I am glad you like her tattoos. Elvian tattoos are applied magically. They can be removed or changed will relative ease. Unfortunately, neither Aray or Fiet know that particular magic.
Nihk tries to be a gentlemen, but he is peeking – and stuttering because if it – in panel 9, 🙂
‘
His fate is not yet determined. Originally, I had planned on killing him in the fight with the Loreshi, but then i decided to keep him around for a while longer. We’ll see how long he lasts. 🙂
Shows to go ya. There’s always someone bigger and meaner than you are. Quite a place the lizard folk have there. Females and young and everything. Those lizard warriors are pretty bad ass, I’m curious as to what the Sloama looks like if he can send them running.
The healed scars on Arayanna’s body are a nice touch. She was really gutted by that one sword.
Am I the only one to notice that the blood staining the water makes a pattern that somewhat resembles the ‘Caduceus’, the ancient Greek symbol for medicine and healing? You know, the coiled snakes around a staff?
Oh! I just noticed that Aray woke up with a streak of grey hair. It’s a clever way to emphasize her very close brush with death. (Or being resurrected.) Nice touch! This is especially significant, considering that she is an elf. If her people could see her now they’d probably look at her strangely. 😀
Q: Do Aray’s people have lifespans that are measured in centuries or millennia, like the elves in works of fantasy or similar to the immortality of the fae in mythology?
Thank you! I like the white streak as well, but its a pain in the ass because i have to hand paint it in each panel. I always liked that effect ever since the original Poltergeist movie. The question is, how close was she to death? Did she actually die?
Aray’s people tend to live until around 300-400 years old. They mature similarly to humans, being fully mature in their 20’s, and then the aging process dramatically slows so that an 250 year old Elvian would appear to be in the early 30’s.
Don’t worry too much about getting the streak in the exact same place every time, as long as it is close enough it will seem more ‘realistic’ if it moves slightly, like real hair
First, I understand few people put this much thought into language, and this is probably a coincidence. It’s intended to provide fodder for further thinking about the culture of Skorr’s people.
On a linguistic level, I’m fascinated that “senesha morlansh senesha” would mean something like “ghost healer”. That could bespeak any of several things about their culture, each of which would be interesting :J (I assume the “angel” translation relates more generally to their mythology.) The two main interpretations arise from embedding: Either the word “healer” is part of the word “ghost”, or the word “ghost” is part of the word “healer”.
The first suggests a self-opposing duality to a ghost healer, in which their word for “ghost” is constructed as “healer’s bane” or “one beyond the healers”. The unhealable who heals, or maybe a “giveth and taketh away” vibe. I think “morlansh” feels more like a “bane” than a “beyond”, phonosemantically.
The second would speak volumes about their image of healing magic, in which their word for “healer” is constructed as “ghostsmith” or the like. A people who developed object repair magic before healing magic? Healing is presumably harder but more important, so maybe that’s them working with intelligence limits? Or… maybe they once relied on some other source of healing magic, like a natural manawell spring, and their craftsmen improvised when that source was cut off?
Alternately, it’s possible it was once closer to “healer, ghost healer”, and this became such a formulaic phrase in their myths that it became the word. This suggests an oral tradition closer to norse than to what we think of today. How do they transmit their myths, that such a formula would do that?
Many RL languages do fun things with repetition. This would be an unusual use for it, but a meaning like <SENESHA><MORLANSH/></SENESHA> is possible. However, neither “veroshen mensorosha” nor “sassla norash” uses the same structure, and what the structure might mean thus opens even wider.
However, this has gotten quite long, so I think I’ll call it there O:J
I had no intention of being Tolkein-level-crazy-ass-obsessed with my story and writing an entire language for these creatures, but as the story progresses, I find that I can’t bring myself to do the movie thing where we just stop with the subtitles after a couple of scenes and suddenly everyone just speaks english….
phew…that was a mouthful…
So, I started trying to make sure the language at least made sense. And the more I got into … well … the more I got into it.
So, to answer your question, or complete your thought, or whatever, when the Loreshi use a common word as a proper noun, the repeat the word after a reference identifier. For example, if we were referring to the Police, the awesome alternative rock trio of Sting, Copeland and Summers, we would simply capitalize the word Police, thus making it a proper word. The Loreshi do not have capital letters, so they repeat the word. In Loreshi, we would say “police rockband police”. 🙂 Senesha morlash senesha translate as “healer of the gods healer”, thus making “healer” a proper name.
