elilla & friends’ very occasional blog thing

conlang

(Spoilers for She-ra planetary background lore.)

In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power season 1 episode 2, we see a door locked with a password readily available in a First Ones inscription, Moria-style:

Screenshot of the door from S01E02, its inscription annotated for phonemes. ‘Eternia’.

In season 2 episode 2, we see in the floating ruins of the Watchtower a variant, not just of the same word but of the same design – recall that the First Ones Script (FOS) allows a significant degree of æsthetic freedom – except it reads not quite Eternia, but ‘Etelnia’:

Note the lack of the dot in the ‘r’ lozenge glyph, rendering it ‘Etelnia’. The inscription is also upside-down in this photo, which is easily explainable by the fact that it’s shown from the point of view of a horse.

We can hardly imagine that the technologically advanced, highly literate First Ones would have misspelt the name of their home planet (a name of obvious cultural importance since it’s used a password etc.). Moreover, the FOS for /r/ is the same as /l/ plus a single dot; were it a mistake, it would be easily fixable ad posteriori. No, there is absolutely no chance that somebody somewhere has simply forgotten to add a dot to this design. We must assume the variant is real.

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