Writing Artifacts

[Jsbrads2]

I noticed in The Dragon Reborn, a sea folk woman uses the phrase: All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well. However, later in the book the exact phrase is used by an Aiel woman roughly 3000 yrs earlier. That’s a mistake. Identical phase being used by a different group 3000 yrs later?

also in book 6, two references to cloudberries, not sure they are ever referenced to again. 

[Sabio]

Could of been a common saying in the AOL.  As the breaking happened and time passed it could be most forgot the saying.   I need to reread, it has been awhile but I don't remember Sea Folk in book 3.  Was it in Tear when Mat was checking inns?

[Jsbrads2]

Sea Folk on the girl’s ship leaving Tear.

honestly, the all is well phrase sounds very way of the leafy...

if the phrase was in Tinker community, maybe. Aiel, maybe. 
 

Anyone notice other things that only appear once or twice in one book?

Edited April 19, 2020 by Jsbrads2

[Sabio]

That explains it, book 4.

[Effete]

The phrase could be a mistake, or it could be Jordan hinting that the two cultures at one time shared roots.

 

A quick word-search for cloudberries came back with two results. The first, Perrin accuses Rand of "picking cloudberries" when he pits himself between the Tower AS and the Salidar AS. The second appearance is in Ebou Dar, where Birgitte offers Nyneave some mint & cloudberry tea. There may be more examples, but I didn't care enough to delve deeper.

 

I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make bringing this up... seems like cloudberries are just some type of fruit. ::shrug:: I think "strawberries" is meantioned only once or twice as well. And aspargus (or perhaps brocoli) is described, but never named, as a strange new vegetable foreign to the Two Rivers. These types of "throwaway" comments are peppered all throughout the novels. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Jsbrads2]

All well phrase, nah, sea folk aren’t from Aiel.

 

Both references to cloudberries were in the same book. Essentially while writing the books... when Jordan was writing he invented cloudberries and those were used in book four, but then never used again because they weren’t a real part of the universe, it is a writing artifact.

curious if y’all could find more artifacts, fun?

[Sabio]

Hence why is was probably a AOL saying before Aiel became the Aiel we know and the sea folks took to the sea to escape the breaking.  It would make sense their ancestors were interacting with each other.

[Effete]

^^^this

[Jsbrads2]

The Aiel were still called the Aiel in the age of Legends.

do we hear that phrase a third time in the entire series? No, It is an artifact.

[Effete]

Is the point of this thread to find examples of things Jordan mentions in one book, but not in others? Because if so, you could have made that more clear in the OP. Otherwise it just looks like you're griping about things and then flippantly dismissing any rationale that's offered.

 

As I said in my previous post, there's a ton of things that only get mentioned once: sword forms; towns; citizens, book titles. It seems boring and tedious to try compiling an exhaustive list.

[Jsbrads2]

I think a writing artifact is something more than something mentioned once.

Also it isn’t something left open ended which in an ideal world with infinite time would have been closed...

My definition of an Artifact is something that was introduced, which should have been recited again, but wasn’t.

The phrase All will be well... was composed, I would even say well composed. Abandoning it in book 4 makes no sense.

obviously cloudberries are a lesser artifact compared to that, but the name was invented to be used, its loss is a much smaller loss, but still a loss. 

The opposite of an artifact is something which is well composed and not abandoned like Sea Folk curses, used by Birgitte and Mat.

[Effete]

Okay, but now you need to provide examples of where the "All is well" phrase deserves to be used, or where "cloudberries" need to be mentioned. Otherwise, these fall perfectly in line with an open-ended use. Just because the books no longer have examples of the terms, it does not mean they no longer exist, or are no longer being said... it's just that there is no reason to mention them explicitly.

 

The narrative can still allude to the phrase, though, even without using it. For example, if a sentence was: In the midst of the panic, she assured them everthing was going to be fine, the reader uses their own head-canon for what is actually said, and the world-building allows for the "All is well" phrase to be inserted.

[Jsbrads2]

I’m willing to admit cloudberries are a weaker invention and can be dismissed while still being an artifact.

All well phrase is a longer phrase, well composed and deserves a few more mentions.  

[Maedelin]

But cloudberries are a real berry, here, in our time. (our slice of the Wheel, if you will)

[Jsbrads2]

LoL, full retraction on Cloudberries, I thought it was a made up name for one of the paler raspberries type fruit. Apparently it isn’t very common outside of Northern Europe. 

[Jsbrads2]

Still, cloudberries used two more times in one book at the end of the series.

all manner of things will be well, isn’t seen again yet. I’m halfway thru Towers of Midnight

[JenniferL]

On 4/19/2020 at 12:22 AM, Jsbrads2 said:

I noticed in The Dragon Reborn, a sea folk woman uses the phrase: All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well. However, later in the book the exact phrase is used by an Aiel woman roughly 3000 yrs earlier. That’s a mistake. Identical phase being used by a different group 3000 yrs later?

also in book 6, two references to cloudberries, not sure they are ever referenced to again. 

It’s actually a quote from Julian of Norwich, a 14th century nun and religious thinker. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich

[Liitha]

I think he lent stuff from all over history and the world to create his cultures. It helps flesh the story out but isnt the mainpoint of it so hence just a few mentions here and there..to maybe avoid that basically they say every time drink earl grey so to say cause its not plausible that if they has tea, havent discovered a whole number of ways to make it.

