Comment on A Letter From Exile

  1. Laura Kaye (laurakaye) Tue 17 Oct 2023 01:14AM UTC

    Victorian lady writing

    Codywan is so good but so TRAGIC. I have cried over Codywan while writing this series more than anyone else.

    (Just wait until I start writing Operation Starbird when I'll be in CODY'S POV to see how these events went down... AND WITH BONUS TRAGIC BLYALA. I'm gonna wreck myself.)

    I'm so glad you appreciated my pun! I have a headcanon that Boba frequently says things in Basic that would be hilarious wordplay and/or dirty jokes in Mando'a, and the rest of the gotra has given up wondering why sometimes Din will just start laughing at some random ordinary thing he said. The House of Sand pun in this I imagine started as one of Boba's jokes and everyone just really liked it, so they made it official.

    Also I love that the Mando'a for "sand" is basically "stabby dirt." Lol. (because kad'la - sharp- is just the adjectival form of "kad" which means "sword.") Mando'a is fun as a conlang because so many of the words are built this way, which means you can construct new words and someone can still figure out pretty easily what you mean.

    I actually translated parts of Obi-Wan's letter into Mando'a and then revised the Basic translation to sound more like Mando'a phrasing, though there are places where the concepts are translated instead - for instance Boba translates the Mando'a "jorcu mhi kartayli kaysh gai sa’ad" (because we know their name as our child) as "because he was ours."

    One extremely minor Mando'a Easter Egg from the main story - when Grogu is using his speech tablet, he asks questions by putting the word "question" in the front of the sentence. This is because he's learning Mando'a and Basic at the same time and communicates in a mixture of the two, and in Mando'a you form a question by putting the word "tion" at the front of a statement.

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