy Eagle Kanji can be Syllabary as well, there are times when the Kanji has no meaning and is just there for a sound.
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You obviously know more about japanese then I do... that was sort of why I was using it as an example. But as I understand it, kanji means 'Han characters' and was basically borrowed from the chinese. Also not surprisingly done by the koreans, but they have slowly been droping their use. From what I understand about written chinese, in the begining there were some parts in the character to give the idea of how it was pronounced and other parts of the character to give you an idea of what the word meant. And I think the majority of the characters now are phonic. This somewhat makes sense, because chinese is a tonal language (which means the same word can have very different meanings depending on the pitch). Well, that is my explination, but you might have more info on it.
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Japanese is the same way as chinese, in theory. Radicals are what the base elements are called, ie the ones that are supposed to help with pronusciation but I personaly don't think they help one bit. Japanese isn't really suited for the Kanji writeing sytem it actualy works better with a phonetic alphabet like roman characters or Kana. The reson why is the silly Japanese have gone and assigned some kanji as many as 10 different pronuciations and meanings. Oi. There was a study put out in the late 90's by the Japanese Education minastry that says more or less the same thing and that they recomended dumping Kanji for romanized spellings.
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Yeah I've heard about those multiple meaning words from reading Vampire Hunter D stuff. One of the book titles had a word like that, and the only way to find out what was actually meant was to ask the author! heh.
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Each kanji may have up to 12 pronunciations, but the bigger problem is that each pronunciation has up to a ZILLION kanji (Like, on WWWJDIC, I just did a kanji search for kanji spellings for the syllable "a," and it came up with 500 matches. That's because it gave up at 500. A more complicated syllable, "ken," for example, got 125 hits.).
So in my opinion it really IS helpful to have the kanji in the writing instead of just using a phonetic spelling system. If you don't have the kanji there, it's very hard to tell which word it is from just the context. In speaking the context is easier to figure out, but in writing, the kanji really helps.