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Messages - Harakeke

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46
Brandon Sanderson / Re: WOK: Navani's Notebook Translation *MAJOR SPOILERS*
« on: September 21, 2010, 04:55:37 AM »
I'm exceptionally impressed. Someone was bound to crack it, but I wouldn't have been surprised if it took longer than this.

Harakeke, did you find out it was an actual script before you tried to crack it? Or did you just try it out on your own? Either way, good job!

Thank you.    ;D
I sort of figured it just *had* to be meaningful -- anything else wouldn't live up to the level of epicness the rest of the book contains!

47
Brandon Sanderson / Re: WOK: Navani's Notebook Translation *MAJOR SPOILERS*
« on: September 21, 2010, 01:19:10 AM »
Updated the first post with the text of page two .

Here's a photo of my notes for those who are curious:


I've been working on translating the text off and on for about a week, ever since I finished reading the book.  I literally turned the last page and thought to myself, "Okay, now I NEED to know what was on those sketch pages." I was actually surprised no one had cracked it yet -- the first thing I did was hit the forums, figuring someone had already worked it out.  I started to get excited when I realized that I had the chance to be the first person to decipher this "lost text".  ;D

The very first thing I did was to scan and print the pages, so I could scribble all over them without defacing the actual book. (sacrilege!)

There were a few observations I made right off the bat:
There was enough of a pattern that these were probably words and not just pretty-looking soundwave sketches.
There seemed to be a mix of short lables and longer sentences.
Multiple lines tend to be left-justified, so I assumed the text was written left to right.
One particular sequence seemed to pop up all over the place.  It looked sort of like this:  <,,|
The tall I shape seemed to mark the start of a formal sentence

For a while, I puzzled over the Double Eye diagram in the lower right of page 2, trying to link it up with the illustration inside the front cover.  Turns out that was a blind alley -- but I was able to piece together various sources to positively identify half of the gems on the inside cover. Going clockwise from the upper right they are: Sapphire, Smokestone, Ruby, Diamond, Emerald.  This follows the sequence in the table in the Ars Arcanum, so presumably the sequence continues all the way around.  But I digress.

After exhausting any chance of a quick and easy correlation between the table of essences and the Double Eye diagram, I turned back to the "brute force" method.
To begin, I needed to determine how many graphemes the Alethi alphabet had so that I could construct a key.   (A grapheme is the smallest unit in written language -- i.e. letters in the English alphabet, Chinese characters, individual symbols in a Glyphward, etc. It generally, but not always, corresponds to a single sound, or "phoneme".)
I picked a couple of the lines and practiced copying them down to get a feel for the letters.  I noticed that the letters seemed to come in three heights, which I ingeniously labelled: 1, 2, and 3.  I also identified three basic shapes: left arrow, right arrow, diamond, hash, and fancy.  The hashes were particularity tricky to differentiate, because it was pretty clear that sometimes multiple hashes made up a single grapheme.

Once I had a notation system worked out, I drew up a key of possible letters and converted a chunk of sentence-looking script.  This yielded something like: 2L 113 3F 211 3L 2 1R 2L 3L etc.

I used this data to run a character frequency analysis, which is essentially counting how often each letter comes up.
Character frequency analysis is based on the fact that given a random chunk of text, some letters tend to be more common than others.  (For example, there are way more E's in this post than Z's).  Fortunately, there are online cryptography tools for doing this sort of thing, so I was able to feed in my typed notation and get a pretty chart. 
I did this mainly to verify that the text was in English and not Native Alethi or indecipherable gibberish.  I suspected it was English because of the lack of palindrome words and the fact that Shallan's pages were in English, but I didn't want to launch into a code-breaking session using all the wrong tricks.
Fortunately, the results of the distribution came out sufficiently close to English that I was encouraged to move forward. 

Given a large enough body of text, you can use character frequency analysis to crack any simple cipher via the mighty power of statistics.  I didn't feel like typing up all the notation that would require -- and it didn't have nearly the allure of poring over the beautiful illustrations themselves.  I also wasn't 100% confident that I had properly identified the hash graphemes, which would throw off all the statistics -- potentially making such an exercise a complete waste of time.

I did get one useful thing out of the frequency analysis, because it told me which Alethi graphemes were most common.  I highlighted those on my key, because they would probably end up corresponding to the English letters etaoin shrdlu.

