Private Sithly Secrets

[Naestra]

“I suppose you have a point there.” She said in concession. Not all races had hundreds of years of life to spare. Sephi such as herself lived an average of 200 years, with the upper limit being around 400. She had time to spend, time that she could use to more deeply understand things. She supposed if he only had a century at best, she could hardly blame him for using those shortcuts that she found to make things incomplete.

They would go around the building itself for a little while, checking each obelisk and documenting the runes it had on his datapad and her notebook. Each one had unique arrangements of the same runes. Some recognized as words when strung together, but still not decipherable yet.

“Okay. So. We’ve seen a few repeating patterns in the writing. What does that tell us about the language?” She quizzed, wondering if he would know.

 

[Anen]

He nodded again, "I've probably only got a hundred and seventy if I'm lucky. Probably ways to extend that for me, but I don't plan on falling into that trap." He was nearly certain something like that was how his father fell. He had always been growing in power, but those who truly knew him, knew it was about more than just craving power. He did crave power. But Anen believed it was about fear.

Their continued progress was harboring relatively minimal results, but something, "Could be a title, or ritualistic reason. Like a blessing or curse." he offered frowning at the datapad and messing with the information a bit, "Written language decryption just...really isn't my area of expertise." Everyone had to have flaws, this was just one of his. There were only two things he could truly be called a master of, medical/biological sciences, and shapeshifting. The skill in the latter of which was strongly related to his skill in the former.

Naestra

 

[Naestra]

She nodded, and let the subject go. She still believed that it was best to take one’s time. But his point that not everyone had that kind of time was one she couldn’t contest, and acknowledged as true.

“Could be. But I’m aiming for something more related to the language itself. What I was going to say is that it indicates an alphabetical structure, so these aren’t hieroglyphs. So a string of letters forms a word and that word represents an idea, rather than an ideogram depicting a concept that is then given a word associated with it.” She explained with a smile. She loved this kind of study. It was always fascinating to learn new things, languages or facts. She was a student to the core and her excitement about learning more was palpable.

Perhaps not shared by him. But she hoped that this was at least stimulating. She didn’t want to bore the poor Padawan.

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Anen

 

[Anen]

He frowned listening and looking back at the datapad. "Why can't it be that these are forming phrases, rather than words?" Anen questioned uncertainly looking them over in more detail. He wasn't entirely sure he'd be able to tell the difference regardless. He supposed it could be that there were repeating words, rather than repeating phrases. That was probably a lot easier to explain.

 

[Naestra]

“Because repeating phrases aren’t as common as repeating words. Easiest way to spot them is the use of conjunctions.” She explained, pointing out A grouping of four runes that always appeared in the same order, and appeared numerous times throughout each obelisk, sometimes within only one word of each other. “I’d bet you anything this here is a conjuction. Like “and”, “or”, or “but”. If it was a repeated phrase it wouldn’t appear so frequently.”

 

[Anen]

Anen tilted his head looking them over then nodding, humming an acknowledgement, "That's something at least. Though I'm not sure what we can do with that." he admitted frowning, "I still don't understand what any of this could really mean. Even if we could narrow down which conjunction it was. It's still not much to work with unless we know the nouns or verbs."

Naestra

 

[Naestra]

“It’s not much on its own, but every piece to the puzzle counts. And an important piece this is. Because this will help us get a grasp of their sentence structure. And if we can figure out how their sentences are structured by comparing it to similar languages, preferably direct descendant languages in a similar geographical location, then we can identify which words are nouns and verbs more easily. And then we work from there.” She told him with glee, excitement in her eyes at having made even this small amount of progress. “But ultimately this is something that will take a long time to do. I’m not sure we’re going to find many other things in the writing just by looking. So we’ve done just about everything we can with what we have so far. This is something I will have to come back to later. So… now I think we should head in. If only to alleviate your boredom and relieve you of the agony of hearing me talk about the intricacies of deciphering language.”

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Anen