I’ll post more on the rest of the language later if folks are interested.
[I’m going to preface this with a note — I get really enthusiastic about this stuff, but that doesn’t mean I demand lots of focus. Just touching on it from time to time is neat O:J]
Ooh, that is interesting — repetition for emphasis, but not contiguous, bracketing a modifier to include it? I tend to leave out the concept of case from my language construction, but I like that :J
By the way, here: http://darekun.twilightparadox.com/PhonoGen.zip
is a tool I use for quickly making up vocabulary. Give it a bunch of words, each on its own line, and click Load; then click Generate to generate another word “similar” to the others(in a Markovian sense) with each click. It really helps if you use a lot of seed words.
If you capitalize each word, then it’ll care about the beginning separately, because it’s case-sensitive, but then you need more seed words. What I normally do is copy and reformat the lede of a Wikipedia article, whose topic and language are chosen for the “sound” I want. (Dwarves? How about a Swedish article on the Bessemer process?) You can also seed with a vocabulary you’ve made up; invent a bunch of words, load ’em up, and start generating more :J
Up to this point I’m purely talking about vocabulary, which by itself produces a “relex”, but here’s an easy trick for going (just) one step beyond: For each word you generate, pick an unrelated pair of English words, and pick just one meaning for each word.
For example, combining the ship-part sense of “bow” and the niceness sense of “politic” suggests a word you can get a feel for, without it glossing well into English :J The pairs then readily lend themselves to expressing cultural associations — in this case, perhaps something of a “face culture”?
Also… Note in panel 4, how Skorr’s line sits behind Kraghen’s and Aray’s lines? You can do a similar trick, but with Skorr’s lines sitting behind Endora’s lines, to convey that translation is being done :J (Or, if the characters already sling the lingo, show both lines coming from the same character.)
The adventure continues! This promises to be good, especially with some new adventurers having joined the party. I particularly like how the transition/infodump was handled mid-page with Aray in the lake — that was a good use of a text box, which is often used ineffectively and jarringly in comics.
Thank you for the info dump comment. I was getting pretty bored with rendering up people in various conversation poses, so i thought i would give this a shot. I am glad you liked it!
Really great ending of chapter, i like it…
only one thing… shouldn’t Maye be carrying Array?…
i know he is a gentleman and shit, but… you know… love and all…
ok nevermind, just dreaming…
Under normal circumstances, Aray would definitely be carrying Maeye, but she wants be arms free if she has to fight and figured that big lumox Nihklas was tagging along so why not let him do the carrying.
Don’t worry, Aray will be giving some TLC in the next page.
I once carried a young lady about 2 miles when she twisted her ankle on a hiking trip. I took turns with two other guys switching off whenever we got tired. It was a bitch.
The April voting incentive is stunning. The pose is perfect. Aray is clearly embracing her newest battle scars with confidence and sheer sexiness. Well done!
Let us rally our numbers and vote every day for this extraordinary comic! 23 is certainly not a suitable ranking for a story and artwork of this high caliber!!! Get to it people. 😀
Usually vote every day (at least, every day check webics, which unfortunately is not as everyday, including weekends, as would like, sometimes forget or the machine plays up)
Also need to vote for “The Androssian Prophecy”, they had slipt down to 226 or so 🙁
Love the symbolism in panel 7, but if that was done with traditional means… well damn that would sting! 😛
And Nihk is such a gentleman, trying to look anywhere but at Aray as she’s coming out of the pool. 😀
I am glad you like her tattoos. Elvian tattoos are applied magically. They can be removed or changed will relative ease. Unfortunately, neither Aray or Fiet know that particular magic.
Nihk tries to be a gentlemen, but he is peeking – and stuttering because if it – in panel 9, 🙂
‘
Well, gentlemen are still guys, they just try to be polite about it. 😀
True that!
A promising turn of events. Wonder what’s going to become of Sir Sphincter.
His fate is not yet determined. Originally, I had planned on killing him in the fight with the Loreshi, but then i decided to keep him around for a while longer. We’ll see how long he lasts. 🙂
Great potential for long term comic relief. 😛
I agree. And I like the idea of the girls having a network of friends in different parts of the land that they can visit from time to time.
Mh, nice story twist. And the chapter transition gives a good opportunity for Maeye to recover.
Nice way to heal … a long, relaxing bath …
Thank you. Wait til you see Maeye’s long relaxing bath. 🙂
Shows to go ya. There’s always someone bigger and meaner than you are. Quite a place the lizard folk have there. Females and young and everything. Those lizard warriors are pretty bad ass, I’m curious as to what the Sloama looks like if he can send them running.
