However, I would ask you, if you have not already done so, to translate Oocco's statements about the Temple of Time and the Copy Rod. It could prove important.
Definitely. I still need to check a whole lot revolving around the Sky chapter...
About the book, I don't think it was a work of the Hylians – why then would it be written in the sky language?
I have a theory. In TMC, the Wind People shared the same language with the Hylians, seeing as their inscription in the Wind Ruins is legible to Link without Ezlo's help, and as all of them talk naturally to Link (in fact anything else would be surprising, as they just departed to the skies a few decades ago). That means that during TMC, the sky language was identical to Hy(ru)lian.
So if the language never developed in the skies because they remained among their own kind, different than all the Hyrulian races, that could mean they preserved the ancient TMC Hyrulian until the days of TP, whereas down on the ground it developed into TP Hylian.
Now one can speculate that as long as the cultural exchange took place, the sky language was still understood by the Hylians. Or even if the languages should already have diverged considerably, Hylian scholars have always studied it as a foreign language anyway.
What I like about this theory is that that way, we would witness two historical stages of the Hylian language in the same game. I think it makes sense that the sky language was the predecessor of Hylian, with the Wind People being presented in TMC somewhat as the predecessors of the Hylian race.
It seems to me more like a ‘guide’ to the City in the Sky and the sky people, which is what Shad and, apparently, the messenger to the sky used it as. It works perfectly with Impal's story: together with the Copy Rod, the book is the key to opening the way to the canon room, ensuring that only the ones sent by the royal family are allowed entrance to the City.
That could work, but I assumed the name of the book implied that it was, well, what it says it is; a book about the history of the sky. Does the Japanese wording exclude the possibility that the book was a summary of the Sky People's history given to the Hylians (containing important things like location of the statues and the canon) and used as a means to ensure a proper exchange between the peoples? Hylians, being the lesser race would be the ones needing such instruction, and that might be why the messenger always brought it with him when meeting with the Sky People. That's how I understood it, at least.
The wording doesn't exclude that, no. It's a fact that the messenger needed the book to recite a spell that enabled them to reach the sky cannon (and a second spell for the rare case of having to repair the Copy Rod). But apart from that, I think the book was mainly used to chronicle the dialogue between the Hylians and the sky, since it'd be very untypical for a messenger to remember all the information by heart. So, I interpret "historic documents" in the way that the book only later came to be called that, as chronicles of all the interracial conversations.
As for the owl locations, I'm not sure if they would be given by the book. Shad tells them to Link from what he knows of his father's notes instead by consulting the newly found book, implying that that knowledge was kept elsewhere (within the Hylian royal family, most likely). This in turn would make it redundant for the book to contain the owl locations.
And independant of that, it would've been a huge undertaking to travel around Hyrule each time before going to the skies, which makes me think that the owl statues may have been just a measure for the emergency case of people forgetting the spell to access the sky cannon.
Or else, the letters could've been removed from the book only after the contact between the peoples had been severed. Or maybe,
in order to severe the contact?! But in that case, where did the owl statues suddenly come from?
Damn, so many questions... Really looks like we need a thread about it, doesn't it?
Edited by Jumbie, 29 May 2008 - 08:30 PM.
