Dictum

Dictum

Tangles Dictum

‘Seven. You can hold to that with some certainty. It’s part of their name, actually. Chaen means Seven. Chaen-dian means “Seven of them”.Chandrian.

Now Ben is university educated, and that is where he has learned a bit of ancient Temic, a language that predates ‘the old Tema that only priests know’ by a thousand years. But we should also remember that the university is Amyr run, and that they are at least as old as Thelu’s first priests and would also speak the old language of the world. Furthermore, nothing Amyr influenced should be taken at face value in these books, or indeed in their own books, and Dian is not Drian just as Chaen is not Chan. Inconsistancies indicate errors and given that Pat has stated that he poured an awful lot of time and thought into creating names for this language, and since Names Are Important, it is only fair that I do the same in order to decipher it back again, and I would expect things to be error free.

The Chaendrian are a groupe of various number. (Likely seven, given their name.)

Our folk history author writes his words to show an oddly spelt old Vintish dialect where lots of quainte olde wordes are given an extra letter ‘e’ for some rustic reason. Since the writing was from two hundred years ago, and Caudicus tells us that spelling wasn’t considered so important in ‘those days’ it may indicate spelling alterations were a common occurrence, which may or may not be important, but the author only assumes that the number and their name are connected.

‘You would do better to call them the Seven though. ‘Chandrian’ has so much folklore hanging off it after all these years. The names used to be interchangable, but nowadays if you say Chandrian people think of ogres and rendlings and scaven. Such Silliness.’

The Cthaeh cannot lie. And he all but 100% confirms that Yes there are Seven of them, and his word is always true. But that doesn’t mean that the whole word ‘Chandrian’ translates exactly into ‘seven-of-them’, He doesn’t actually confirm that as being a fact, and so it might not be so after all.

My beef with Ben lies with the structure of the words. If ‘dian’ means of them, then what does ‘drian’ mean? Adding a letter for unknown reason is grating as I cannot translate that part well enough myself to argue my case. But ignoring Ben’s assertion that ‘Dian-Drian’ both translate as ‘of-them’ for now, the numerical indicator spellings Chan- and Chaen- are quite obviously not the same thing. There is a whole extra letter ‘e’ written in the ‘older’ spelling which looks as though it has been ‘cut away’ from the shorter and more commonly known version and therefore is clearly a more recently adapted spelling. The Cthaeh, who knows all, gives us a tip as to the preferred faen way of naming procedure when different spellings may needlessly complicate matters. It suggests that the easiest way to avoid confusion is to simply don’t use either spelling and just abbreviate the whole meaning down to it’s most salient part, and then to use actual numbering instead and just call them ‘The 7.’ But I don’t want to blindly do what he says, I want to know more about such things.

Seven words

Now The Chaendrian are a world famous phenomena, and so the chances on everyone in every country and in every language all coming up with the exact same way of spelling are going to be slim, narrative septagy shouldn’t apply to proper names so why didn’t folk just stick with Chaendian once and for all in every language where they were known? The description should always be the same unchanging combination in every language. As far as the number 7 goes, we have it on good authority that in Siaru the old term ‘Chan Vaen edan Kote’ spells the number 7 as ‘chan’ which is only four letters long, not five as it is in the Temic ‘Chaen’. Even the Ademic have a word in their secret language for the Seven, which is another Old language from the days before the chaen-dian were first… created? That word which is indeed talking about the same ‘handful’ of powerful bad things is ‘Rhinta’ which bears no resemblance to any of our seven words so far, but that is a better word to use than chandrian, apparently, and there are other words quite similar too rhinta which do make appearances elsewhere.

In the Commonwealth, where they generally speak Aturan, we have a Big clue from Pat, but only in the 10AE spelling. In the original printing, Trapis tells us

‘But on the Seventh day, Tehlu drew near before Encanis could bring his power to bear and the seventh city was saved. That is why Seven is a lucky number and why we celebrate on Caenin.

This gives us the modern Aturan spelling for the seventh day, and it sort of looks a little bit like our other 7 words. ‘Caenin’ is also what much travelled and knowledgable Arliden probably uses himself in life and so it isn’t surprising that he didn’t know the archaic name for the seventh day of the week too, although Laurian did have a good ear for such things. HOWEVER, in the 10AE the word Caenin has been deliberately replaced by Pat with the equivalent word in Temic, ‘Chaen’ which is the old word for the seventh day in the old language which would have been spoken by the people like Perial who were actually living in the story at this time. Deliberate changes to the text for no obvious reason are signposts from Pat telling us that we are following the correct path and investigating the correct things with our lucky 7 words. Without such clues, the puzzle is possibly too difficult to solve, but with them… we can continue with confidence, and perhaps a bit of a smirk on our faces.

