#we could even go for some quen lore with alva

[angst-eater]

We need characters DLCs for Horizon Forbidden West, even short ones. Imagine reliving Hekarro’s warrior days and how he became chief of the Tenakth. Fighting at Barren Light with Kotallo only to face betrayal and exile, and how he became Marshal. Fashav’s glorious days at Meridian and his hunt for peace until he’s caught by the Tenakth. 

#horizon forbidden west #hekarro #kotallo #fashav #i just want more of them #we could even go for some quen lore with alva

[pikapeppa]

re: your post about quen glyphs... it's possible that the old focuses they found in the delta were formatted to work w/ simplified chinese characters... after all, the focuses are pre-zero dawn and would have been formatted to whatever the local ppl used, right? its even possible that being able to write and speak simplified chinese in addition to any other languages that a focus could be formatted to might be something on the diviners examinations alva talks about... (also the fascinating implications that the quen might have had the only record of other languages existing pre-apollo)

I'M SO SORRY IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO REPLY TO THIS. But I wanted to do it when I had time and brainpower to fully think it through 😂

So this ask is in relation to my tags on this gorgeous photo, where I remarked that it's weird for this beautiful Quen person to be carrying a tablet with what look like nonsense glyphs, when we know canonically that the Quen read and write English in the Roman alphabet. This is in contrast with the Oseram, for instance, who read and write English in their own original glyph system (as evidenced by Erend having trouble learning to read the Old Ones' glyphs).

For the purposes of this reply, I'm going to focus on Mandarin and Cantonese as the spoken forms of "Chinese" since they're the most familiar Chinese languages, and since Mandarin is considered the "standard" Chinese language. Before I start, I should also point out that there is no such thing as spoken simplified Chinese; "simplified Chinese" refers to a variation of written Chinese that's usually used to transcribe the spoken language of Mandarin, whereas "traditional Chinese" refers to the written variation of Chinese that's usually used to transcribe Cantonese.

ALSO, STRAP IN, BECAUSE WE'RE GOING TO GET A LITTLE NERDY HERE. I'm a speech-language pathologist by day (smut writer by night! 👹) and my favourite class in undergrad was a course about writing systems of the world, so I'm just giving advance warning that YOU ASKED FOR THIS. 😂😂😂

Okay, diving in now! That's a really good point re: the Focuses in the Great Delta -- it would make sense for many of the Focuses there to be set to display in Mandarin and/or Cantonese, and thus for the "glyph system" to be simplified or traditional Chinese characters, respectively. But if we're sticking to canon lore, the Quen don't speak other languages. There is a datapoint from Alva about this where she expresses some (VERY ACCURATE AND ADORABLE) disgust at Ted Faro for the loss of all languages except the Zero Dawn "default" language of English. If we're taking this at face value (and I see no reason why Alva would lie about this in her notes), then even if the Focuses were formatted to display Chinese characters, the Quen wouldn't be able to read them. This would also explain why being a Diviner is a rare and highly-prized role: it would probably be rare for the Focuses they found to be set in English, and those English Focuses would be even more prized and revered since they're interpretable.

Now, we might wonder why the Quen wouldn't be able to learn to speak Mandarin or Cantonese by deciphering the glyphs on a Chinese-formatted Focus. The problem is that the Quen have no spoken language to map the Chinese characters onto. Chinese characters are not an alphabet, and thus there's no one-to-one correspondence between a character and a sound or a sequence of sounds; instead, Chinese characters are largely morphographic, meaning they represent a unit of meaning rather than a sound or a sequence of sounds. The Quen might be able to figure out what some Chinese characters represent by comparing a single piece of text that's written both in Chinese and English, but they would not be able to figure out what the Chinese characters sound like.

Ah, but you might be wondering if the Quen could have figured out how to speak Mandarin/Cantonese by listening to audiorecordings or holovids in Mandarin/Cantonese and mapping them to transcripts written in Chinese, then comparing those Chinese transcripts to English transcripts of the same text? (Wait, YOU'RE NOT WONDERING THAT? SERIOUSLY?? I'm teasing. I'm clearly overthinking this.) I mean, yes, they could, but that would require you to have a piece of text in both English and Chinese that also has a corresponding holovid/audiorecording in Mandarin/Cantonese for that text, which... I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but that seems like a pretty big ask. Then again, if the Focuses have like a library of C-dramas with subtitles, then that could work???

But this brings me back to Alva's datapoint again. If all of the Diviners learned Mandarin/Cantonese for their exams, either Alva is being secretive about this in her own notes (seems implausible to me, she is not a disingenuous person), OR there is a faction of Quen Diviners above Alva's proverbial "pay grade" who are working on that. So that could be an interesting avenue for someone to explore in fic! Actually, the more I think about it, the more plausible it seems that there is some "upper class" of Diviners who are secretly working on restoring old languages and who get extra perks from the Imperial family for interpreting the most valuable texts. Okay, you got me, you talked me into it LOL.

But let's return now to my original cheeky remark re: the Quen glyphs as pictured in the game. This is a more detailed image of some Quen glyphs in Burning Shores:

Now, we can't say whether this piece of text is meant to be read top to bottom or whether it was pinned to the post sideways, but it looks to me from the brackets and the red lines (likely underlines) that it's posted sideways and is meant to be read either right-to-left or left-to-right. This does not look like Chinese characters, either simplified or traditional. On a superficial inspection, it looks to me more like the Tibetan syllabary, or maybe the Hebrew abjad, without actually being either of those. In the image I referred to at the beginning of this post, the glyphs look more like the Arabic abjad as it would be used to transcribe Farsi. In other words, the Quen glyphs as pictured in the DLC alone are inconsistent.

To be perfectly honest, I think that these Quen glyphs are a "game-ism": one of those things that's a visual element in the game that actually doesn't match up with the lore, similar to how Grudda is canonically from the Desert Clan but has Lowland tattoos. (If you've never noticed this, I implore you to use tearblast arrows to blow off all his armour until he's naked down to his underoos the next time you play LOL. Drakka would greatly approve.)

In short, I still adhere to the idea that the general Quen population read and write in English using the Roman alphabet, and that the Quen glyphs pictured in these images are visual nonsense (NO OFFENSE). If there are any Quen who speak and read in other languages, it would most likely be a secret faction of Diviners that Alva doesn't know about.

I hope this answer was satisfying and not fucking boring as hell BAHAHAH. Thank you for making me think about this, though! It also reminds of a mini-rant I have about Hekarro wanting the Tenakth to learn Carja glyphs that I should find some time to write out!

If anyone has further thoughts about this, feel free to comment/reblob/send me an ask or a message or whatever! ❤ Also, forgive any typos, it's past 1AM when I'm writing this LMAO.

-- much love from your friendly neighbourhood Pika xoxo

#horizon forbidden west #hfw #horizon burning shores #burning shores spoilers #horizon meta #is that a thing? IT IS NOW #pikapeppa talks #quen #alva #alva hfw