The Official Beginner's Guide to Canthan Language

[Shi Violet]

I've been a long-time browser of the Lore Forums, but never really had a chance to post. Prior to Nightfall's Release, I got to go to the ArenaNet Studios for Press-Day as a representative of GWVault. We were told we could take pictures of anything that was up and share it. When I firest saw this, I instantly thought of the Lore Society. This has been sitting on my hard-drive since then....sorry I didn't have a chance until now to post it.

Here is the Official Beginner's Guide to Canthan, as was tacked up on the wall in A-Net's studios. I've got a pretty beefy camera, hence the external link.



Feel free to use this as a tool or discussion point!

I just noticed that you didn't have the alphabet in the conpendium, feel free to add it!

[Santax]

This is fantastic, thanks Shi ^_^

[Arkhan The Black]

Oh intriguing.

Kinda tricky to make out the translation letters though.

[Quintus Antonius]

Oh thank you for this! Now we can finally translate the stuff found around Cantha. I'm going to stick this.

[Seyfert]

Ooo interesting, thank you for sharing

[Gmr Leon]

You can just make out what some of those translate to..

I don't suppose you saw anything like a guide to the Elonian Alphabet?

Really though, thanks.



If anyone can edit this to make it easier to read that would be great.

[Quintus Antonius]

I cleaned up the text, unfortunantely, the image itself is more or less screwed up by what I did, so I'll just post below what it says:

* = Unknown ("Possible")

Man, Woman, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
7, 8, 9, 10, Light/* ("Stars"), * , * ("Lantern"), Kirin
Tool, Sky, Dark, Hand, Face, Fire, Lord/General, Warrior
City, Daughter, Foot, Admiral, Brother, Sister, * ("Bear"), Son

Air, Friend, * ("Summer"), Crops, Time, Life, * ("Science"), Death
Assassin, Necromancer, Monk, Mesmer, Elementalist, Earth, Water, God
Rage, Blood, * ("Electric"), World/* ("Domain", "Dominance"), Up/Above/Yin, Down/Below/Yang, Night, Day
Midnight, Love, Dance, * ("Murder"), Touch, Boat, Junk, Vengence

That's the best I can do. If anyone else has better text enhancing skills, please, by all means, have a go.

Just some thoughts: "Junk" bears a strong resemblence to the symbol for "Boat", which makes me think it refers to the ship-class junk, rather than the opposite of valuable. Also, "bear" most likely refers to the verb "to bear" rather than the animal. I also notice that there is no symbol for the classes Ritualist or Ranger

[Shi Violet]

I can do better than text enhancing...I can just check out the picture. It compressed for the web, but trust me, the original is much more clear.

They are from left to right, top to bottom:
Man, Woman, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Light/sun, Arms, lantern, kirin, tool, sky, dark, hand, face, fire, lord/general, warrior, city, daugher, foot, animal, brother, sister, bow, son

air, trusted, sunset, crops, tree, life, sunrise, death, assassin, necromancer, monk, mesmer, elementalist, earth, water, god, rage, blood, elements, world/ balance, up/above/yin, down/below/yan, night, day, midnight, love, demon, monster, torch, boat, junk, vengance.

If any of the Lore society would like the bigger, original image, I can e-mail or pm it over. Just let me know!

One last edit: Looking over some of the words, they look more pictographic, such as 'hand,' 'face,' and 'torch.' It's possible that the language may not have a set alphabet, but instead uses icons that resemble the word. Or, this could have been the start of the language and it then developed an alphabet, but kept some of the older words. Just a couple of thoughts.

I didn't see anything (at least, didn't get any pictures) on the Elonian alphabet. It was a bit of a whirlwind day, with only so much I could take in at once!

[Quintus Antonius]

Hey, I didn't do too bad!

[False Visage]

I was going to try this some time, but I'd have to do guess work from the pictures in game. :/

Canthan isn't an alphabet by the way, it's based on Chinese and Korean mostly by the looks of it, and is a glyph system like Hieroglyphics where each symbol represents a concept or object.