The healed scars on Arayanna’s body are a nice touch. She was really gutted by that one sword.
The Sloama is cool. :). I just bought him this weekend. Can’t wait to start doing some renders.
The scars are an indicated of how close Aray was to death – she has never scarred before when Maeye has healed her.
Doesn’t necessarily mean literally bigger, but the idea is there
Panel 5:
Am I the only one to notice that the blood staining the water makes a pattern that somewhat resembles the ‘Caduceus’, the ancient Greek symbol for medicine and healing? You know, the coiled snakes around a staff?
That is a very cool coincidence. I was trying to emulate how the blood would wash off as she swam out to the center of the lake.
Oh! I just noticed that Aray woke up with a streak of grey hair. It’s a clever way to emphasize her very close brush with death. (Or being resurrected.) Nice touch! This is especially significant, considering that she is an elf. If her people could see her now they’d probably look at her strangely. 😀
Q: Do Aray’s people have lifespans that are measured in centuries or millennia, like the elves in works of fantasy or similar to the immortality of the fae in mythology?
Thank you! I like the white streak as well, but its a pain in the ass because i have to hand paint it in each panel. I always liked that effect ever since the original Poltergeist movie. The question is, how close was she to death? Did she actually die?
Aray’s people tend to live until around 300-400 years old. They mature similarly to humans, being fully mature in their 20’s, and then the aging process dramatically slows so that an 250 year old Elvian would appear to be in the early 30’s.
Don’t worry too much about getting the streak in the exact same place every time, as long as it is close enough it will seem more ‘realistic’ if it moves slightly, like real hair
Cool.
…Overall, wow <3
Completely avoiding certain topics due to personal issues…
Feori, if this page went up in four parts, then they'd each be great :J
I'm envisioning the Sloama as the sixteen-foot beast from the Den segment of Heavy Metal, but we'll see O:J
I also have so many linguistic comments, so I’ll post those separately.
Thank you very much for the compliments. And thank you for inspiring me to go home and watch Heavy Metal. 🙂
You’re welcome to both, thank you for making these comics 🙂
My pleasure. Most of the time, anyway. But not when Daz is crashing constantly. Like today. Bad Daz!
First, I understand few people put this much thought into language, and this is probably a coincidence. It’s intended to provide fodder for further thinking about the culture of Skorr’s people.
On a linguistic level, I’m fascinated that “senesha morlansh senesha” would mean something like “ghost healer”. That could bespeak any of several things about their culture, each of which would be interesting :J (I assume the “angel” translation relates more generally to their mythology.) The two main interpretations arise from embedding: Either the word “healer” is part of the word “ghost”, or the word “ghost” is part of the word “healer”.
The first suggests a self-opposing duality to a ghost healer, in which their word for “ghost” is constructed as “healer’s bane” or “one beyond the healers”. The unhealable who heals, or maybe a “giveth and taketh away” vibe. I think “morlansh” feels more like a “bane” than a “beyond”, phonosemantically.
The second would speak volumes about their image of healing magic, in which their word for “healer” is constructed as “ghostsmith” or the like. A people who developed object repair magic before healing magic? Healing is presumably harder but more important, so maybe that’s them working with intelligence limits? Or… maybe they once relied on some other source of healing magic, like a natural manawell spring, and their craftsmen improvised when that source was cut off?
Alternately, it’s possible it was once closer to “healer, ghost healer”, and this became such a formulaic phrase in their myths that it became the word. This suggests an oral tradition closer to norse than to what we think of today. How do they transmit their myths, that such a formula would do that?
Many RL languages do fun things with repetition. This would be an unusual use for it, but a meaning like <SENESHA><MORLANSH/></SENESHA> is possible. However, neither “veroshen mensorosha” nor “sassla norash” uses the same structure, and what the structure might mean thus opens even wider.
However, this has gotten quite long, so I think I’ll call it there O:J
I am going to come back to this because I think it is very interesting – just been busy as hell this week.
Ooh — no hurry, but I look forward to it O:J Good luck with whatever’s filling your time!
I had no intention of being Tolkein-level-crazy-ass-obsessed with my story and writing an entire language for these creatures, but as the story progresses, I find that I can’t bring myself to do the movie thing where we just stop with the subtitles after a couple of scenes and suddenly everyone just speaks english….
phew…that was a mouthful…
So, I started trying to make sure the language at least made sense. And the more I got into … well … the more I got into it.
