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First Flight (Epilogue and Last Thoughts)


KSK

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On 8/21/2020 at 6:31 PM, briansun1 said:

Thank you for giving us the last 7 years worth of a great read. I'm quite intrigued on whatever you will write next.

You're very welcome! And, as I've said before to other folks on this thread, thank you for always coming back to it over those seven years.

To answer your question, this, plus a handful of flashfics for a D&D campaign I'm playing at the moment. (My character is a bard - and what use is an itinerant storyteller without a few stories in his back pocket? :) ), plus another short story that I'm hoping to submit to a local sci-fi magazine when they're next looking for new material. If they end up rejecting it (quite likely), then I'll post it online somewhere. Oh yes - and I've been working my way through this writing challenge.

I also have a couple of pages written for another novel - which is about as long as it took me to realize that I really need some basic worldbuilding set up first. A rough map, some country names, an outline of a military command structure, that kind of thing. Currently playing around with the map which has also proven to be a useful source of possible plot points for later on. Which is nice.

So, nothing major on the writing front  but I have been keeping my hand in. :) 

16 hours ago, camacju said:

I've just binged this whole thing, and may I say, WOW. This is amazing work!

Thank you very much! Glad you enjoyed it and for dropping by to say so!  It's always a treat to have a new reader.

Edited by KSK
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Ah nooo! somehow I stopped recieving mail updates! Well, guess I need to read the finishing chapters now... I'm sorry for making anyone who was looking for them wait for translations guys, will be there shortly

 

EDIT: It seems I wasn't the only one with this problem, @mstachowsky had it too. I wonder how many people suddenly dissapeared because of that...

Edited by superstrijder15
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This is gonna be a long one folks, a lot of translating and commenting on my reading:

Spoiler

 

Quote

Kermbal minsathona

 

From chapter 110. Throwing this through my translation program returns 

Quote

-<Kermbal>;--smallest-deed-dependence on(negated)-(plural);

The translator bailed to spot the suffix bal, since Kerm isn't in the dictionary (I should put it in to be honest), and after that this can be simplified or made more readable into something like "I cut Kerms, whose small deeds we do not depend on!". A very nicely crafted insult!

 

I love how you crafted the secondary schools full boarding period with the worldbuilding around Kerm trees so nicely!

For what soundnfury brought up about whether prefixes or suffixes are stronger: In my software prefixes are stronger (and if something is a noun and a verb it is interpreted as a verb. The full order is verb, prefix, noun, suffix basically because that is the order I wrote the code in), if I do things by hand I look at multiple interpretations and work things out by context.

 

Quote

Bin balsoathada

and here we see that preference become a problem in my program, which assumes bal means 'to cut' here, not 'a thing that accomplishes'. When I temporarily take bal out of the verb list soathada is also still completely ununderstandable, because the verb for flight is hidden inside there somewhere. Picking it apart myself, I can turn it into bal-so-ath-ad-a, which translates to 'ways to accomplish-soath-inhabitant of-(plural)'. Soath may be the complete verb for 'to fly', or a misspelling of sath (deed), but in the later case the meaning would not line up with the stated translation (the things we use to fly'). I also cannot make my own word for it since I lack words for fly and for thing.

Edit: My other document does have soath, but I had not copied it. Stupid me! The noun list also has things like beast. I guess I didn't update the code after the poem that was my last post.

I also just realized I should cast my entire string to lower before doing stuff so string matching will actually function right...

 

Quote

"Bob - factr balsoathada. Wernher dja Bill? Binda ara."

"Dja Jeb?"

"Jeb? Jeb soathr balsoathada."

well, you introduced factr, to build, and ara, them. I think that might be the first of the ... I actually don't know what word type it is, but it fits in with I and him and such. With a bit of tweaking (and the now known mistranslation of airplane) we get the horrible 

Quote


-<bob>;--to build(he/she/it);--to cut(I)-to fly(we)-(plural)-<.>;-<wernher>;--and;-<bill>;-<?>;--to understand(they);--them;-<.>;
--and;-<jeb>;-<?>;-<jeb>;-<?>;
-<jeb>;--to fly(he/she/it);--to cut(I)-to fly(we)-(plural);-<.>;

My code doesn't understand punctionation so I have seperate them into seperate words which are then considered untranslatable. For the reader who doesn't want to read that here it is with those taking down a bit:

Quote


-<bob>;--to build(he/she/it);--to cut(I)-to fly(we)-(plural). -<wernher>;--and;-<bill>? --to understand(they);--them.
--and;-<jeb>?
-<jeb>? -<jeb>;--to fly(he/she/it);--to cut(I)-to fly(we)-(plural).
Quote

Almkerm

hmm, a new prefix in a new name?

Thank you so, so much for writing this all @KSK, I very much enjoyed reading it. Perhaps I should sub your new fictions on spacebattles, I haven't been on there in ages.

 

and I ran out of likes before catching up, as is tradition.

