Well, no, it's not so much like that: I think there's a way in which that text wants to construct you as an insider, and this one--by the end, anyway-constructs us "earthlings" as outsiders. Which is frustrating, I know, and I totally embrase people like aesc and anyone else who wants to declare themselves insiders/Lanteans again. But the story for me closes with that sense of Atlantis receding away from us "earth-bound" readers: I was calling it in beta a "textual fade-to-black."
*pouts* What ratcreature said, but it's still really cool. I am curious as to where/how you figured out all those characters for it, though. Were those taken from the show somewhere, or did you or someone else make them up? (As I write this, I realize I could be admitting that I've completely missed something about SGA. Ack.)
The Tao of Rodney has a few shots where a bunch of text written in Ancient-ese is prominently displayed (there's probably like 50 billion other epsiodes in either SGA or SG-1 that have them, but that's the episode I watched most recently). In addition, this being the internet, and thus full of nitpicky nerds, the wikipedia article on the Ancients includes their full alphabet.
Oh, I can't take any credit for THAT; I mean, that's canon Ancient! There are several different Stargate and SGA fonts that fans have made based on the languages we are shown in canon: there's several versions of Ancient, and there's the gate symbols, and all sorts of other cool things! One is called "Times New Ancient"--hee!--though that's not the one I used. *looks through fontbook.* I THINK it's ancient handwriting, though I'm not sure: there's literally ten of them. Probably more, but I have about ten!
Awesome. I knew they'd done at least a partial alphabet because I'd seen the lettering in the show, you know? But I hadn't realized that they'd actually done the whole shebang. Fabulous.
funnily enough, even though I am ususally in any given room at any given time the most curious and nosy person, and even though I used to get very easily frustrated by the mere idea of information which exists out of my reach, I have not one second really yearned for the meaning of that last bit. It performed beautifully as the inaccessible thing it was, the "gone native"-ness of it was so clear and so necessary, and it didn't bother me one sec.
I figured maybe I've grown up a bit, without knowing it. :)
I'll tell you, it takes a LOT to learn to live with undecidability: it's taken me years of work, and a lot more personal security than I had when I was younger, to appreciate indeterminability, unknowability, paradox! It is NOT in general a fannish quality: we are the translators, the delvers, the nitpickers, the screenshot-studiers. I mean, I get that, and my beta Terri SAID that people were going to want to know what it said, and I kept saying, I know, I know: But you don't get to! That's what it's meant to SHOW. It's staging that "beyond reachness!"
Of course we don't get to, because we, in this scenario, are the children of the Terrans. And then later (now, right away, omg the next day), we can in other works like aesc's understand and translate and discuss (create, show, tell of) other bits of Lantean and Pegasus lit/oral tradition... But the story needs this bit to be what it is, sheer alien opacity. It wouldn't work nearly as well without it.
You're right though, I think, that it takes time and personal security to accept that some things are unknownable. I'd never just thought of it in those terms.. but yes.
It did for ME anyway. I was--I mean, come on, we're the A-students and the Type-As, so many of us, and I used to be SO FRUSTRATED by, like, modern art and Samuel Beckett and you know: art that requires you to feel impatience as PART OF THE WORK. Like--I didn't get that, that a writer can strategically EMPLOY your boredom or your sense of anxiety: that a text can CREATE anxiety by what it refuses you, whether it be David Lynch or whatever. It literally did take me years to be like, *breath*: OK! It's not me! I'm supposed to be confused and frustrated here! I'm supposed to feel alienated or cut off, etc. I had to be pretty confident before I could allow myself to feel confused and even enjoy it. *G*
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*feels cheated*
I somehow expected it to be more like the Elf languages and scripts in LOTR.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterans#Language_and_writing_system
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I figured maybe I've grown up a bit, without knowing it. :)
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You're right though, I think, that it takes time and personal security to accept that some things are unknownable. I'd never just thought of it in those terms.. but yes.
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