Lor'Avvu

Happy May Day everyone!

Nashza Na (NAL)
NACZA NA
Basic greeting in NAL. Very equivalent to ‘Hello’.

Q.F. (QF in Ondoko) is nautical acronyming of queikfaepo (kweek-FAY-poh), the metric hour of Kaian, more often just called faepo (FePo). It is defined and calculated (as exactly as possible) to be one even ten-thousandth the duration of each Kaian year. Despite various older methods of notating time, such as tracking stars, the sun disc’s movement, its analemma and so forth, the Ondoan chronometrics have pretty much caught on the world over.

(The word faepo is pretty interchangeable for ‘hour’, being scantily more than a blink after an hour and 7 minutes of our time.)

After some consideration, I have changed the last panel’s translation since “tomorrow” seemed awfully inadequate and inappropriate given the Kaian day is about 500 hours long. Even though it is broken up into meals and rest periods more or less by necessity (among festivals and other traditions), the word the patch-eyed stranger actually used in the faerie tongue was:

hadhkahmo (NAL)
HAD|KAMO
(hahd-[glottal]-KAH-moh)
“The Sun turn”, a particular period following roughly mid-day.

This is a safe way for the stranger to say “later” without implying whether that period will be one of rest or waking. Yet, they also used it at a knowing time so that Ilon hears it as recognition that he will want the traditional rest period associated with the specific time and will then observe the traditional “waking” of the same name. Furthermore, the stranger uses a slightly awkward but clever modifier (like changing “waking” to “wakening”), which is immediately heard as something like “as soon as possible after your rest is over”.

Whew! All to replace a little “tomorrow”. Sorry about that, and I hope it’s clearer now.