 

EDIT: @LordOfTheNorth The full download had a bit of weirdness going on with the index/contents list, having the parts 1, two, three and three. 

EDIT 2: 

Quote

* Unknown how prefixes with long translation of which different parts can be inverted react, use cautiously, or use on purpose to be ambiguous

Hey, you took that from my dictionary! (Although now obsolete, it is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0eDcf2dWf6_HwHZTgiDGwFXxOZ7Qxv-LyD2Jgpj8u0/edit)

Edited by superstrijder15
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25 minutes ago, superstrijder15 said:

The full download had a bit of weirdness going on with the index/contents list, having the parts 1, two, three and three

Thanks for picking that up, I hadn't noticed. I've been meaning to go through and fix some other typos in the full version, so I might actually get around to doing it now :D.

 

28 minutes ago, superstrijder15 said:

Hey, you took that from my dictionary!

Indeed I did, you've basically got a whole section dedicated to your dictionary (hope between KSK and me we managed to do it justice).

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17 minutes ago, LordOfTheNorth said:

Indeed I did, you've basically got a whole section dedicated to your dictionary (hope between KSK and me we managed to do it justice).

Ah, I read over the first line of that section. It is quite a bit more elaborate than my dictionary so I thought those were KSK's own notes on it. I think some stuff like the numbers never came up before...

 

Maybe I should go to bed now...

Edited by superstrijder15
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8 minutes ago, superstrijder15 said:

Ah, I read over the first line of that section. It is quite a bit more elaborate than my dictionary so I thought those were KSK's own notes on it. I think some stuff like the numbers never came up before...

Yeah, it was basically a combination of your dictionary and some of KSK's notes (like the numbers).

9 minutes ago, superstrijder15 said:

Maybe I should go to bed now...

Goodnight :).

Feels weird saying that when its the middle of the day for me :D

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7 hours ago, LordOfTheNorth said:

Thanks for picking that up, I hadn't noticed. I've been meaning to go through and fix some other typos in the full version, so I might actually get around to doing it now :D.

Indeed I did, you've basically got a whole section dedicated to your dictionary (hope between KSK and me we managed to do it justice).

I hope so too. For what it's worth @superstrijder15 got a shout-out in the Last Thoughts for the 'Old Kerba dictionary and grammatical discussions' but I should also say that chewing over various Old Kerba translations on this thread has been a ton of fun!

And on that note :)

Spoiler

 

Looking at the output from your translator, I think it's getting its strings in a twist somewhere over bal which seems to be translating as 'cut'. Bal was intended as a case marker signifying 'a thing which is used for'. Add on the usual pronoun suffixes and it becomes 'a thing which I/you/we/they use for'.  So balskirna (I think), is a compound noun of bal and skirna - to cut, or 'a thing which is used to cut' or more idiomatically, 'a knife'. :) 

Turn bal into a suffix and it denotes a 'thing which is not used for', so Kermbal translates to 'a thing which the Kerm does not use for'. In its historical context this was a declaration of independence from the Kerm by very early Kerbals, in the context of that chapter it could be seen as somewhat perjorative because the speaker (deliberately) does not use the arguably more correct Kermbel, which translates to 'person which the Kerm does not use for.' Alternatively, one could rationalize the speaker using Kermbal because that's the historically correct version and the (rather extremist) splinter of the Children of Kerbin that he belongs to, take particular pride in hewing to the old ways.

 

 

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1 hour ago, KSK said:

Looking at the output from your translator, I think it's getting its strings in a twist somewhere over bal which seems to be translating as 'cut'

Yeah, it is. I think at the time that we were just starting verbs I wrote it in the dictionary as the word for 'to cut', which now turns out to be incorrect. Such is the work of a linguist deciphering an alien lanuage I suppose XD. And this is a pretty simple one at that, mad respect for people actually deciphering actual ancient texts.

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20 minutes ago, superstrijder15 said:

Yeah, it is. I think at the time that we were just starting verbs I wrote it in the dictionary as the word for 'to cut', which now turns out to be incorrect. Such is the work of a linguist deciphering an alien lanuage I suppose XD. And this is a pretty simple one at that, mad respect for people actually deciphering actual ancient texts.

:)  And yes - completely agree. Mad respect for the folks that do this for real. 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Oh man, this is great! I thought this was not done, since I for some reason stopped getting email notifications after "The Sage of Barkton". I had other things to think of and let it slide, and now I discover that I have lots of chapters to enjoy, and an ending as well! Thanks for writing this epic epic.

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On 10/21/2020 at 6:06 PM, GalFisk said:

Oh man, this is great! I thought this was not done, since I for some reason stopped getting email notifications after "The Sage of Barkton". I had other things to think of and let it slide, and now I discover that I have lots of chapters to enjoy, and an ending as well! Thanks for writing this epic epic.

You're very welcome - hope the ending works for you!

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  • 2 weeks later...
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