HFQ Offical Snippet #4

Joat42 wrote:Well, being a Seijin is good if you don't want to overawe the locals being an angel.

My guess is that Kohdy is one of the original crew that decided he wasn't going to play angel with the rest of them and went out among the people getting his hands dirty.

The Seijins might have been an integral part of the system. They could mingle with people as the Angels couldn't. That would give them a lot more flexibility and a deeper 'feel' for what was happening. As teachers, leaders, heroes, they'd be in a position to 'fine tune' society as it developed. After the War of the Fallen could have been used as a 'clean up' crew - reasserting the authority of the CoGA in a positive fashion. They could also track down stray bits of tech - 'magical' or 'demonic' artifacts - left over from the War.

Joat42 wrote:Then they edited him out of the testimonials out of spite. Thinking on how they did that a number on Schueler with the abomination that is the Test, I'm beginning to think that the surviving crew wasn't all that rational in the end. Which also makes me wonder what else they may have done or prepared for.

After the War, the remaining Angels and Seijins had a couple centuries left in their lives. Plenty of time for a few of them to have second thoughts about Means and Ends. I think that's what happened to Schueler and Kohdy.

jms

The idea of writing in Spanish to conceal his thoughts doesn't really make that much sense. At least for the time of Seijin Kohdy. Think about it, Kohdy living during a period where the archangels were still around. They had Federation tech. So had his journal fallen into the wrong hands during his lifetime, they would have easily been able to translate the Spanish parts using a computer.

The only way it makes sense to me is if he was trying to conceal information from later generations. Maybe whatever he wrote was something he didn't think people were ready to hear at the time. So he wrote it in Spanish. Since it is an unknown language on Safehold, then it would be virtually impossible to read. Only somebody with some knowledge of the Federation or with access to technology would be able to translate those portions of his diary.

isaac_newton wrote:

6L6 wrote:Merlin should give her a dictionary and tell her to have at it.

Without a grammer book & a good understanding, she would almost certainly end up with the completely wrong ideas.

I found that out the hard way doing latin translations at school - they ended up being almost 100% spurious - and I was really convinced I done a good job too

I'm actually surprised they couldn't figure some of it out. A language seems easier to me than a code - or maybe they're almost the same thing.

-- Bob G

Henry Brown wrote:Think about it, Kohdy living during a period where the archangels were still around.

Why does everyone assume Kohdy dates from the time of the Archangels? Kohdy could just as easily be "Son of Zorro" as he could be an original "Zorro." He could have learned Spanish from a parent who spoke Spanish at home out of nostalgia.

Kohdy's journal entries in Spanish might also date from the end of his life when the Archangels had all died off or gone into hibernation or whatever.

Henry Brown wrote:The idea of writing in Spanish to conceal his thoughts doesn't really make that much sense. At least for the time of Seijin Kohdy. Think about it, Kohdy living during a period where the archangels were still around. They had Federation tech. So had his journal fallen into the wrong hands during his lifetime, they would have easily been able to translate the Spanish parts using a computer.

The only way it makes sense to me is if he was trying to conceal information from later generations. Maybe whatever he wrote was something he didn't think people were ready to hear at the time. So he wrote it in Spanish. Since it is an unknown language on Safehold, then it would be virtually impossible to read. Only somebody with some knowledge of the Federation or with access to technology would be able to translate those portions of his diary.

You are assuming Spanish was as common and well known as it is today and that it was in the computers. Spanish might have been a dead language in the later days of the federation with only a few scholars able to read it. Langhorne might have purged all other languages but safeholdian English as other languages might have raised questions about the creation and places other than Safehold where those languages originated. Langhorne's main computer was blown up along with him. The computer under the Zion Temple may be only be a building maintenance computer with a limited database. Likewise the tactical computer that controls the OBS. The key of Schuler, and similar artifacts seem more like a USB Thumb drive or recording device with playback but again a limited, though large amount of data, not an encyclopedia of all federation knowledge, including all current and past languages. Of course the key of Schuler may well include a Spanish dictionary or translation program that Kohdy intended to be used to decrypt his Espanol.

