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Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 13 Apr 2015 15:45
by gestaltist
sangi39 wrote:
gestaltist wrote:You make me think maybe I should share my climate maps for the World of Twin Suns...
I can't see any reason why you shouldn't [:)]
I have a few reasons why I shouldn't:
1) I have just barely finished working on it and there are likely to be mistakes (I am checking the climates as I focus on the history of a given region, so it could be months before I review it all)
2) in some places, I have kind of „winged it“ - e.g., I have assigned „tropical monsoon“ to some places that didn’t quite fit as rainforest or savanna despite a complete lack of a monsoon pattern
3) if someone finds a flaw in my process, it would mean a lot of extra work which I am not willing to do :mrgreen:

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 13 Apr 2015 16:12
by sangi39
gestaltist wrote:
sangi39 wrote:
gestaltist wrote:You make me think maybe I should share my climate maps for the World of Twin Suns...
I can't see any reason why you shouldn't [:)]
I have a few reasons why I shouldn't:
1) I have just barely finished working on it and there are likely to be mistakes (I am checking the climates as I focus on the history of a given region, so it could be months before I review it all)
2) in some places, I have kind of „winged it“ - e.g., I have assigned „tropical monsoon“ to some places that didn’t quite fit as rainforest or savanna despite a complete lack of a monsoon pattern
3) if someone finds a flaw in my process, it would mean a lot of extra work which I am not willing to do :mrgreen:
Well one reason that I think overrides all of those is "feedback". While there might be mistakes that you haven't spotted yet, and aren't ready/willing to put any work into correcting, then meh, you don't have to just yet. You've said that you're reviewing it region by region as you focus in on history, so any review of climate might be months down the line, but if you post what you have so far, then you'll have a basic idea of what needs reviewing when it eventually comes to it.

That's one of the reasons that I posted what I had even though I was only halfway through certain stages. The more feedback I got earlier on, the more I could see, later on, of what had gone in the wrong direction. I didn't necessarily correct it right away, but the basis for those corrections was there for me when I needed it [:)]

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 15 Apr 2015 08:53
by gestaltist
Just dropping by to say that you convinced me. I am going to share my climate maps in my thread over here: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=4636. Or perhaps I will start a new thread for them.

However, I have already discovered some inconsistencies when I reviewed them in some alternative projections. I will share the maps with you when these are corrected.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 21 Apr 2015 18:39
by sangi39
So I thought I'd get back into this quite slowly, first by naming places. Let's start with something we already know, the names of continents:

Image

Green - Sirden, home to the Kusan Empire and birthplace of the human species
Blue - Arenda
Yellow - Konyur
Orange - Hungas
Red - Mistaya, occasionally referred to as "The Land of the Wolf", after the Kovur inhabitants which originally evolved there
Purple - Velkasta, referred to as "The Frozen Twins" or "The Twins of the South".

The brown area is known in Classical Kusan as "The Great Bridge". Generally speaking it's considered a part of Sirden, but others consider it a part of Arenda instead.

I think next up I might look at naming islands and island chains, as well as oceans. These will likely have literal translations if the name derives from a Classical Kusan term, or a Kusanic term in a related language.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 21 Apr 2015 19:09
by sangi39
So quickly onto oceans:

Image

1 - The Northern Ocean
2 - The Dagger Ocean
3 - The Sunrise Ocean, occasionally referred to as "The Devoured Ocean" or "The Encircled Ocean "by some later cartographers.
4 - The Great (Eastern) Ocean
5 - The (Southern) Sunset Ocean
6 - The Northern Sunset Ocean

The Great Eastern Ocean refers specifically to a single ocean, although others simply refer to it as the Great Ocean, a term which is also applied to the entirely of Yantas' oceans. As a result, the term "Great Ocean" can be somewhat ambiguous, with "Eastern" being used as a method of disambiguation.

