Irkair uncovered her light stone and carefully unrolled the paper, putting the stone on one corner and another rock on the opposite. She knew it was from Tinaul to one of the other Shiŗoshodai, although she didn't know which. Hopefully she could glean some information from this communiqué.
She looked at the text. And her hopes fell. While she recognized Kaushan writing—sort of—there was some other writing on it as well. And none of the Kaushan words made any sense, anyway.
She pushed the stones aside and started rolling up the paper. But she noticed something. She took her light rock and looked at it. Irkair carefully turned the stone over, and rotated it, comparing it to a symbol on the page. The were the same! Maybe there was hope after all!
Ptarshodai /ptɒɹˈʃoʊdaɪ/ is the dragon's writting, a code developed at the request of
Tinaul qī Narat for use by
Shiŗoshodai to communicate in spoken and written language among its number without fear of being understood by those outside the inner circle of the Shiŗoshodai.
The code is based on a combination of the writing in the
Vorashodai (written in
Thevan) and
Kaushan. The creators of the code did not know how to pronounce Thevan words, so pronunciation is closer to Kaushan.
The code consists of Kaushan words mapped to nonsense phrases of Thevan, mixed with actual Thevan and Kaushan words and a simplified grammar. When written, it uses a combination of Thevan and Kaushan writing, written right to left, top to bottom. This differs from both Thevan and Kaushan, which are written left to right, top to bottom and top to bottom, right to left, respectively.
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