So, to answer your question, or complete your thought, or whatever, when the Loreshi use a common word as a proper noun, the repeat the word after a reference identifier. For example, if we were referring to the Police, the awesome alternative rock trio of Sting, Copeland and Summers, we would simply capitalize the word Police, thus making it a proper word. The Loreshi do not have capital letters, so they repeat the word. In Loreshi, we would say “police rockband police”. 🙂 Senesha morlash senesha translate as “healer of the gods healer”, thus making “healer” a proper name.
I’ll post more on the rest of the language later if folks are interested.
[I’m going to preface this with a note — I get really enthusiastic about this stuff, but that doesn’t mean I demand lots of focus. Just touching on it from time to time is neat O:J]
Ooh, that is interesting — repetition for emphasis, but not contiguous, bracketing a modifier to include it? I tend to leave out the concept of case from my language construction, but I like that :J
By the way, here:
http://darekun.twilightparadox.com/PhonoGen.zip
is a tool I use for quickly making up vocabulary. Give it a bunch of words, each on its own line, and click Load; then click Generate to generate another word “similar” to the others(in a Markovian sense) with each click. It really helps if you use a lot of seed words.
If you capitalize each word, then it’ll care about the beginning separately, because it’s case-sensitive, but then you need more seed words. What I normally do is copy and reformat the lede of a Wikipedia article, whose topic and language are chosen for the “sound” I want. (Dwarves? How about a Swedish article on the Bessemer process?) You can also seed with a vocabulary you’ve made up; invent a bunch of words, load ’em up, and start generating more :J
Up to this point I’m purely talking about vocabulary, which by itself produces a “relex”, but here’s an easy trick for going (just) one step beyond: For each word you generate, pick an unrelated pair of English words, and pick just one meaning for each word.
For example, combining the ship-part sense of “bow” and the niceness sense of “politic” suggests a word you can get a feel for, without it glossing well into English :J The pairs then readily lend themselves to expressing cultural associations — in this case, perhaps something of a “face culture”?
Also… Note in panel 4, how Skorr’s line sits behind Kraghen’s and Aray’s lines? You can do a similar trick, but with Skorr’s lines sitting behind Endora’s lines, to convey that translation is being done :J (Or, if the characters already sling the lingo, show both lines coming from the same character.)
The adventure continues! This promises to be good, especially with some new adventurers having joined the party. I particularly like how the transition/infodump was handled mid-page with Aray in the lake — that was a good use of a text box, which is often used ineffectively and jarringly in comics.
Thank you for the info dump comment. I was getting pretty bored with rendering up people in various conversation poses, so i thought i would give this a shot. I am glad you liked it!
And yes, the adventure continues!! 🙂
Really great ending of chapter, i like it…
only one thing… shouldn’t Maye be carrying Array?…
i know he is a gentleman and shit, but… you know… love and all…
ok nevermind, just dreaming…
Jesus i’m stupid… i mean Array carrying Maeye…
Under normal circumstances, Aray would definitely be carrying Maeye, but she wants be arms free if she has to fight and figured that big lumox Nihklas was tagging along so why not let him do the carrying.
Don’t worry, Aray will be giving some TLC in the next page.
When travelling to a strange place, use the non-fighters as the pack-mules
Plus, maybe Nihk is simply stronger
I once carried a young lady about 2 miles when she twisted her ankle on a hiking trip. I took turns with two other guys switching off whenever we got tired. It was a bitch.
Did she really twist her ankle? Or did she simply get ‘tired’ of walking? o_O
Brilliant plot redirection! 😀
Thank you!! 😀
The April voting incentive is stunning. The pose is perfect. Aray is clearly embracing her newest battle scars with confidence and sheer sexiness. Well done!
Thank you! *bow*
Not sure what happened to the voting, tho. We dropped 14 spots in the last 24 hours. :/
Calling out to all of my fellow Prentil fans,
Let us rally our numbers and vote every day for this extraordinary comic! 23 is certainly not a suitable ranking for a story and artwork of this high caliber!!! Get to it people. 😀
Thank you. 🙂
Usually vote every day (at least, every day check webics, which unfortunately is not as everyday, including weekends, as would like, sometimes forget or the machine plays up)
Also need to vote for “The Androssian Prophecy”, they had slipt down to 226 or so 🙁
Thank you and duly noted!