The Sunset Ocean refers to both the Southern Sunset Ocean and Northern Sunset Ocean as a combined body of water (usually by those who do not consider the Northern Sunset Ocean to be a distinct ocean), as well as referring to just the Southern Sunset Ocean (usually by those who do consider the Northern Sunset Ocean a distinct ocean). The term "Southern Sunset Ocean" is thus used as a method of disambiguation.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 10 Sep 2015 17:44
by sangi39
Right, finally, names for islands:

Sirden

Image

Yellow - The Sword Islands
Red - Greater and Lesser Hwarza
Purple - Palvo Island (the Shield of the Sun)
Grey - Gadar Island
Brown - The Ninda Islands
Orange - The Bereka Islands (The Bow Islands)
Pink - The Luvijasa Islands
Black - Hidira Island
White - Syavan Island
Blue - Lukorda Island

The eastern island of the Sword Islands is known mostly as the Hilt Island.



The Bridge

Image

Red - The Homon Islands (The Needle Islands)
Grey - Kowtir Island (The Northern Step)
Yellow - Nyerpaka Island (The Pin)
Green - Kirunal Island (The Western Step)
Purple - Jargovi Island (The Southern Step)
Black - The Lesser Stepping Stones

Kowtir, Nyerpaka, Kirunal and Jargovi make up the Greater Stepping Stones, occasionally known simply as the Great Steps or the Great Stones.

This is where we see the blur between exactly what areas are part of the bridge. From a linguistic viewpoint, the Lesser and Greater Stepping Stones belong to Sirden, since the populations of those islands speak Sirdic languages. However, they are considered by geographers, cartographers and the like to belong to the Bridge, as the name suggests.



Arenda

Image

Red - The Eneksama Islands
Green - Rowmiki Island
Brown - Pyalta Island
Black - Misinda Island



Konyur

Image

Orange - Gimalva Island
Black - Lesser Cisala
Brown - Greater Cisala
Orange - Virama Island
Green - Lenkasa Island
White - Zyarga Island

Virama, Lenkasa and Zyarga make up the Western Lupine Islands, within the Lupine Strait between Konyur and Hungas. This area is so named due to the increasing occurrence of Kovur outposts, not because the majority of the population is Kovur.



Hungas

Image

Yellow - Kyalsur Island
Red - Moryako Island
Green - Kasima Isle
Grey - Lyakar Isle
Black - The Talon Isles

Kyalsur and Moryako make up the Eastern Lupine Islands, although Moryako doesn't fall within the Lupine Strait.



Mistaya

Image

Purple - Reman Isle
Green - Wolf Isle



Velkasta

Image

Red - Alpa Isle
Green - Velki Island
Orange - Tundara Isle
Grey - Jagan Isle
Brown - Bazar Isle
Blue - Porgin Isle
White - The Dagger Isles




"Island", "Islands", "Isle" and "Isles" indicate a difference in how the area was named. Names which are derived from native terms take "Island" and "Islands" while names which were given by explorers take "Isle" and "Isles". "Island" is typically dropped in relation to islands with Sirdic-speaking populations but is retained elsewhere, e.g. Palvo Island can be referred to simply as Palvo, but Gadar Island will always be referred to as Gadar Island.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 11 Sep 2015 02:12
by shimobaatar
sangi39 wrote:"Island", "Islands", "Isle" and "Isles" indicate a difference in how the area was named. Names which are derived from native terms take "Island" and "Islands" while names which were given by explorers take "Isle" and "Isles". "Island" is typically dropped in relation to islands with Sirdic-speaking populations but is retained elsewhere, e.g. Palvo Island can be referred to simply as Palvo, but Gadar Island will always be referred to as Gadar Island.
Lovely! That's a really cool distinction to make.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 11 Sep 2015 12:08
by sangi39
shimobaatar wrote:
sangi39 wrote:"Island", "Islands", "Isle" and "Isles" indicate a difference in how the area was named. Names which are derived from native terms take "Island" and "Islands" while names which were given by explorers take "Isle" and "Isles". "Island" is typically dropped in relation to islands with Sirdic-speaking populations but is retained elsewhere, e.g. Palvo Island can be referred to simply as Palvo, but Gadar Island will always be referred to as Gadar Island.
Lovely! That's a really cool distinction to make.
It's supposed to be kind of historical as well, and kind of shows the main cultural viewpoint I'll be dealing with as I start moving through history. Isles are either uninhabited or not inhabited by humans (and by the Kovur instead). They might have a "native" name, either given to them by a nearby human culture (the Dagger Islands, for example, might have a Velkastan name, but no-one lives there), or they might have a Kovur name (Wolf Island, for example, is home to one of the first Kovur populations encountered by the post-Kusan Empire explorers of the 16th Century AD. It has a native Kovur name, but it was given a different name by explorers).

