HFQ Offical Snippet #4

The Spanish translations or lack thereof were not mine. I can claim no credit for them.

However, as a practical matter there is only one known language on Safehold. The sisters cannot plausibly think of translation, because they have never heard of foreign languages. The only reasonable interpretation -- as seen in my novel The One World -- is that the strange writing is an elaborate encryption. The regular repetition of words leads only to the reasonable interpretation that they have a word-substitution cypher.

phillies wrote:(snip)
However, as a practical matter there is only one known language on Safehold. The sisters cannot plausibly think of translation, because they have never heard of foreign languages. The only reasonable interpretation -- as seen in my novel The One World -- is that the strange writing is an elaborate encryption. The regular repetition of words leads only to the reasonable interpretation that they have a word-substitution cypher.

O.K, so in Aivah's words:

runsforcelery wrote:The ‘Español’ portions are brief, initially, interspersed with the ones we can still read, but its last eight months are recorded entirely in ‘Español.’ I suspect he switched to that language when he wrote down things that might have done serious damage to the cause of Chihiro and Schueler if it had fallen into someone else’s hands.

She's specifically referring to it as a language, not as a cipher. If RFC intended Spanish as an "unbreakable" code, he has made a serious mistake. Because Spanish, unlike e.g. Welsh, contains its own Rosetta stone for translating from Spanish into English. Actually, the techniques of code-breakers faced with an incomplete (!) word-substitution pattern are applicable to that situation. And chances of success are more than even. I can't see him screwing up that obviously.

As to Aivah not lying to Merlin: Why shouldn't she? He's doing the same (by remaining silent). And there are several potential reasons for her not to spill all the Sisterhood's secrets to him in an excess of optimism. For starters, the original convent was destroyed by an "angel" with rakurai. If Merlin should have similar leanings (unlikely, but you never know), telling him the wrong story could endanger the Sisterhood as a whole. Moreover, she has to suspect that Merlin is one of Shan-wei's. And we (and Merlin) don't know her position on Shan-wei...

anwi wrote:

phillies wrote:(snip)
However, as a practical matter there is only one known language on Safehold. The sisters cannot plausibly think of translation, because they have never heard of foreign languages. The only reasonable interpretation -- as seen in my novel The One World -- is that the strange writing is an elaborate encryption. The regular repetition of words leads only to the reasonable interpretation that they have a word-substitution cypher.

O.K, so in Aivah's words:

runsforcelery wrote:The ‘Español’ portions are brief, initially, interspersed with the ones we can still read, but its last eight months are recorded entirely in ‘Español.’ I suspect he switched to that language when he wrote down things that might have done serious damage to the cause of Chihiro and Schueler if it had fallen into someone else’s hands.

She's specifically referring to it as a language, not as a cipher. If RFC intended Spanish as an "unbreakable" code, he has made a serious mistake. Because Spanish, unlike e.g. Welsh, contains its own Rosetta stone for translating from Spanish into English. Actually, the techniques of code-breakers faced with an incomplete (!) word-substitution pattern are applicable to that situation. And chances of success are more than even. I can't see him screwing up that obviously.

As to Aivah not lying to Merlin: Why shouldn't she? He's doing the same (by remaining silent). And there are several potential reasons for her not to spill all the Sisterhood's secrets to him in an excess of optimism. For starters, the original convent was destroyed by an "angel" with rakurai. If Merlin should have similar leanings (unlikely, but you never know), telling him the wrong story could endanger the Sisterhood as a whole. Moreover, she has to suspect that Merlin is one of Shan-wei's. And we (and Merlin) don't know her position on Shan-wei...

Interesting point. At some point, it might occur to one of these people that Aivah knows that there are foreign languages, which is an impossible piece of knowledge unless there are some leaks we have not yet heard about completely. She knows Khody had occult writing, and its name, but what does she know about it. Perhaps Saint Khody told them that there are other languages.

As an interesting aside, sometimes twins will develop a private language known only to the two of them that their parents can't understand. Fun for the twins, frustrating for the parents!

Don

A foreign language cannot be translated without a Rosetta Stone or some equivalent. ie, a speaker of the language, pictures to go with the words or a 'Creole', that is a document in a 'Creole'. The problem is a language is not a code. So trying random equivalencies between words or even sentences won't work(it could also take decades) and the Sisterhood doesn't have a translation. So they don't have a Rosetta stone or a speaker of the language. They may have a 'Creole' in the middle of the journal, where he starts writing in 'Espanol'. If you think I'm wrong look at the history of the actual Rosetta Stone and how hard that was to translate, even with an actually translation in existence.


Definition: Creole: A language which is a combination of two or more languages.
Synonym: Pidgin

P.S. The reason a Creole would be useful is you could gain context. For instance if you had the sentence "He drank el aqua" you could deduce that 'el aqua' was a beverage. This would be imperfect as the word could have multiple meanings(like the word 'general') and you don't know that el is not part of the word, but you could get the gist of the text.