Chaen is counted a lucky number from ancient times which remembers the seventh wondrous city of the old world, of which everything else, including it’s name, is now long forgotten. Every story we have tells us that the name given to the seventh day is based around the word for lucky Seven to celebrate the day on which the seventh city was spared from destruction. The Tehlin Church then arrived on the scene and promptly gave its own names to the next four days. Now these are proper words with deep religious undertones. Felling replaced 8-day. Reaving replaced 9-day. 10-day was changed to Cendling and the last day of the span, the old 11-day, was completely hijacked and turned into Mourning, which has become a general day of abstinence and religious reflection and is the new focal point of the entire span which only helps draw common folks attention away from the significance of the number seven buried away in the middle. But the practice of counting the first seven days has been deeply engrained in the very fabric of Temerant life since the lost days of Ergen, Perial’s villagers came for her son on the first day of the seventh span. Collectively, the days one to six might also represent the six cities which did later fall. But the church was not instantly all-powerful and change was slow in the coming to the far reaches of the four corners and it was many years before the iron law and the book of the path finally forced the world to change it’s calender to fit with their holy ideals. Even Trapis corrects himself when he remembers ‘No, wait, there wasn’t any Mourning yet’ and so it seems that instead of the rather sweeping change of completely renaming everything, they simply incorporated the old traditions in so much as they even used the old numbering system in their own spans and furthermore introduced the ‘seven days of high mourning’ where they meddled with the countings of such things to their own satisfaction.

And so logically, and rhetorically, if follows that if Chaen means the seventh say, the first 6 days names will reflect the previous six numbers, too, and if that is true then this tells us that Luten. Shuden. Theden. Feochen. Orden. & Hepten are representative of the phonetic equivalents of the first six numbers the original language of the Egren empire, Temic.

Rosetta Stone

If we can take the calendar as an approved key, we should be able to confidently take one huge step towards translating some further pieces of Temic we are given. Writing our list of days down next to each other reveals a running theme throughout in that the numbernames all end with the same suffix. ‘-en’. Putting on my tinfoil helmet once again makes me think it quite probable that this suffix is an addition to the root numbering structure and that it is likely going to be something that has been added to the root seperately to indicate what exactly we are counting, (like one potato, two potato,) and so the whole is officially something that is ‘other’ than the real number itself. One good thought is that it acts like a pronunciation indicator fir-st. (1st) Seco-nd. (2nd) Thi-rd. (3rd) Four-th. (4th) Etc whilst another thought suggests that ‘-en’ is the suffix used when counting days specifically which indicates that they correct translation of our list is actually 1-day. 2-day. 3-day. 4-day. Since I like both theories I am going to propose that they are both correct and the construction is actually a two-part binding, a lot like those used in Sygaldry and Sympathy both.

If we assume that all the ‘-En’ part always means ‘-Day’ in it’s meaning, and if we were counting something other than days then this suffix would need not apply. Without it the root numbers will be

Lut = 1. Shud = 2. Thed = 3. Feoch = 4. Ord = 5. Hept = 6. Cha = 7.

This is now sounding, to me, a lot like the phonetic names that we give to our musical notes, namely Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti. Music knows how to follow a meter. Language too has a structure and numbers will always follow set rules when they are combined. It is not expected that this is going to be like a tally score, one scratch for each letter in each number, which would make one a one letter word, two a 2, three a 3, and although 4 actually is four letters, but there are limits to such an infinite scale as the last digit on any list, the number nine, would have a name that was nine letters long! and that is going to prove very unwieldly when we reach the upper levels of unlikely mathematics that will involve doing multiplication sums to combine two different word numbers together to make even more complex numberwords later on in this study.

In a perfect world, all things would be equally allotted the exact same amount of letters so that they could all display their long names equally, a triangle of three parts in the simplest form, one letter for each bit of their three part name. But this is not a perfect world, alas, perhaps, and Our assorted number/letter count is all different where we really deserved to see everything laid down in apple pi order. Since everything I have seen up until now indicates that any name is really a three part name, and considering we are going to need all the luck we can get, when it comes to breaking these numbers down into names again, I believe that we should use a maximum of three letters in our counting words to ascertain each of our true seven day-relating number words. Applying this 3-part thinking to the word Feochen for example will allow us to split it into three syllables, fe+och+en. We have already accounted the ‘-en’ part to indicate that we are counting a number of days, but Fe-och meaning 4 still looks far too complex to me.