 

And things like the saying i agree with some its just a throw back reference to the AoL before the world was broken and all the groups split apart. The point of the aiel seeing their past is to learn about those things, and how they werent always a desert warrior people. 

[Jsbrads2]

Earl Grey? Don’t you mean Tremalking Black? ? any way, I think it would have been better had the sea folk woman said the things we’ll phrase slightly different, I’m not sure how a phrase like than can be altered but still recognizable. Identical words 3000 yrs apart seems like a mistake to me. They aren’t even speaking the same language, right? Sea folk is speaking common and the Aiel is speaking ancient. 

[Liitha]

Yeah which means we generally read the translation, and not what was actually said 3000 years ago because then you have to sit with a dictionary to read the books.

 

And lolz my days of studying details like names of teas and plants are at least for now in the past. I had some books that looked worse then some of my studybooks in past..but either that was for rp plot research or chores to get raised in the org..these days what i need i can mostly find in the bwb or the new guide. ?

 

 

[Thrasymachus]

Common is a vulgar form of the Old Tongue.  Everybody's language evolves more or less the same because it comes from the same root, the presence of exceptionally long-lived and socially prestigious individuals that would have slowed the adoption of new pronunciations, words and phrases (Channellers and Ogier) and widespread trade and intermingling of people, such that linguistic innovations would have been quickly and widely dispersed.  The Aiel speak a form of the vulgar Common tongue that is closer to the Old Tongue, probably through the influence of the Rhuidean columns, but while the Aiel were more isolated than any other group other than the native Seanchan and Sharans, they weren't that isolated, trading regularly with peddlers, gleemen, Cairheinin for a good long time, and Ogier.

 

While Jordan wasn't much of a linguistic scholar, I don't really find it all that implausible to assume that everybody in the Westlands is speaking in languages that are somewhat less diversified than the less Germanified Romance languages, i.e. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.  When you've got some members of society that can live up 800 years, and widespread trade and wars causing refugees being more normal than not, language can be surprisingly resistant to diversification and change. 

 

Sharans were the most isolated, but they would also have been those with the longest-lived channellers, as only their rulers were killed/died after a 7 year reign.  All the other powerful channellers in their society would have been able to live up to 800 years, probably averaging at least 500 years, putting the Breaking only about 7 "generations" of channellers back.  Roughly equivalent to Shakespeare's time for us.

 

Luthair's invasion of Seanchan was only about 1000 years back, and the wars of Consolidation would have done a lot to wipe out any greater diversification of language that pre-existed the Empire, which probably didn't change that much anyway due to how many Ogier there were and how the ruling channellers who called themselves Aes Sedai weren't Bound by the Oath Rod.  Post-invasion, there's still the Ogier, and damane could also have lived to be 600+ years old, which puts the invasion relatively as far back for those members of society as the Civil War, perhaps the Revolutionary War was for us.  And I reckon George Washington and myself would have very little trouble understanding one another.

[Harldin]

Lets not forget that late in the AOL there would have been one very dominant language spoken world wide and common today would have evolved from that language.

[Jsbrads2]

I think the old tongue and common are as different as Latin from a modern Romance language. People who don’t study it thoroughly know few words or phrases.
That Randland shares one language makes some sense due to Hawkwing’s relatively recent empire, similarly the Seanchan. I am torn as the similarity between Aiel and Common. Logic seems to indicate that the Aiel would need translators to communicate with Randlandians, even their closeness with Cairhein would not lead to them speaking a similar language, the people have been isolated for thousands of years. Villages in northern Iran speak Aramaic, the common language of Jews in the Babylonian Empire of 2000 yrs prior. ?‍♀️

[Thrasymachus]

They are probably even less distinct than that.  Consider that Min, who has no formal education or academic training at all, was able to learn enough to read and translate the Prophecies and commentaries on Callandor within a year.  And it's not like we see her studying verb conjugations or memorizing charts of prepositions and pronouns in preparation for her scholarly work on behalf of Rand.  That speaks to a high level of similarity between Common and the Old Tongue.  Or that Jordan didn't want to be bogged down being hyper-realistic about the evolution of language.

 

And the Aiel are really not that isolated.  They are wealthier than they have any right to be, being desert-dwelling goat herders, with prominent holds like Cold Rocks being as decked out as almost any royal palace in the wetlands, in large part due to profiting from the trade between Cairhein and Shara.  Implying that there was a lot of trading going on before Laman's Sin.  And peddlers and gleemen seem to be at least as common visitors to the Waste as they are in the Two Rivers, possibly more common.  Not to mention all the trading through the Ogier.  The Aiel are noted as having a more formal, old-fashioned way of speaking, and their names for things are always in the Old Tongue.  I would guess that implies that that the Old Tongue is to Common as early Middle English, or possibly very late Old English, is to our modern English, while the Aiel speak an analogue of late Middle English, which sounds somewhat odd when spoken and looks weird and misspelled when written, but is fairly easily understood by a modern English speaker

[Jsbrads2]

The parallels with Latin abound. Whether the Aiel would speak a language more similar to the ancient language is no problem for me.

as to Min, people can study translations and come to different conclusions without learning the whole language. Min also has the advantage of knowing Rand, his friends and situation better than any of those translators. As to guessing right, I’m still not sure if Harry Potter or Neville Longbottom is the true hero of the story.