Written Speech

Hello again everyone. I'm glad to be back to the forum after a breif hiatus!

I've been reading through some of the language posts, and I've noticed something of interest. I think we're all agreed that the written form of the Speech is some sort of symbol system like Chinese (ie, single characters make up a whole world), instead of an alphabet. But I just finished reading Dilemma, in which Dairine configures the family computer's keyboard to type the Speech. It specifically states that there are 418 keys.

My question is, how can only 418 characters possibly describe everything in existence? I'm thinking that maybe the characters might be able to be compounded a lot, like when Nita changes the Lone One's name by adding the arrow above the circle. Even though that still doesn't seem right... (Hmm, or I might just be insane and rambling on about nothing.) Any other thoughts?

"There is no great genius without some touch of madness."
- Seneca

Hello again everyone. I'm glad to be back to the forum after a breif hiatus!

I've been reading through some of the language posts, and I've noticed something of interest. I think we're all agreed that the written form of the Speech is some sort of symbol system like Chinese (ie, single characters make up a whole world), instead of an alphabet. But I just finished reading Dilemma, in which Dairine configures the family computer's keyboard to type the Speech. It specifically states that there are 418 keys.

My question is, how can only 418 characters possibly describe everything in existence? I'm thinking that maybe the characters might be able to be compounded a lot, like when Nita changes the Lone One's name by adding the arrow above the circle. Even though that still doesn't seem right... (Hmm, or I might just be insane and rambling on about nothing.) Any other thoughts?

"There is no great genius without some touch of madness."
- Seneca

[Caledonian]

We can use a standard keyboard to type in whatever alphabet or representational system we wish. The number of keys is irrelevant, since it's the way data is interpreted that matters -- as long as each character can be represented by a unique string of data, it can be stored.

How can ones and zeros represent any piece of data in the universe? Same deal.

To be wise, learn foolishness. To be strong, learn weakness. To know joy, learn sorrow.

[Aradia Madrea-Nox]

Well, this is just a note, but:
In Japanese, they use radicals, or one character sort of "tacked onto the beginning" of another character, and that creates a whole new word. So, for instance:
S and H are two different letters, but SH together make another sound. It's sort of like that, but sorta... more complicated-y...

[Kathy Li]

Yeah, keys for radicals seems likely. Chinese keyboards apparently used to have keys for the individual strokes that could make up characters, before someone thought about using other kinds of input.

Maybe Dairine will realize that tablet & pen input with handwriting recognition might be the way to go. :-)

[PK]

I believe that, for example, the Mason's Word was referred to as a word composed of... I'm wanting to say sixteen symbols, but I'm not sure of that. The Lone Power's name (probably like names of a lot of other things) is very long and not only a description but a story. Rather like Ents' names, it occurs to me.

So, er, yes. I agree with the idea that the symbols have both individual significance and... combinatorial significance. I'm fairly sure word-symbol languages (bother, I know there's a proper term for that and am blanking) as a rule have a fair amount of compounding, though I could be fairly sure of a mistake. I do get the impression that the individual symbols may stand for syllables rather than sounds, but I'm not sure on that one.

Now, I'm going to expand the question a little bit into other... types of representation, I guess. It's made clear that there are quite a lot of different ways to use the Speech. Fred speaks it, I believe -- but in thought and light. Trees (earth trees and Filif) can use motion without sound; I'd guess that the grass is also not using sound. But it translates in Nita's mind into recognizable words, or so it seems to me. In A Wizard Abroad, on the other hand, the reference to wizards overhearing one another's bodies suggests to me that there are portions of the Speech that are or can be expressed biochemically -- and that may translate, at least to other wizards of the same species, in the same way rather than coming out in words.

Well, let's see. It does make perfect sense for the Speech to be possible to express in whatever way is appropriate and perceptible to the individual/species. It would pretty much have to be, really, by definition. I'm wondering, though, whether it's wizardry that allows the translation across different modes of sensing and expression -- similar to the way Nita ends up sensing the three-degree radiation and perceiving it as a sound -- or if it's a property of the Speech itself.

Then again, if your senses are that different, maybe you're more likely to run into the kind of trouble discussed in A Wizard Alone where you really need conscious knowledge of the vocabulary and can still have trouble with minds that work very different ways from your own. (And I wonder if Dairine gets on with aliens better than her own species -- usually -- largely because she doesn't expect their minds to work the same way, whereas she might resent that other humans don't "get" her automatically or vice versa. But I digress.)

[Kathy Li]

...I'm fairly sure word-symbol languages (bother, I know there's a proper term for that and am blanking)...

Err...logographic or ideographic, maybe? The thing is that Chinese is usually simplistically described as being ideographic, but in fact the bits can describe not just concepts and compound concepts, but also "sounds like" similarities, so it's formal categorization is something insanely long like phonologoideographic or something. But I digress.

I think that it's the Wizardry that does it--just as the Oath speaks in an idiom that best represents the point of view of the wizard who takes it, the Speech can manifest through the perceptions by which the wizard is most proficient.

[Aradia Madrea-Nox]

I actually think that it is a property of the Speech itself that allows light and movement to be translated into Speech, but also the transferring of thought. It's like telepathy, sort of, and body speech. It's a mixture of everything, and everything is dependant upon everything else. I think.

