Yuku free message boards

Rimer Dal-- I wouldn't blame the late Keith Parkinson for the runes not matching up to the text. Publishers control the content of the painted covers, not the authors; Parkinson give an example of how the authors wanted Dog picture on the Fire Sea cover but of course the publisher won out. Whether or not he read the books, the publisher got to determine the look of it. We don't know if the publisher specified how the runes should appear or if Parkinson was given freedom to design them and it didn't end up matching the textual descriptions and appendix figures.

Translating the runes into a linear form means breaking it down into a new system of thought that addresses ideas from beginning to end, rather than layers of context interwoven where any starting point is a valid starting point that creates a slightly different meaning. Reading through the runes does seem to break it down into a linear flow, from what rune is chosen as the start point through to the last concluding rune from that start-- but that seemingly linear reading also involves all these surrounding runes and meanings taken in as you go, and that process can't be rendered into a linear language. While the language of these books (and in the book context, the mensch languages) presents the runes to us as linear sentences, that's not how Patryn/Sartan thought about the runes actually works. There's just no way to accurately translate them into English, or another publication language, because of the great difference in how they work. The books also tell us Patryns tend to record things in mensch languages rather than their own runes because they consider the runes too powerful for that. Mensch language is much simpler and safer since it has no magical power! The spoken form of these languages, I suppose, necessarily has to pick a starting point and speak through to the finish-- but if you wrote down the runes that were spoken, you could then read it in that any-starting-point-goes way.

Now I have a weird urge to draw what this process might look like :P

The Romance languages example is a good one, actually. The Sartan language came first, after all, with Patryn branching off from that when they split off to form their own new culture. Similar to Romance languages, then, they are both different and similar. I know very little about the Korean language myself, Flamer ohr, but there is a superficial similarity to Chinese written language in that both are ideograms.

That's one of the spellings of his name, yes-- it was Baltazar in one book and Balthazar in the other And... a ball of noodles?! Dry or wet? I can't say that I've ever attempted to untangle a noodle ball.

I'm not certain what word is used for those either, but I've heard them referred to as "brushstrokes" before in reference to the calligraphy used. I didn't think about the specific order, but that's true as well for both the rune structures and the ideograms.

With the runes though, as the books described, you can change the order to create a different effect. The Dragon Wing appendix talks about the positions the rune could be placed in-- fountain runes, matriarch runes, and others. I think that creates a more fluid grammar than other languages have, so it would be extra bewildering trying to figure out, "What does this rune mean when it's here instead of over there?"

Yeah, the Romance languages don't work well as a stand-in for the written forms!

How does it work? Do you have to cook the noodles and tangle them up, or what?

Nothing simple about it like those simple straightforward mensch languages, eh? (Not that our languages are simple, but compared to that...!) I love the things Weis & Hickman came up with in DGC

With that rune discussion, you can just look to the appendix-- but you should reread the entire book anyway because it's so good I'm starting to get fuzzier on where certain things are located, but I can pull up sometime where the other books get into details of the runes.

Ahhh, young people are their silly noodle ways!

The Patryn explanation is in book 2 (Elven Star) if you ever want to review that. The Patryn one was also written in the context of their exile to the Vortex, probably part of attempts to preserve knowledge and teach their future generations, and in isolation from any mensch (some didn't even know they had existed) and Sartan (the ancient enemy, of course.) It includes some brief mentions of pre-Sundering events, as well. I've never attempted to construct any kind of timeline from this-- more like just a progression of events because I don't think we have enough year references to go on for an actual timeline.