Blank key in hand, I went hunting for small words.  Small words are great for codebreaking because they are simple and common -- words like the, is, and, etc.  They're an excellent place to start looking for patterns.
Right away, I focused on the sequence I had circled earlier: <,,| (3L 113)
The thing that caught my eye was that in addition to coming up often, it occasionally came at the start of a sentence, and it never came at the end of a sentence.  It seemed extremely likely that it was the word THE.  The tricky part was that the Alethi word had four symbols, which I had initially grouped into two graphemes.  I suspected that written Alethi might have a unique grapheme for the phoneme TH, because of the way palindromes like Alethela are formed.  I also noticed word further down the page that included the string of symbols I had decided was THE, along with a few extra letters.  Presumably it was something like THEIR or THERE, but I couldn't pin it down exactly because I was still trying to get my TH grapheme to work.

This threw me for a while, so I took a break and worked on the other page.
My second big break came from Page 2, where I noticed a couple of long words that all ended with the same symbol (3R).  The only thing this could really be was S.

Armed with my key consisting of TH, S, and E, I attacked the list of small words that I had copied.  I didn't make much headway, so I split the TH into separate T and H graphemes and gave that a try.  This helped me narrow down the possibilities.  "This letter is either I or A, and that's an N  or T.  But T is already taken... and so on."

The first word I actually translated (not just assumed the meaning of like THE) was "SPREN".    ;D
The rest of the line was still a mess: ?HRPESPREN LRAPPET ?N ?ERAR?R -- but that was the point at which I knew I was on the right track.  From there, everything swiftly fell into place.

It turns out that Alethi script is written partially phonetically, and the correspondence between English and Alethi phoneme/grapheme pairs is not 1:1.  For example, the English C is written as either K or S depending on its pronunciation. The text I've posted here has been cleaned up somewhat for the ease of reading, and is not an exact transliteration.   Sometimes it's hard to tell individual letters apart, because they share similar forms. The sequence RI, for instance looks very similar to LO.  It makes translation somewhat of an art, and ambiguous words need to be verified by context -- which made the shorter labels tougher to work out than the long sentences. 

((Note: the following speculative paragraph is... wrong, as is pointed out later in the thread. =P))
For instance, the English letter F is written in Alethi as PH, while  The similar-looking Alethi letters for T and D seem to be largely interchangeable, while the letter H can have two different forms depending on neighboring consonants. Several letters (j, l, v) are written as another consonant followed by a vowel.  For example, the word fabrial is technically spelled PHABRIARO

The Alethi alphabet is rather elegant in the way it organizes phonemes, and graphemes seem to be systematically derived from the sound properties of their corresponding phonemes, rather than simply being abstract symbols.  Each grapheme has two elements that describe its sound properties: shape and size. The different shapes correspond to the location in the mouth the sounds are produced: hashes are vowels, left and right arrows are various alveolar consonants, diamonds are bilabial consonants, and fancies are velar consonants.  Height relates to breath control - the amount of stress and voicing the sound recieves. The taller the line, the greater the stress.
Reading written Alethi script evokes speaking the word aloud in a much more direct fashion than English letters, with the sound rising and falling with the letters' curves.

I thoroughly enjoyed not only learning the intriguing revelations hidden on these secret pages -- but the entire process of deciphering them.  My sincere thanks to everyone involved with including them in the book.  This is the sort of attention to detail that makes a truly great work of art.  :)

48
Brandon Sanderson / WOK: Navani's Notebook Translation *MAJOR SPOILERS*
« on: September 20, 2010, 06:52:19 AM »

Edit,TLDR: to skip right to the translation & summary, click here.



Whew!  I've finally decipered the Alethi scipt used in the Navani's Notebook illustrations.  It's a very beautiful writing system -- I particularly like the way it resembles visual representations of sound waves and incorporates the Vorin appreciation of symmetry.  The phonemes aren't quite the same as in English, which made it a frustratingly fun puzzle.

I've translated all of the first page so far, and parts of the second.  The results are quite shocking, though perhaps not unexpected.  It definitely explains why Syl has such a dislike for Shardplate.

Quote from: Navani's Notebook, Page One
The cut and type of the gem determines what kind of spren are attracted to it and can be imprisoned in it. There must be thousands of possible combinations.
Once a spren is captured and the gem infused with Stormlight the fabrial can be used in machines.

Pain Knife
The pain knife is used as a means of protection. Sharp blades pierce an attacker’s clothing and cause crippling pain.

cold gravity pain heat wind
(These are labels describing which spren are attracted to different gem cuts.)

Flamespren trapped in emerald

Removable outer covering to infuse fabrial with Stormlight

Fabrial

Retractable blades cause crippling pain.
Dial pushes blades to four set lengths.