[semiramis]

Metinks maybe part of it is that it's the meaning that matters more than the mode of conveyance... but that the mode of conveyance is still important in its own way. Like how, in music, the notes are more or less dead without intonation and dynamics....

About the "parts" thing.... a lot of chinese words have multiple parts to them, yes. There are words in chinese that can be used by themselves, or that can be tacked on to other words (as a "pang") to modify the meaning/sound. My name (the character on my icon) is fairly simple because it only has two: the one on the left is "king" and the one on the right is "literature," but they combine to mean "rose" (yes, the logic behind the combination all makes sense somehow... now if anyone would care to explain it to me...). Or you could stick a ko-zhe-pang (ko=mouth, zhe just means letter/ideogram) on the left of a lot of words to make a sound effect...

But the problem with this is that I'm sure chinese has more than 418 "component" characters, and I'm sure the Speech would need more...

[Majutsukai]

Well, what I'm thinking is, the Speech is like Japanese, in that it has both a phonetic alphabet (i.e. Hiragana/katakana) and a symbol-based one (i.e. Kanji). The symbol-based words can be expressed in the phonetic alphabet, but, for the sake of brevity, aren't. Which would explain why the keyboard only has 418 keys, the phonetic alphabet of the Speech. Just my opinion. ^^

[PK]

Majutsukai: Ooh. That makes sense to me -- though I'd also add that I get the impression that the phonetic characters in the Speech do have some symbolic meanings of their own. The symbol Nita and Kit changed at the end of the Lone Power's name appears (as far as I can tell) to be both a pronounceable symbol and almost a spell or spell-component in itself; at any rate it has a meaning of its own, even if affected by context.

[Aradia Madrea-Nox]

Also, I think the written language might have a bunch to do with what context it's used in... for instance, in say Japanese, if you use a certain character one way, it can mean "day" or the other, "sun." It just depends on how it's used. On that, you have to learn how to pronounce it.

Each character in the Speech my have many, many meanings, as well... again to Japanese, some characters have as many as 20 meanings... but... there are literally thousands of characters... so maybe each character in the Speech could have more than 20 meanings, reducing the needed numbers of characters, as well?

[Birdhead]

Well, I don't know any ideographic (? I always used to say pictorial as being more descriptive, also obvious. Hmm, new word.) languages but surely with more than 20 meanings, for each character, you're getting way, way too confusing. We have some in English (not to mention all the problems with... what are the words that sound the same but mean something different, or look the same but mean something different? Anyway I'm sure there's a whole train of thought in there somewhere), like back and back or might and might and so on, and they cause enough trouble even in a "simple" phonetic alphabet. (I'm using simple advisedly, I guess, because I suspect I call that simple because I use it rather than because of its relative merits) In a language like the Speech, where I'd agree that it's implied that characters also have meaning but words themselves are or can be made up of groups of more than one character, and yet you also have to be incredibly precise because it's used in wizardry and wizardry has to be precise...

I like the idea of a combination phonetic/ideographic language, like Japanese, but I'm not sure about it. I also like the idea that a combination of characters makes words, and not always arbitrarily. (The examples I know all come off the back of a book I just read: female + housework = woman, female + son= good. I'm going to assume they're right. Book, btw, is The good Women of China by Xinran.) I'm thinking of a specific example in The Book fo Night with Moon, where a character or symbol is described and named for us: it means the Eye (not eye, but Eye, as in foresight). "...two curves, a slanted straight line bisecting them..." That seems to me to be a ideographic symbol, and obviously there's a sound that goes with it. And it's a word by itself, which most letters in a phonetic alphabet can't be. You could make other words coming off that root- say, the Eye plus the symbol for... uhm... the Wizard's Knot, which could mean close minded. Or asleep, or whatever.

Yeah, I don't really have any idea. Maybe having every symbol have a meaning, alone and in context but a sound as well, so there's a standard for pronunciation.

[semiramis]

originally posted by Birdhead:
Well, I don't know any ideographic (? I always used to say pictorial as being more descriptive, also obvious. Hmm, new word.) languages but surely with more than 20 meanings, for each character, you're getting way, way too confusing.

...erm... I think we're running into a slight communication problem here... in Chinese, at least (I'm not sure about other ideographic languages), it's not actually 20 meanings per character on its own, or like "context reading"; it's more that a lot of concepts have two "words" assigned to them (like, for and example, "icecream"), but the two words can be separated and mean different things when placed with other words ("icebox") or on their own ("ice"... um, this isn't the best example, but it's all I can think of right now... the amount of difference in meaning is closer to the situation that you find in words like "origin" and "original," but with a different mechanical corrilation (sp?)). Which gives rise to a surprisingly large amount of possibilities... although my mother mentioned that a three to five thousand-character vocabulary was normal for a literate Chinese... so 5000^2 is a lot more than 418^2.

...So maybe word-combinations with more than two words? Or (building on PK's theory), it could be like that one Babylonian alphabet, in which the first character means "ox" (I think it's "ox"...), but can also be used to signify the hard "g" sound (again, I think it's "g")... or would this be too confusing for a tool used in an occupation built upon accuracy?

[Birdhead]

Sure. I wasn't referring to Chinese, but to Aradia's example of Japanese and consequent suggestion that maybe each character in the Speech could have twenty, or at least a number, of different meanings. your solution works.