The dropping of "Island" shows that the Sirdic languages, and the Kusanic languages within them especially, are spoken by the main cultural group I want to deal with (and have wanted to deal with since I started work on Classical Kusan), or at least that they're nearby. The Kusan Empire, for example, is spoken on Palvo, the Hwarza Islands and the coastal regions around about there.

What I want to move onto next is naming seas and mountain ranges, and then possibly deserts and rainforests, although since I haven't worked on climate much, the actual areas that those names apply to might change a little bit.

I might also go back and try to show what the Classical Kusan versions of names given to islands might be, e.g. Wolf Island might be Vajen Jenki (wolf-PL-GEN island, Island of Wolves) while The Sword Islands might natively be known as Rudalgan Hënkunyë (sword-GEN island.COL).

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 12 Sep 2015 03:50
by shimobaatar
sangi39 wrote: It's supposed to be kind of historical as well, and kind of shows the main cultural viewpoint I'll be dealing with as I start moving through history. Isles are either uninhabited or not inhabited by humans (and by the Kovur instead). They might have a "native" name, either given to them by a nearby human culture (the Dagger Islands, for example, might have a Velkastan name, but no-one lives there), or they might have a Kovur name (Wolf Island, for example, is home to one of the first Kovur populations encountered by the post-Kusan Empire explorers of the 16th Century AD. It has a native Kovur name, but it was given a different name by explorers).
When you say that "no-one lives there", do I understand correctly that you mean no humans live there?

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 12 Sep 2015 17:04
by sangi39
shimobaatar wrote:
sangi39 wrote: It's supposed to be kind of historical as well, and kind of shows the main cultural viewpoint I'll be dealing with as I start moving through history. Isles are either uninhabited or not inhabited by humans (and by the Kovur instead). They might have a "native" name, either given to them by a nearby human culture (the Dagger Islands, for example, might have a Velkastan name, but no-one lives there), or they might have a Kovur name (Wolf Island, for example, is home to one of the first Kovur populations encountered by the post-Kusan Empire explorers of the 16th Century AD. It has a native Kovur name, but it was given a different name by explorers).
When you say that "no-one lives there", do I understand correctly that you mean no humans live there?
In relation to the Dagger Islands "no-one" meant neither human nor Kovur [:)]

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 26 Sep 2015 21:59
by sangi39
This is just a start on naming mountain ranges, which I'm finding pretty tricky.

First, I've tried to look at which mountain ranges which I initially thought would be separate might actually form longer ranges:

Image

The mountain range in marked in red, known as the Spine of The World, is formed as the result of a number of on-going tectonic collisions, both continental-continental and continental-oceanic. Similarly, the mountain range marked in yellow (the Great Kovur Range) is the result of on-going tectonic activity, but also includes a smaller mountain range which is no longer tectonically active.

These two large mountain ranges are the largest on Yantas, with other smaller mountain ranges resulting from on-going activity marked in black (the Konyur Range), brown (the Lesic Range) and purple (the Greater Velkastan Range). A number of "lesser" mountain ranges (in terms of altitude) are much older and are no longer tectonically active. These are marked in orange, white (the Skawlan Range), pink (the Lesser Velkastan Range) and blue (the Mesit Range).

The naming of the larger ranges is obviously fairly lazy, but I'm hoping to get past that once I start trying to name smaller divisions of those ranges.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 28 Sep 2015 00:04
by shimobaatar
The map, names, and descriptions all look excellent to me. [:D]

One question, though, if you wouldn't mind my asking:
sangi39 wrote: The naming of the larger ranges is obviously fairly lazy, but I'm hoping to get past that once I start trying to name smaller divisions of those ranges.
What do you mean by this?

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 29 Sep 2015 00:45
by sangi39
shimobaatar wrote:The map, names, and descriptions all look excellent to me. [:D]

One question, though, if you wouldn't mind my asking:
sangi39 wrote: The naming of the larger ranges is obviously fairly lazy, but I'm hoping to get past that once I start trying to name smaller divisions of those ranges.
What do you mean by this?
The major ranges are mostly named after the major language group in that area (Mesit, Lesic and Skawlan), the continent their on (Konyur and Velkastan) or the non-human species which lives around those mountains (Kovur).