HOw would the church react to the possibility of another language used? hide it away, destroy it, confiscate it. simply claim it is gibberish.
THey might have a collection of encoded texts, that the church has been unable to translate, but what it is that they are simply in another language. It might have been a way for the angels to ensure anything that is in some other language is collected and contained by the church if it escapes the hands of the priest hood.

His book was always to hide the truth from the lay people of safehold, if angels had a reason to read his personal diary he was in trouble any way.

Henry Brown wrote:The idea of writing in Spanish to conceal his thoughts doesn't really make that much sense. At least for the time of Seijin Kohdy. Think about it, Kohdy living during a period where the archangels were still around. They had Federation tech. So had his journal fallen into the wrong hands during his lifetime, they would have easily been able to translate the Spanish parts using a computer.

The only way it makes sense to me is if he was trying to conceal information from later generations. Maybe whatever he wrote was something he didn't think people were ready to hear at the time. So he wrote it in Spanish. Since it is an unknown language on Safehold, then it would be virtually impossible to read. Only somebody with some knowledge of the Federation or with access to technology would be able to translate those portions of his diary.

Actually, it makes plenty of sense. You just don't yet know why it does.

And the people who are saying "Gee whiz, surely they could have figured out something as simple as a foreign language' are way underestimating the difficulties in figuring out how to translate another language when the only one in existence (aside from the limited sections of a single document) is English. Different grammar, different verb forms, different sentence structure, different idiom, etc. Don't assume there were bunches of proper nouns which could provide cognates, at least for names, either.

You guys are doing an awful lot of speculating on a very limited information base at the moment.

Just saying.

Weird Harold wrote:
Why does everyone assume Kohdy dates from the time of the Archangels? Kohdy could just as easily be "Son of Zorro" as he could be an original "Zorro." He could have learned Spanish from a parent who spoke Spanish at home out of nostalgia.(SNIP).

Unless he was the son of an Angel or Archangel with an unaltered memory, said parent would have no knowledge of any other language,also, speaking Spanish learned from a parent is one thing. Writing entire journal entries in Spanish implies some study.

You know, given that English is the only language that was supposed to be on Safehold, the mere fact that Kohdy wrote Spanish in his diaries would have rung alarm bells if any "Angel" learned of it. Never mind what he was writing about, just using Spanish would be a "forbidden knowledge" violation.

But of course, Spanish would only be recognizable as forbidden knowledge to someone who already knew about Spanish. To anyone else, Spanish would just look like particularly exotic code. Suspicious perhaps, but not automatically labeled as "forbidden".

Which is basically another example of how trying to forbid knowledge without actually telling what knowledge is actually forbidden is doomed to failure.

Edit: Also, I'm going to have to go with Spanish not being a dead language when the Federation fell and that Kohdy personally knew it. After all, why encode a journal in Spanish? Why not something more obscure or alien to English? Like Russian, or Chinese, or even Navajo?

Perhaps he knew it or learnt it, as some people leanr languages for fun, or to learn more about history or their family history. So he could use it because he would know it already, and wouldnt need to learn another language to encode it in, and wouldnt have to worry about tripping off alarms by higher ups about someone learning a language when the future safehold is english only.

evilauthor wrote:You know, given that English is the only language that was supposed to be on Safehold, the mere fact that Kohdy wrote Spanish in his diaries would have rung alarm bells if any "Angel" learned of it. Never mind what he was writing about, just using Spanish would be a "forbidden knowledge" violation.

But of course, Spanish would only be recognizable as forbidden knowledge to someone who already knew about Spanish. To anyone else, Spanish would just look like particularly exotic code. Suspicious perhaps, but not automatically labeled as "forbidden".

Which is basically another example of how trying to forbid knowledge without actually telling what knowledge is actually forbidden is doomed to failure.

Edit: Also, I'm going to have to go with Spanish not being a dead language when the Federation fell and that Kohdy personally knew it. After all, why encode a journal in Spanish? Why not something more obscure or alien to English? Like Russian, or Chinese, or even Navajo?