No one just dabbles in comparative philology.

As researcher Elspeth Andryan from the Durmand Priory puts it, "No one just dabbles in comparative philology." Yet this is what the game does, for reasons I totally understand, but I am wondering if any tenacious linguists tried to role play some more language into the game, and where I could find their inventions. Thanks!

EDIT: Sorry I should have inserted this link: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Language#Old_Canthan_writing_system

A week has passed, so instead of editing my initial post I'm making a new one.

I've been looking at and into the Old Canthan script. With only 56 words (and ten numbers) there isn't much to tell, apart from many questions, some of which I'll share in the hope there are answers to them.

The known subset of the script looks entirely pictographic and ideographic as prehistoric Chinese writing was but the strokes are already stylized the way Hanzi would be millenia later. By ideographic I mean that most characters are a combination of pictograms that make up a concept, not a combination of a semantic key and a phonetic rebus as most Hanzi are.

Some characters such as face and hand are very straightforward, some are more abstract: the characters for the four elements for instance. Combinations seem to be very free-form, sometimes to the point of fusing characters together, as is the case in the character for elements.

The diagonal stroke for light/sun, which may represent a beam of sunlight, seems to be used in many combinations: a god is a light above the world, monk is man with light, man and woman have light inside their head (unless this is just a facial feature), life is light on top of an unknown pictogram (that is also used by the character for blood but with water on top of it). Because of this I suppose that light also means soul. Are there any clues in the Old Canthan culture that hint at this?

Light/sun is also used more literally, for instance in day which is light in a half frame; the half frame could be a combination of air and earth. Night is sun underneath a flat earth or light beneath a veil or something. Any mythology hint about that? I'm not sure what to make of the characters for sunrise and sunset. Do they use pictograms for East and West? Dark is light in a box... maybe.

I'm done for today. Next post I'll ramble on water, boats, family, professions.

Let me answer in the only way i can.

What?

@"DanAlcedo.3281" said:Let me answer in the only way i can.

What?

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Language#Old_Canthan I Guess

Sorry for making it cryptic, @DanAlcedo.3281 and thank you @mercury ranique.2170 for providing the link I stupidly left out.

The character for water looks like a falling drop, with the pointy end of the stoke up and the bold end down, different from the reversed stroke found in numbers and the up and down characters. It can be found in a few composite characters: junk is drawn as a simple two-mast ship on water (unless the stroke is a keel, some junks have one); boat is a more complex ship with a deck added. Blood is water on top of the mysterious pictogram that life uses too.

Death is the vertically flipped version of that mysterious pictogram, which might just mean life in spite of life being given as that pictogram with light on top of it. The character for necromancer has death completely merged with man contrarily to most other professions where the elements are next to each other, separated or touching.

Assassin and warrior use pictograms for what looks like two daggers and a sword respectively but these are not listed as standalone characters. Lord is an unknown pictogram next to the same sword. Any idea what the first one is? Also, what is the second pictogram in the character for ritualist? Does anybody know why mesmer has the pictogram for earth? Or is it a different pictogram? Man with rage is not a berserker but means vengeance, maybe as in rage against someone?

Up also means yin, and down also means yang, which is the reverse of what Taoism teaches. Does anyone know enough about Cantha to explain this?

Hello ! I'm late I know, but a friend and I started looking deeply into this, creating new logograms and trying to translate the ones we can find in EoD maps

If you're still interested in the topic, let's create a research team