What I want to do when I start naming the smaller divisions of those ranges, though, is to move away from that and use names that are more independent of stuff like that. So, for example, if we assume that the Alpide Belt of Earth was instead named something like the Eurasian Range, in a manner similar to the Konyur Range of Yantas. Its name here is related to the continent it's found in. However, the subdivisions of the Alpide (Eurasian) Belt are named things like the Alps (with an uncertain(?) etymology, either from a word meaning "hill" or "white), the Carpathians (with a similarly uncertain etymology, possibly going back to a word meaning "cliff" or "rock"), the Pyrenees (named after a princess of classical Greek mythology) and the Himalayas (from a Sanskrit word meaning "abode of snow").

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 29 Sep 2015 01:13
by shimobaatar
sangi39 wrote: The major ranges are mostly named after the major language group in that area (Mesit, Lesic and Skawlan), the continent their on (Konyur and Velkastan) or the non-human species which lives around those mountains (Kovur).

What I want to do when I start naming the smaller divisions of those ranges, though, is to move away from that and use names that are more independent of stuff like that. So, for example, if we assume that the Alpide Belt of Earth was instead named something like the Eurasian Range, in a manner similar to the Konyur Range of Yantas. Its name here is related to the continent it's found in. However, the subdivisions of the Alpide (Eurasian) Belt are named things like the Alps (with an uncertain(?) etymology, either from a word meaning "hill" or "white), the Carpathians (with a similarly uncertain etymology, possibly going back to a word meaning "cliff" or "rock"), the Pyrenees (named after a princess of classical Greek mythology) and the Himalayas (from a Sanskrit word meaning "abode of snow").
Ah, thanks for the clarification, and I actually wasn't aware that the Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, and Himalayas are considered to be part of a larger range! In any case, I definitely agree that dividing the larger ranges up a bit will make naming mountains and groups of mountains much easier. Best of luck! [:D]

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 29 Sep 2015 01:59
by Keenir
shimobaatar wrote:Ah, thanks for the clarification, and I actually wasn't aware that the Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, and Himalayas are considered to be part of a larger range!
that's news to me.

I knew the Himalayas were from the collision with India...but I can't see how that caused the Alps.. (thought that was from Africa striking Europe)

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 29 Sep 2015 02:21
by shimobaatar
I don't know much about mountains and plate tectonics and all that, but this page and this page seem to indicate that this larger range is made up of mountains created not by a single collision of two plates, but apparently by a series of side-by-side ongoing collisions between multiple plates in the south and a single plate in the north starting at around the same time, (pre)historically. I could be interpreting the content of those pages incorrectly, though, since, as I said, I know very little about this.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 06 Nov 2015 15:32
by sangi39
I'm slowly working on updating how the mountainous regions of Yantas appear on the map. At the moment I'm trying this out:

Image

Mountainous regions about 2000m are marked out with black, peak-like shapes while areas between about 1000-2000m are marked out in with light green diagonal lines. I'm not quite sure how I'll mark out plateaus within these height boundaries, but I'll figure something out.

The main idea here is to clearly mark out mountainous regions, but without being much more complex than I feel like I need to be at this scale. More local maps will likely be filled out as I go, but for now I this this will roughly do.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 06 Dec 2015 11:43
by Darvince
I like that method, although how do you make it not be so tedious to do? Do you have a brush that you made to paint these mountains on?

For my own paper worldbuilding once I get to the stage where I'm doing elevation I'll mark out mountains by just using peak symbols of varying sizes to represent their heights (either from each other, or from the ground below). This system seems to be a bit tricky for plateaus though.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 06 Dec 2015 18:28
by sangi39
Darvince wrote:I like that method, although how do you make it not be so tedious to do? Do you have a brush that you made to paint these mountains on?

For my own paper worldbuilding once I get to the stage where I'm doing elevation I'll mark out mountains by just using peak symbols of varying sizes to represent their heights (either from each other, or from the ground below). This system seems to be a bit tricky for plateaus though.
Honestly, I've done almost nothing on Yantas in aaages (either conworlding on conlanging). They've both kind of slipped away from me the last couple of months and I think my activity on the board in general has dropped (I've only posted 19 times since November 1st).

