BL: The Sky Village (Ashland, Monk and Nigel) [kgbooklog]

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Monk and Nigel Ashland, The Sky Village
Candlewick (2008) ISBN: 978-0-7636-3524-4
Score: 2

Start of the Kaimira series (YA, planned to be five books) about two kids with special abilities growing up after the Trinary Wars (between humans, beasts, and meks) ruined human civilization. It includes several appendices, including two pages in Chinese (or maybe Korean; I can't tell) and two pages in symbols invented for this series (a couple symbols are translated on the website; hopefully there were be more content there once the book is released).

Next Book: Jim Butcher, Small Favor

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There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

If you can post a small sample of the unknown language, I can tell Chinese from Korean from Japanese. Or check out

Chinese: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm
Korean: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/korean.htm
Japanese: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese.htm

Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

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Okay, it's not Korean. I recognize a couple characters, like the one for "3" and the one that looks like a lambda, but those appear in Chinese and Japanese. The text is written horizontally, left to right, but so are all the examples you linked. There is a character that looks like the Arabic "3" (more so than "了"), and one that's like an arrow pointing up, but with the left diagonal higher than the right. There are a few places where it looks like a character was used twice in a row, but it's hard to tell because it's handwritten.

I'm not going to scan it, because I'm trying to keep it in mint condition. So even if I knew which language it was, I wouldn't be able to translate it.

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Japanese uses syllabic characters (kana) along with the Chinese derived word characters (kanji). The syllabic characters are much simpler, consisting of only a few strokes, and are used for inflectional endings and other purposes, so they are quite frequent in written J. Compare the J and C examples on the Omniglot pp.

ONe of the commonest kana is "no", analogous in function to our "of", like a lowercase "e" reflected in a mirror and then rotated to the left so that the opening faces down: の . The angle of the cross-stroke can vary a bit. If you see that, you can be sure it's Japanese.

Here are a few more kana, selected more or less at random. Some are hiragana, others katakana; see wikipedia for details:

へけさフヒサ

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It's Chinese. Written in the sort of formal handwriting Chinese students learn in grade school before they start doing the equivalent of cursive.

a picture of my wife doing the hand lettering (http://rettstatt.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/fantasy-books-and-back-matter-2/)

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BL: The Sky Village (Ashland, Monk and Nigel)

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