Speculating on Sandaria; what happens next (spoiler)

Randomiser wrote:Obviously, Sandaria is feigning growing acceptance of the lies these demon servants of Shan Wei are telling her so she can get out of this execrable cave and back to civilisation where she can blow the whistle on them and, sadly, Nynian to her Sisters. Nynian is going to have to terminate her before she can do too much damage. Time we had one of those!

I don't believe that your scenario is the way the story is going to go. But you could turn out to be prophetic.

We shall see...

Don

Charles86 wrote:

So if sandaria ask to have a written dictionary english-spanish, to compare by herself and make sure that everything translates correctly, she will most probably (99.9% chance) get it wrong, the only person that right now in all of safehold who can do the translation, even if she doesn't speak the language is nimue, the why?, because she lived on earth and know about how different the languages can be, and know that certain expresions can be translated as something that if you make a literal translation wont make sense, this also happens between people from the same language, and if you dont believe just grab a person from the united states, 1 from britain, 1 from canada and 1 from australia, sit them together and enjoy the chaos, with spanish is exactly the same thing.

I agree with everything you've said. Although I'm mono-lingual, myself, I've spent a lot of time on translation efforts. It's part of my religious studies. Just as example, I've taken a Chaldean version of Genesis and, using Strong's Concordance, translated literally word-for-word. The results have been fascinating. And enlightening. Notice that Strong's might have thirty English synonyms for a single Chaldean word. If there were ten synonyms for each word in a ten-word sentence then there are one hundred possible literal translations. Even then, some passages don't make sense in English. It's not uncommon for a verse in the bible to be a pun in, for example, Aramaic. Those are impossible to translate exactly into English because there are no English words that have the same two meaning as some Aramaic pun-words. I understand. But it's only because experts have noted the puns and made notes about them available to me. Something that Sandaria does not have.

Please note that I don't think Sandaria will ask for an English-Spanish dictionary. What I think she will ask for is a translated copy of the Spanish sections of Kohdy's journal. It's just not conceivable otherwise. She's a member if a sect that's been revering Kohdy, and his journal, for eight or nine centuries. She's suddenly privy to information about that journal that stands everything she's believed on its head. I'm certain that she will not take Merlin's word for what's in it. I can not believe that she would change her mind about facts so fundamental without loads of evidence. A translated copy of the journal is the very minimum she will consider.

Now, having said that, another thing I'm certain about is that she and the Sisters of Seijin Kohdy will compare the translation against true copies of the Kohdy journal. It's just inconceivable that she would leave that undone.

Another thing I'm certain of is that Merlin will provide her the best translation he, and OWL, are capable of. One thing that will happen is that Sandaria will find invariant spellings. For example, "Scheuler" will occur in the Spanish journal, and it will occur in the translation. The SSK will note that fact. They will also note the fact that every time Scheuler occurs in the Spanish journal, there is a corresponding occurrence of Scheuler in the translation.

Another thing that I'm certain of is that some words will be translated the same way in both. What I mean to say is that if a Spanish word is used in twenty places in the Spanish journal, then the same English word will be used in some or most of those twenty places in the translation.

What I don't know is whether the She will judge the remainder to be some kind of Shan-wei spawned lie on the part of Merlin.

~Tonto

n7axw wrote:

Out of the Dark was my least favorite Weber so far. I read it once and never bothered to reread.


Yeah...same here.

The plot as you have outline it could have been written. But I think it is so far removed from what we have so far that we have moved from speculation to fan fiction.

I hate to admit it, but I think you're right. Still...why did the author mention that one other person knew of Nimue's existence. Had he not mentioned it, nothing in the plot would have been changed. As one Christian to another, it's something like the one angel, two angel difference at the resurrection in Matthew and John. If Kau-yung's other person died in the blast then his knowledge of Nimue's existence is purely gratuitous. I'm not saying that the author has never written anything gratuitous, I'm just saying...that it niggles the mind.

There is no evidence at all to suggest that Nimue's 750 years in stasis was interrupted.

Please see my response to Charles83 for scenarios that don't require the interruption.

Unless we are anchored in the story we have before us somehow, we are simply free lancing, which of course, we are free to do. But then we are no longer discussing David's story.

