Timewaster's Guide Archive

The initial discovery of the Cosmere books being in the same universe happened when someone noticed the repeat use of the name Hoid in Warbreaker and another book, asked Brandon about it, and got told that it's actually the same character rather than just the same name.  I'm not sure which non-Warbreaker book it was, but I don't think Hoid ever identifies himself by that name in Final Empire or Well of Ascension, so it would have to be either Elantris or Hero of Ages.  This happened well before Warbreaker got published as a printed book; Warbreaker has been available in digital format for free from brandonsanderson.com since its early draft stages.

The name Adonalsium was first revealed (with an unfortunate typo, the l was missing so it appeared as Adonasium) in a chapter epigraph in Hero of Ages.  It was mentioned precisely once, and only in a small remark that was never referred to again, and never appeared again in the books until Hoid said it in Way of Kings, but several readers jumped on it and started asking Brandon tons of questions about it.  Most of the available information about the Cosmere comes from Hero of Ages, inferences based on Hero of Ages, and Brandon's answers to questions.  Way of Kings has also added some material, particularly with the letter in one set of chapter epigraphs, which is clearly written by and addressed to people who know a lot about the Shards of Adonalsium.

And who and what, really, is Wit?

Wit is Hoid.  If you don't know who Hoid is, you really haven't been reading this forum much.

Should I resurrect it for the next WOT book?? lol

Sure, why not?  Have you read the prologue, chapter 1, and chapter 8 (I think) yet?  Those have all been released online already.

Because it hasn't been put back together "perfectly", just well enough that visual and tactile inspection can't tell the difference.  It is an ancient magical device, and mere physical reassembly is not sufficient to repair damage to the magical portion of its workings.

-random point- did they find the sheared pieces of the soulcaster, or did those just decide to go off and vanish?

They found them and glued (or something) them back together.  Shallan has the reassembled pieces, and her possession of them is a critical part of her plan to steal Jasnah's soulcaster - without them, she'd have nothing to replace Jasnah's soulcaster with.  I'm not sure how you could have missed this, as it's rather important to her part of the plot and is mentioned repeatedly.

His very first PoV scene in the prologue includes a mental comment that Shardplate interferes with his Surgebinding, so he had to choose one or the other.

Assuming he's speaking the truth, which I think is a pretty safe bet, that is Talenel'Elin, the only one of the Heralds who did not abandon the Oathpact as shown in the prelude, and that sword is a Dawnshard rather than a Shardblade. Following Kalak's mental remarks from the prelude, if Talenel had died his blade would have vanished, unlike a normal Shardblade. Thus, he is alive. Also, he's the only reasonable candidate for the "major viewpoint character who first appeared in the epilogue" that Brandon mentioned in an interview he linked to in his blog recently.

I've seen a quote somewhere stating something like "English likes to hunt down other languages in dark alleys and go through their pockets for loose grammar." English is an unusually difficult language to learn for non-native speakers because it has a huge number of words, phrases, and special cases adopted from other languages, and many of these have exceptions to normal English grammatical rules because for that particular word/phrase/etc. the rules of the language it came from were adopted with it. As a result, English has an enormous number of exceptions to every rule, and really learning the language well requires learning both the rules and the gigantic list of exceptions.

From the perspective of designing a language from scratch, English has an extremely impractical and illogical language design. This hasn't done anything to stop it from becoming the dominant language in much (most?) of the world.