Sticky Stuff

Remembering our other lessons in Pat magic though might help us to put everything together in a way that will satisfy our understanding of the universal laws that apply to all things Temerant. Ben begins teaching sympathy by using pitch pine as a sort of placebo glue to help things fit easier together. It wasn’t strictly necessary, only a glue for the mind, but once you understand the principals at that level of magic it helped supplying a basic yet familiar understanding of unfamiliar concepts when it comes to unfamiliar practices, a lot like Kvothe has to explain to both Marten and Denna about ‘invisible string’ where a technical explanation would be out of the quiestion. This magic glue also makes an appearance in sygaldry lessons when Kvothe explains that when you are working with runes, some runes for different things fit nicely together, whilst others do not. It is a universal rule that some things, like numbers, just fit better than others do, such is the way of things. Kvothe explains the complicated process of how to stick two runes together with the use of ‘linking runes’ such as ‘Ule and Doch are both for binding’ and so when it comes to unfamiliar concepts we do at least have a grasp of accepted practice on what might be possible in our entry level Temerant language construction class too.

It appears to me as though the ‘Fe-‘ part in Feochen may be an example of how two pieces of our puzzle simply do not fit very well, at least not without an extra linking rune in between, and if that is so then we can recognize the magic glue for what it is. Fe-en alone might not create a satisfactory combination of ‘4-day’ by itself, and so to make it work at such a desired level the universe has declared that it was necessary to use the linking rune ‘doch’ between them which has the right linkage to fit with both edges at once. This would create the new word Fe-Doch-En to mean Four (th) day. Yes, I am aware that Doch is not Och, but there are 197 different runes in the sygaldry alphabet and we do not know them all. Just enough to make some educated guesses. So when looking back at our original calender I will predict that the correct constructions are as follows.

Lu (t) en , Shu (d) en , The (d) en , Fe (och) en , Ord-en , Hep (t) en , Cha-en.

We will note that five and seven are similar in that they do happen to fit nicely without any magic glue, but the general trend is to break up the vowels and consonants in a way that doesn’t need to use any added accents, such as ‘Ë’ to do the dirty work when it comes to pronouncing diphthongs.

There is indeed some evidence that what I am suggesting is in all actuality the correct method for the construction of converting numbers into names when we look to the language of Siaru. In Pat’s most famous example we are given four words by Kilvin that translate into a five word sentence!

‘Chan Vaen edan Kote‘ , we are told on good authority, means ‘Expect Disaster Every Seven Years.’ This will clearly mean that in that ancient and secret language, One of these words is going to have to do double-duty and represent two words at some point. Those who may disagree with my reasoning might possibly suggest that this will simply be a case similar to our own worlds words ‘century’, ‘decade’ or ‘lustrum’ which mean a period of ‘100 years, 10 years and 5 years’ respectively, and it is true that such terran language tricks might well be the answer here in Temerant too. But in the case for my methods defence, I will point out that if ‘Cha’ is the universal base for ‘7’ then it can act in a similar vein to our adding ‘-en’ to mean 7-day, so adding ‘-n’ might turn it into ‘7-year’ instead, which gives me two examples that both follow the same pattern. This translation would also leave the three remaining words ‘Vaen edan Kote’ to cover ‘every, expect and disaster.’ which would simplify a much easier basic word substitution for the rest of the saying into 1-2-3 order.

Breakdown

Since I have arrived at this conclusion using the lucky numbers 3 & 7, again, and if you have read my Irony papers that I call a trilogy in π parts, then you should know that I always like to check my working to it’s limits and so we should always try to break these things apart in a test of destruction.

In my answers, I have arrived at Lu = 1 and The = 3. Now! Trapis tale of Tehlu and the demon lord now has some interesting visual aspects as Teh-Lu now clearly uses the rune for One in his own name, and you could argue that he represents 1/3 part of Aleph’s holy trinity of ‘three-in-one’ which is all sounding rather good. In further stories about ancient things we can see ‘Lu’ everywhere as it occurs not only in Teh-Lu, but also in Lu-dis and even in Fe-Lu-rian giving us more reasons to believe in mynumbers. Mixing numbers into actual names has thus opened up many new areas for further interpretation, but for now let’s just see what happens when we try to reach for the luckiest of numbers, 21 which is best represented by solving the sum Three multiplied by Seven. Or using this new key, ‘The’ times ‘Cha’. Now multiplication is complicated, but it is clear to me that the most obvious answer might well turn out to be a very interesting anagram of the letters that form it’s numbered parts, suggesting that ‘lucky 3’ times ‘lucky 7’ might justequal unlucky ‘Cthaeh.’