I once was required to attend one of those business training sessions that is generally supposed to make the employees more well-rounded and wise. In one particular training session we were trained not to jump to conclusions. What happened is that the instructor gave us a two-paragraph story, and then asked to answer twenty questions. Surprisingly, only two of the questions were true. It's possible that that training session made me more...incredulous than is the norm.

The author hasn't helped me in that respect. Nimue appeared on the cover of the most recent Safehold book. The author stated that, "I don't know where some of the elements of that cover came from." Many people took that to mean that there wouldn't appear a female, red-headed, katana-wielding seijin in the text. Me, I wasn't so sure. It turns out that I was right to be...doubtful. She appeared.

~Tonto

Tonto Silerheels wrote:I hate to admit it, but I think you're right. Still...why did the author mention that one other person knew of Nimue's existence. Had he not mentioned it, nothing in the plot would have been changed. As one Christian to another, it's something like the one angel, two angel difference at the resurrection in Matthew and John. If Kau-yung's other person died in the blast then his knowledge of Nimue's existence is purely gratuitous. I'm not saying that the author has never written anything gratuitous, I'm just saying...that it niggles the mind.

Perhaps this also counts as jumping to conclusions, but the impression I always took away was that the "other person" was Proctor. Given that he was listed as one of the "fallen" archangels in one of the books responsible for forbidden knowledge, (I think...) it would stand to reason that Chihiro had somewhat of a reason to vilify him afterwards. Also, whoever went with the Kau-yung to the meeting would need to be somewhat in a position of seniority to be including in the meeting as someone more than "my aide".

Besides, Proctor obviously knew of the existence of the PICA as he did the hack in the first place, no? Either he died in Alexandria, or died with Kau-yung or he would de facto be a _third_ person who knew of her existence beyond the "other person" that was going to the meeting. Correct?

lyonheart wrote:
Personally, I'd find a discussion including Olivia's new or reinforced religious perspectives due to her own research of OWL's data banks to be fascinating; NTM as the 'queen mother' of the royal inner circle, I think we should be hearing more from her, since her mature perspective could save some grief.


L

Hi Lyonheart,
I have an awful feeling that I've missed something here. Which new or reinforced religious perspectives might you be speaking of?

Flanders wrote:

Tonto Silerheels wrote:I hate to admit it, but I think you're right. Still...why did the author mention that one other person knew of Nimue's existence. Had he not mentioned it, nothing in the plot would have been changed. As one Christian to another, it's something like the one angel, two angel difference at the resurrection in Matthew and John. If Kau-yung's other person died in the blast then his knowledge of Nimue's existence is purely gratuitous. I'm not saying that the author has never written anything gratuitous, I'm just saying...that it niggles the mind.

Perhaps this also counts as jumping to conclusions, but the impression I always took away was that the "other person" was Proctor. Given that he was listed as one of the "fallen" archangels in one of the books responsible for forbidden knowledge, (I think...) it would stand to reason that Chihiro had somewhat of a reason to vilify him afterwards. Also, whoever went with the Kau-yung to the meeting would need to be somewhat in a position of seniority to be including in the meeting as someone more than "my aide".

Besides, Proctor obviously knew of the existence of the PICA as he did the hack in the first place, no? Either he died in Alexandria, or died with Kau-yung or he would de facto be a _third_ person who knew of her existence beyond the "other person" that was going to the meeting. Correct?

All we can really do here is guess... I suspect that Procter died with Pei Shan-wei when the OBS struck the Alexandria Enclave. At the same time I say that, I would have to admit that I have no idea whom Pei Kau-yung was refering to when he talked about that one other person who knew the secret about Nimue.

As sort of a default, I was thinking that it might have been an aide who accompanied him to the meeting, presumably for taking notes. Had this aide normally accompanied him, perhaps it would have been suspicious for him to show up alone. Carrying the logic one step further, perhaps together they mutually agreed that it would be better if no one survived who was in on the secret.

All of this is one big guess that I wouldn't want to place a serious wager on. The question of who that person is does tantalize. I'll go with Tonto that far...

Don

Tonto Silerheels wrote:Charles86 wrote:

So if sandaria ask to have a written dictionary english-spanish, to compare by herself and make sure that everything translates correctly, she will most probably (99.9% chance) get it wrong, the only person that right now in all of safehold who can do the translation, even if she doesn't speak the language is nimue, the why?, because she lived on earth and know about how different the languages can be, and know that certain expresions can be translated as something that if you make a literal translation wont make sense, this also happens between people from the same language, and if you dont believe just grab a person from the united states, 1 from britain, 1 from canada and 1 from australia, sit them together and enjoy the chaos, with spanish is exactly the same thing.