I'm only partway done with Page 2, but it's getting late and the smaller font is giving me a headache -- so I'm going to take a break.
The gist of it seems to be that the bracelet is an Altering fabrial, based on the inclusion of the ten Polestones arranged in the Double Eye of the Almighty.  But -- the labels in the diagram in the lower left aren't gem names, numbers, or colors -- they're emotions!  An emotion augmenting/diminishing fabrial? 
Stay tuned...

Quote from: Navani's Notebook: Page Two
Examples of stormlight patterns

Patterns of stormlight filtered through the fabrial determine the power of the gem

Fabrials allow creation of things like the emotion bracelet made of ten fabrials working together

The pattern cannot be seen by the naked eye

Man betrayed by a close friend
Woman who has just been proposed to
Man who discovered his betrothed lies to him
Mother at wedding of only son

Anticipation
anger
disgust
sadness

love
hate

joy
trust
fear
surprise

The trick of the emotion fabrials is first learning to read it and second learning to tell if the bracelet is reading your emotions, your subject's emotions, or the emotions of the people in the next room over


49
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Favourite Minor Character
« on: September 19, 2010, 09:52:44 PM »
The ardents Geranid and Ashir, for making a systematic study of spren while the rest of the world overlooks them as a mere curiosity.

50
(General spoilers for all sorts of things below.)

My thought was that as a person's soul is leaving their body for the afterlife, another mind starts leaking in -- specifically, the consciousness of Talenel, the Herald who is still bound by the Oathpact.  This is a precursor to his physical return, and explains why the visions have only started happening recently.

The lives of the Heralds (after joining the Oathpact) seem to have two parts: 1) terrible, furious fighting during the Desolations in which they accept their violent death is more or less inevitable and 2) something far worse that fills the intervening time in "the place of nightmares" (i.e. Shadesmar).  Presumably, at the moment of death each Herald's consciousness transfers to Shadesmar to live out some horrible torture until their return.  Possibly, this entails reliving the horrors of each Desolation they've lived through, with nothing to look forward to until the next Desolation.


Why Talenel, and not just random prophesey?  The visions seems to have personal knowledge of the Heralds, the Oathpact, and the Almighty.
Quote
“Ten people, with Shardblades alight, standing before a wall of black and white and red.”
“Ten orders. We were loved, once. Why have you forsaken us, Almighty! Shard of my soul, where have you gone?”

One specifically references the abandonment of the Oathpact:
Quote
“The burdens of nine become mine. Why must I carry the madness of them all? Oh, Almighty, release me.”

This one was particularly intreaguing:
Quote
“Three of sixteen ruled, but now the Broken One reigns.”
Sixteen is not as significant number on Roshar as it is elsewhere the cosmere, yet it pops up here.  Possibly a reference to the 16 Shardholders, implying that Roshar was once managed by three Shardholders (Cultivation, The Almighty, and Odium), but now only one (Odium) is still in power.

Many of the other quotes are consistent with Jasnah's theory on the Voidbringers and seem to describe fighting between the Heralds and the Voidbringers, including the battle at the Shattered Plains
Quote
“That chanting, that singing, those rasping voices.”


Number 5 is interesting because the dying host is still lucid, and is quite clearly one of Tavarangian's "patients" who has realized that something is not right. 
Quote
“I’m dying, aren’t I? Healer, why do you take my blood? Who is that beside you, with his head of lines? I can see a distant sun, dark and cold, shining in a black sky.”

Note that the patient offers up a profoundly true statement "I'm dying, aren't I?".  He then sees Shallan's symbol-heads and has a glimpse of Shadesmar's sky. 
This parallels Shallan's own experience:
Quote
"'What am I?' she whispered. 'I'm terrified.'
This is true.
...
She found herself in a place with a black sky and a strange, small white sun that hung on the horizon, too far away."

Also interesting is the fact that Taravangian's scholars consider this sample to be "of particular note."  It seems Jasnah is not the only unconventional Soulcaster familiar with Shadesmar.

51
Oh and one more question:  are there any theories on who the faces are at the beginning of the chapters, and why they appear at which chapter?  I assume they're the Heralds + Hoid, since the masked face always shows up when Hoid is there.  I also noticed that the faces in Chapter 2 changed from the ARC to the final version.

I was wondering about that as well while I was reading the book.  At first I thought the faces represented the the main characters in the chapter, but eventually decided they were the Heralds once chapters starting coming up with doubles of the same image.
The Herald faces also appear the in the border of the map and eye of divinity diagram inside the front cover -- although the masked face is absent, so I think you're right about that being Hoid.

I'm also working on cracking the Alethi? script from Navani's notebook -- I'll post again once I have something concrete.

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