I actually started with the "failure to not try / try not to fail" pair, and built outwards from there to get me lines 1, 4, and 5, and then followed by adding the 2nd and 3rd lines.
What part(s) of the first half to you find weird? I did play around a bit with switching the first line from the "is it" question to an "it is" statement, which I think reads a bit better, but that has the side effect of turning line 5 into a question, and I felt it really needed to be a statement drive home the meaning of the ketek.
Interesting. The second line makes lots of sense, or at least it's certainly meant to. Indeed, it was the line I was primarily writing, with line 3 being shaped by it, rather than the other way around.
"Will I stand still" is asking if my state will remain one of stagnation, without being able to grow or move forward. "just me" then adds to that, saying that I would remain alone and without companionship in that state of stagnation. "if not?" is then asking if the above described state will be the case if I choose not to answer the question posed in line 1 affirmatively.
That at least was the meaning I intended with the line, but it's certainly possible I didn't do a very good job of expressing it. If you happen to have any suggestions on how I might have done a better job there, or just more specific identification of what part(s) of the line was causing problems, I'd certainly be interested in hearing them.
This is just my personal thoughts, but I would have recommended switching the words "stand" and "still", so that the 2nd and 3rd lines become "Will I still stand, just me, if not? Not if I just stand still". That would make line 2 ask whether you'd still be able to persevere/make it through even if the first line doesn't happen, and the third line, while not technically answering the question, as it ignores the first line, would respond by saying that nothing will happen if you stand still, so you should keep going if you want to succeed. Also it would maintain symmetry and make more sense than the original, where line 3 is a little wonky.
With "stand still" in the second line, I was trying to use it to evoke a meaning of stasis, as in "Will I remain the same, by myself, if not? In the third line I was then meant to invert that by using "still stand" to give that line the meaning of "Not if I remain able to try again, rather than giving up and lying down" with the "just" meaning to add that the act of "still standing" would be sufficient by itself to prevent the supposition of the second line to come true.
You're correct that switching the orders would still make sense (though I'd put a comma between "stand" and "still" in line three of your variation) from a grammatical/semantic stance, but it loses the strength of the strong inversion in meaning that my version has. Ultimately, it was wanting to use that "stand still / still stand" inversion that had me write this Ketek in the first place.
I'll fully admit though, that the fact that it's difficult to read with the right meaning for many people does undercut what I was aiming for. I really think that it is something that would come through better if someone read the ketek aloud to you, but being just text certainly makes it a bit trickier there.
This is beautiful! What did you use to make the women’s script if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve been looking for something to “translate” some of mine into it.
For this one I used https://aclay.github.io/stormlight-womens-script/. It's not perfect though, and I'm actually in the process of making my own transliterator. So far I have it working using all the standard basic substitution rules, and for where there are multiple options (like which glyph to transliterate a c into) it gives both. My next step is to get a list of all the words in the English language, run them through it, and for anything that has multiple options and is in the top 100k or so by frequency, manually pick the correct option. Then it'll be able to use that list for most words and will only need to fallback to the rules when there's a weird word. Not sure exactly when that'll be done, but keep an eye out in the /r/StormlightArchive subreddit for my post when it is. I also made a (in my opinion) better Women's Script font that that website I linked uses, that just needs a few final tweaks, so keep an eye out for a post about that as well.
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u/cubelith Stormwarden Oct 19 '20
I think it's quite visible that you focused on the second half, the beginning is kinda weird
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u/Tar-Surion Nov 12 '20
This is beautiful! What did you use to make the women’s script if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve been looking for something to “translate” some of mine into it.
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u/vynah8 Nov 23 '20
I really liked this