I agree with everything you've said. Although I'm mono-lingual, myself, I've spent a lot of time on translation efforts. It's part of my religious studies. Just as example, I've taken a Chaldean version of Genesis and, using Strong's Concordance, translated literally word-for-word. The results have been fascinating. And enlightening. Notice that Strong's might have thirty English synonyms for a single Chaldean word. If there were ten synonyms for each word in a ten-word sentence then there are one hundred possible literal translations. Even then, some passages don't make sense in English. It's not uncommon for a verse in the bible to be a pun in, for example, Aramaic. Those are impossible to translate exactly into English because there are no English words that have the same two meaning as some Aramaic pun-words. I understand. But it's only because experts have noted the puns and made notes about them available to me. Something that Sandaria does not have.

Please note that I don't think Sandaria will ask for an English-Spanish dictionary. What I think she will ask for is a translated copy of the Spanish sections of Kohdy's journal. It's just not conceivable otherwise. She's a member if a sect that's been revering Kohdy, and his journal, for eight or nine centuries. She's suddenly privy to information about that journal that stands everything she's believed on its head. I'm certain that she will not take Merlin's word for what's in it. I can not believe that she would change her mind about facts so fundamental without loads of evidence. A translated copy of the journal is the very minimum she will consider.

Now, having said that, another thing I'm certain about is that she and the Sisters of Seijin Kohdy will compare the translation against true copies of the Kohdy journal. It's just inconceivable that she would leave that undone.

Another thing I'm certain of is that Merlin will provide her the best translation he, and OWL, are capable of. One thing that will happen is that Sandaria will find invariant spellings. For example, "Scheuler" will occur in the Spanish journal, and it will occur in the translation. The SSK will note that fact. They will also note the fact that every time Scheuler occurs in the Spanish journal, there is a corresponding occurrence of Scheuler in the translation.

Another thing that I'm certain of is that some words will be translated the same way in both. What I mean to say is that if a Spanish word is used in twenty places in the Spanish journal, then the same English word will be used in some or most of those twenty places in the translation.

What I don't know is whether the She will judge the remainder to be some kind of Shan-wei spawned lie on the part of Merlin.

~Tonto

She won't have to ask. As I understand the last snippet, a written copy of the journal, including the parts translated by Owl from Spanish is going to be provided to her. That's what I got out of that exchange between her and Nahrman at the very end.

I think it's probably going to turn out ok. Once she got over being shell shocked over the revelation, she has been showing a quite a bit of mental flexibility.

Don

I just had a thought... Were it to turn out that Sandaria were to have trouble accepting the authenticity of Owl's translation from the Spanish, maybe the thing to do would be to have Owl teach her Spanish... If she has to stay in the cave, that might not be a bad use of her time. It would make more sense than handing her a dictionary and telling her to work it out cold turkey.

Imagine Sandaria reading Cervantes in the original... Boggles the mind!

Don

Randomiser wrote:Obviously, Sandaria is feigning growing acceptance of the lies these demon servants of Shan Wei are telling her so she can get out of this execrable cave and back to civilisation where she can blow the whistle on them ...

A simple question using a verifier would take care of the worries. Of course they could accidentally neglect to think about doing this should that suit the author's purposes.

Tonto Silerheels wrote:n7axw wrote:

What?

So, what are the odds that the demon who defeated Kohdy was Nimue Albin?

~Tonto

The slight problem I see with this is;
1)it is stated quite plainly that Nimue was a tightly held secret and as few people as possible were to know.
2)It would have been a colossal risk to someone who had sacrificed her life in order to alter the history of Safehold at a safe(r) date.
3)Nimue would been have likely been unwilling to go back to sleep and if she did she would remember it(see point 4), and everyone who knew about her PICA was suffering from a slight case of being rather erm dead during the war of the fallen.

and 4th and finally: Only Proctor could have Purged Nimue's memory after she had been activated and then made the modifications to remove the 10 day clock. If Proctor had powered her up he would have realised that the High Speed data port was defective due to his modifications and would have either left an explanation that it was unfixable or he would have fixed it.