As for it being tedious, yeah, it really is. GIMPs not been working properly for me for a while (I had some issues with my laptop a while back. I mean, it could probably be sorted fairly easily by simply reinstalling it, but whatever), so I've been working in MSPaint for the last however long. So this is basically a pixel-by-pixel effort [:P]

As for representing plateaus, yeah, that is kind of tricky. At the moment I'm just leaving gaps within the mountainous areas to represent them, but that's obviously ambiguous. I have a couple of ideas for them, this one's the one I was thinking of most when I stopped working on it last:

Image

The plateaus and marked in a kind of dark grey. They're pretty hard to see, but I assume that's a colour issue.

Re: Yantas - Birth of a New World

Posted: 11 Jan 2016 20:35
by sangi39
So, I decided to have a bit of a go at a calendar, mostly for the Kusan Empire, but the development noted here could also mirror its in-world history, so neighbouring groups might employ similar calendars. All mention of "days" are a day on Yantas, which is 24hrs 40mins long. All mention of "years" are given as one orbit of Yantas around its sun.

So, let's start with the basics.

1) Yantas orbits its sun, Italva, once every 386.925 days.
2) Yantas has two moons, Kadyura and Hwestun.
3) Hwestun goes from one full moon to the next every 46.500 days (8.321 cycles per year)
4) Kadyura goes from one full moon to the next every 11.916 days (32.471 cycles per year, or 3.902 cycles for each of Hwestun's)

A year is divided into Long Months, consisting of alternating lengths of 46 and 47 days, coinciding with the Full Hwestun Cycle (FHC).

A year is also divided into Short Months, consisting of fixed periods of 12 days, which used to coincide with the Full Kadyura Cycle (FKC) but was, at some point in the past, fixed, rather that changing the length of the Short Month 3 times a year to match up with the FKC.

New Year's Day falls on the first day of a Long Month after the Winter Solstice.

Just to throw some temporary names out there for looking at it more easily:

Lirgat - 46 days (contains New Year's Day)
Vilgat - 47 days
Hargat - 46 days
Ledegat - 47 days
Tibegat - 46 days
Singat - 47 days
Jeligat - 46 days
Humugat - 47 days

The intercalary months are named Jeligat II and Humugat II depending on how many days they contain (46 and 47 respectively). If a leap year contained Jeligat II, the next one will contain Humugat II, the next after that Jeligat II and so on and so on.

A result of this is that a year will either be 372 days long (known as a Short Year) or 418/419 years (known as a Long Year).

The Winter Solstice will fall within Humugat during a Short Year and either Jeligat II or Humugat II during a Long Year.

Long Years (so far as I've worked it out so far) occur every 3 years, although I suspect that there will be exceptions to this rule, but I haven't quite worked them out yet.

Since the Short Months are fixed at 12 days long, the day on which New Year's Day falls within the Short Month changes each year (similar to the way the day of the week on which New Year's Day fall in the Gregorian Calendar also changes).



Several rest days are observed within the official Imperial Calendar. The days on which either moon was full are considered rest days as are the days immediately before and after New Year's Day (along with New Year's Day known as the New Year's Triad). The Winter Solstice is also a recognised rest day, as is the Summer Solstice, but only those days specifically.

The Imperial Calendar makes no allowances for additional rest days should, for example, a full Kadyura and a full Hwestun coincide on the same day, but where rest days accumulated one after the other, each one was observed in full and often resulted in larger celebrations. (one thing that, I think, is possible, is for the New Year's Triad, a full Kadyura and the Winter Solstice to all occur on separate days, resulting in a 5-day-long period of rest).

Several additional rest days are observed, notably the Feast of Sodyënar, the chief deity within the Kusan pantheon, celebrated on the second day of Hargat, and the Salute to the Emperor, celebrated originally on the day of either the Emperor's birth or his rise to power, but eventually fixed on the second day of Singat.



There is also a cycle of 9 years, named after the 9 major deities of the pantheon. Combine this with a tradition of numerology, and some people believe that it's possible to predict the future, to a degree, and there is a tradition of spiritual advisers to the Emperor who counsel him on matters of war, festivals and the like based on this tradition.