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

[kgbooklog]

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

Comments

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

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