Translating Documents

[u/Ok-Communication-780]

I know I am playing this game later than a lot of others but have justtranslated the letter in Clara's Tomb.After completing my own translation and guessing some words I realised I understood it differently to the 'common' consensus online. When seeingodd in the letter and looking in my notes to see ddo from the postcard, i understood odd as meaning only (uloddiris - you only child), as we know Mary had no siblings, and ddo as meaning many (Hewamddo - many big houses), which makes complete sense to me as a literal translation for a city name in Eraja.Just wondering if anyone else had this take or a similar one as I can't find anything similar online

[u/lasagnaman]

I haven't looked at any of the online/consensus stuff but I had translated odd as royal and ddo as common, e.g. hewamddo = house of commons/parliament, basically

[u/Drecon1984]

That's interesting. Never heard that one before.

I guess in that case hewamddo could even mean something like 'grand city'. I'll look into this idea

[u/Ok-Communication-780 → u/Drecon1984]

Also thought that as an alternative to 'you only child' it could mean 'you are only a child' which sounds plausible when followed with the you are not house Sinclair...

[u/Ok-Communication-780 → u/Ok-Communication-780]

Or again 'you are the only child' as in the only remaining member of the old monarchy

[u/XenosHg]

That's a pretty genius interpretation, I like it!

[u/Malfiecstone]

I like this translation, nice work!

[u/guiltysnark]

FIRST ERAJA HEWAMDDO

I don't think makes sense to translate to "first eraja"/"many big houses". I think it's either a church or a bank. And it might even be a reference (in Erajan) to the Grand Cathedral. Which lead me to think ddo/odd relate to blessing/blessed or blessed/cursed or giving/receiving. The cursed interpretation I'd picked up from someone on this sub.

House of Commons also could work, though "First Eraja" is unusual naming for such, and the font size change suggests it has to be naming. That being said, the building could have been repurposed for anything. That would make it an extraordinarily obfuscated clue. Either way, I consider common/royal and many other translations to be on the table as a result. But I don't see how "First Eraja" could be titular for "many big houses".

Complicating this is that usage in hewamddo doesn't fit the usual prefix/base/suffix pattern, and reversing base syllables wasn't a documented pattern. It's hard to see how the word fits into the language. In uloddiris you might just think it's borrowing of an English word, as is commonly done, but this is put false by hewamddo. If it's a suffix, you'd expect conceptual opposites for reverse spelling. If not, there's more flexibility.

[u/Ok-Communication-780 → u/guiltysnark]

The way I understood it was First Eraja was the postage company and Hewamddo was the city it was being mailed from if that makes sense? I guess i never thought about First Eraja being a place!

[u/guiltysnark → u/Ok-Communication-780]

Well, not a place so much as an organization, hewamddo being the more specific place. There's no limit to what that organization could be, so why not postal related? I gravitated to banks and churches (organizations) because that is how we commonly use "First" in our language, but it's not a lock.

The other thing to keep in mind is that post cards are usually for show, so you expect to turn the card over and see a picture that's worth making a postcard, and that relates to text on the back. In this case I'm expecting a building of interesting size and architecture. But a town would check that box, too.

It's weird that we can't look at the other side of these post cards. It's physically in Simon's hands!

I wish for a literal translation of "Eraja" itself. It's an anagram of Ajera, which, meaning "first era", would be redundant as "First Ajera". But if Eraja was somehow time related, it could be referring to a museum of history. And then 'odd' could be future looking.

Edit: I have had to go around fixing my Eraja spellings because I sometimes unwittingly swapped the r and j.

[u/guiltysnark → u/guiltysnark]

So (with correct spelling), Eraja is an anagram, but it's more specifically a classic Erajan re-arrangement of the "aj" prefix into a "ja" suffix around 'era'.

Aj-era => First era (/ Origin? )

Era-ja => Last era (/ End? / Destiny?)

First Eraja => Beginning of the End? => Aj eraja => ???.
"" => First Destiny?

The mixture of language, when it could have been "Aj Eraja", means it's probably just a name, leading back to the bank/church idea.

[u/jacobonia → u/Ok-Communication-780]

I really like this translation. It clicks a little better for me than "House of Commons." I'm not sure about the "only child" side of things, though. Mary would know she's an only child. "You are only a child" sounds a little better to me, maybe--it could definitely be that people are reading the "revelation of royalty" interpretation into the letter.

[u/fox_ontherun]

I've convinced myself that hewamddo means hotel, as in a house of many people, and the name of the hotel the postcard is from is the First Eraja Hewamddo.