Highjohn wrote:A foreign language cannot be translated without a Rosetta Stone or some equivalent. (snip)
They may have a 'Creole' in the middle of the journal, where he starts writing in 'Espanol'. If you think I'm wrong look at the history of the actual Rosetta Stone and how hard that was to translate, even with an actually translation in existence.

First, your assumption is wrong. Second, please consider the specific problem the Rosetta Stone was helpful at. It was for deciphering old Egyptian hieroglyphs. If those Egyptians had written in the same alphabet as us, it would probably not have been needed. As Spanish is written in the normal alphabet and Safeholdian English as well, there's no problem with actually reading the texts - unless Kohdy used a code, which is quite unlikely in a diary...

Finally, just look up the history of Spanish (Latin, Arabic, some Gothic) and English (Lower Saxon, Old French, Latin) and then open the Spanish wikipedia and you might notice why I'm saying that Spanish contains its own Rosetta Stone.

The key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics was the Coptic language, the last form of the Ancient Egyptian language. A guess that king and queen names in the Greek text were encoded in hieroglyphics in cartouches allowed phonetic values to be given to them.

Given false friends, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend; lack of structured grammar inflections in English compared to Latin and it's derivative languages translating Spanish from knowledge of English is next to impossible.

Poker

pokermind wrote:(snip)
Given false friends, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend; lack of structured grammar inflections in English compared to Latin and it's derivative languages translating Spanish from knowledge of English is next to impossible.

Nolo contendere regarding Coptic.
Regarding inflections I'm a bit confused. Let's see:

I am ------ Yo soy
You are --- Tu eres
He/she is - El/Ella es
We are ---- Nosotros/as somos
You are --- Vosotros/as sois
They are -- Ellos/as son

And you even have a change of stems on tempus:
I was ------ Yo fui
You were --- Tu fuiste
He/she was - El/Ella fue

I guess the left column is tought in primary school. Even though English got rid of most inflections of verbs by genus (for tempus it's still in use), the concept is still there - as you can see with the pronouns. I grant it's more complicated in Spanish but that won't stop someone from translating. I guess the most difficult part would be that Spanish routinely drops pronouns if they are clear from the context. In English, that's only done when speaking colloquially.
Regarding inflection of nouns - in Spanish you're using prepositions like in English without even a genitiv.

In any case, these problems are insufficient to preclude the kind of translations I've described above.

Ok, I went back to the snippet, and here is a key point. Aivah says that:

Until I encountered that ‘Español’ of his, it had never occurred to me another language might even exist!

I think that reaction would be common among Safeholders. I still hold that it would be almost impossible for someone with no concept of other languages to successfully translate Khody's writings. Sure you could look at them as a cypher, but a cypher ultimately decodes to the target language. Spanish does not map 1 to 1 with English. It is not a cypher for English, but a completely different language with its own nuances and subtleties.

Without understanding of the structure of various other languages (ie. only having English as an example), the grammatical rules, the colloquial expressions, "false friends" as pointed out by Pokermind above, and words that have no obvious equivalencies, I think the SSK had very little chance of getting any meaningful translation. Is there a possibility, yes, but very unlikely. I don't think RFC has miscalculated here.

Further, I wish I had been more clear when I suggested that Aivah was "testing" Merlin somehow. While possible, I don't actually believe she is doing so. I think she's been truthful, at least as far as what she's revealed. Maybe she hasn't revealed everything, but neither has Merlin .

Given that she already believes that Merlin and the Adams, Eves and Archangels came from "somewhere else", I think she will ultimately accept the truth, and become a key player in the inner circle going forward.

But, we may be at an impasse here anwi, and we might have to agree to disagree regarding the translations. We'll have to wait and see!

AncientMariner wrote:Without understanding of the structure of various other languages (ie. only having English as an example), the grammatical rules, the colloquial expressions, "false friends" as pointed out by Pokermind above, and words that have no obvious equivalencies, I think the SSK had very little chance of getting any meaningful translation.

Here we can agree to disagree. I'll allow that there are conditions which lead to that scenario, e.g. if Kohdy was writing about concepts unintelligible to a Safeholdian like renormizing graviton vertices in generalized Yang-Mills theory (but Kohdy seems to be a common Safeholdian), or if Bedard stripped and limited the English vocabulary of Safeholdian beyond the obvious scientific keywords like electricity (but the Brothers of St. Zherneau could read pre-safeholdian texts).

Overall, since I am basically using a translation approach by word-mapping for Spanish with acceptable results, I'm still in favour of the theory that Aivah knows more about those sections than she implies - and her conclusions (see below) could be rooted in info from those sections...

AncientMariner wrote:Given that she already believes that Merlin and the Adams, Eves and Archangels came from "somewhere else", I think she will ultimately accept the truth, and become a key player in the inner circle going forward.

That is certainly a possibility and not even unlikely. However, as things are playing out recently, there needs to be some adversary to Merlin's plans more dangerous that the current CoGA. So, either Aivah turns out to be that player or - at least as likely - that trip to Zion shows us that player. At least that's my current speculation.
As a further remark: With LAMA, RFC has made Merlin redundant (literally). Makes me wonder...