a rant on making atla headcannons/fics/literally anything else believable, even though translation convention is a thing (aka, a crash course on the chinese language + some background about how atla was modeled after the existing cultures)
we all know atla is set in east asia(ish) right?
if not, you know now. but it's set in east asia, the different nations more or less correspond to different nations/ethnic groups that exist today. loosely, the fire nation is similar to imperial japan, the earth kingdom is based off of imperial china, the water tribes are modeled after the inuit/aleut/yupik/other indigenous cultures in the arctic, and the air nomads emulate tibetan buddhists.
in the real world, obviously all of these places have different languages and writing systems.
however, atla has chosen (based on the comics; remember this letter?)
to use what is functionally written (traditional!) chinese. (hanzi, 汉字, kanji, chu nom, whatever you would like to call it is cool).
why the hell should you care? after all, they speak english in the show! (as a note, that's called "translation convention," though i've heard it called "tolkien brainrot" lmfao, but basically it means that even though it's acknowledged that characters/that world is operating in a language different from those of the audience, everything is described in the language of the audience, with the assumption that everything's just be translated on principle. (see article here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TranslationConvention))
well, guess what? in the show, we still see that all the writing is done in chinese. with chinese writing conventions and tools, and a big part of making your writing/headcannons/etc believable will be incorporating these. hence, the crash course about the chinese langauge. (fyi, i'm assuming that avatar takes place in loosey the 1850s... not sure if this is correct, but honestly, any time before the 1920's doesn't reaaaaally matter.)
a crash course on the chinese language
chinese is a pictographic language. as such, many of the characters actually resemble what they're supposed to mean. (eg: 馬 is a horse, and it kind of looks like one. 山 is a mountain, and it also kind of looks like one.)
each character (there are over fifty thousand, though only like twenty thousand are really used...) has a distinct meaning, and a nondistinct sound. there are a set number of sounds (google bopomofo) , and a four (kind of five??) different intonations (it's kind of like singing; sometimes the sound goes up, sometimes it goes down, sometimes it stays at the same pitch, sometimes it goes down and up, you can research this on your own time.) however, unlike english, the meaning is attached to the character; if you were to just give someone a sound, there would be at least like eight different things you could mean.
if you were like "gee, that sounds like a lot of characters?" yeah. you'd be right. unlike in places that use the roman alphabet, schools in places that use any form of chinese characters basically send kids home with 5-100 characters that they have to learn to read and write. it's an ongoing process, from when you begin school to when you leave. there's no such thing as "finishing learning to read + write" at the age of seven and moving on.
chinese has "radicals", or different symbols that have different meanings. for example, water is 水，but in it turns into three dots on the left side of a character. eg: 河 is a river. those dots mean water, and the right part of it is more or less just phonetic (so, some radicals do indicate phonetic pronounciation, but not like... reliably.) or for example, 火 is fire, and it turns into four little dots under something, so 煎 is to fry, where the top part is also kind of phonetic. other things are just symbolic though, like 安, which means safe/peaceful. 女 is a woman, and the top part is a roof, so a woman under a roof = safe. (yeah, there's def sexism embedded, eg: 女 (woman) + 子 (child) = 好 (good) but that's kind of a different problem...). in short, radicals tell you something about the character's meaning, or what it related to.
there are actually two types of chinese script! (or at least, presently in use. there's like ooooold chinese, but no one uses it...) one is traditional and another is simplified. here's a few versions for comparison: 舊金山 (traditional) vs 旧金山 (simplified); 愛 (traditional) vs 爱 (simplified)；美國 (traditional) vs 美国(simplified); 謝謝 (traditional) vs 谢谢 (simplified. as you can see, not all words have simplifications. in atla, people use traditional characters. this is pretty historically accurate, given that simplified characters are a product of the chinese cultural revolution, circa 1949, so if we're in the 1850's, everyone definitely still using traditional. (though, in the real world, china uses simplified, taiwan uses traditional, and japan mostly uses traditional, but some simplified.... (idk that's a mess but it's valid)) obviously, simplification happens like 100 years after when we assume atla will take place, but if anyone is a nerd and willing to fudge around with timelines, you could absolutely include simplification, or controversy over it in your fic/hc/work.
no one write with pens. or quills. please. you lose all plausability the instant you put a quill dipped in ink in your story. (also like?? atla literally showed zuko writing??? and sokka with piandao doing calligraphy?? both with a 毛笔 (traditional brush) and the whole calligraphy setup? y'all??) but yeah the writing set-up is paper, something to stretch the paper out (it comes in like a roll/scroll form, so it tends to curl at the edges), plus a little rectangular ink well. (one end is kind of shallow, and the other one is deep, so you can get your brush in the ink, and then get some off, and get a pointy tip to be precise.) and also you sign your name with this neat little thing called a chop, which is basially a stamp.
this is more cultural, but generally having very neat writing is a sign that you're a very noble, organized, and virtuous (generally good) person.
punctuation was just. not a thing. for a hot second. until like the 1920s ish or like right after luxun published some of his stories…(if you really needed to denote a sentence end, you could use a "。" or "、" but usually you'd just move to a different line, or just... not. (so no question marks or exclamation points, unfortunately. (so that one fucking fantastic fic about question marks in sokka and zuko's relationship; unfortunately, not linguistically possible. (but also, the fic was really good, and the question marks were central to the plot point, so i'm willing to pretend it works (or that a question particle was used. what is that? next bullet point lol)
chinese uses particles to denote things! for example, 我 is "i." what is my? 我的。 the "的” is a particle that makes something posessive. in the same vein, 你 = you. 你的 = yours. 他 = he*, 他的 = his. another cool particle is 们, which pluralizes things. (我们 = we. 你们 = y'all. 他们 = they.) another cool thing is the question particle, 吗. it basically just... makes a thing a question. eg; "你喜欢蛋糕" = you like cake. “你喜欢蛋糕吗“ = you like cake? obvs there are other ways of making this a question "你喜不喜欢蛋糕” and "你是不是喜欢蛋糕的" so.... if u wanna write a fic like the question mark fic, maybe clarify that it's "吗“, which does work, linguistically?
*side note; in modern language, 他 = he/him, and 她 = she/her. there's work on developing something similar to they/them, there are a couple different versions, which i have *opinions* about, but that's for later. however 她 was actually created in the 1910s, as the result of westernization and a women's movement (in that order) in china. before the invention of 她, only 他 existed, and was therefore less gendered. although the 1910's is a bit late for atla's timeline, you could absolutely include it in your fics/hcs/work, and wreck havoc with the fact that referring to a third person in the singular is functionally gender neutral.
also, traditionally names are three characters. and the three characters are supposed to mean something cool. like people name kids stuff like 美琳 to mean "beautiful jade" or 俊德 to mean "handsome virtue." also names are written [last] [first first]. atla kinda said "fuck it" and although characters have two-character first names, (idk about katara???) they don't... mean anything... like iroh's is 艾洛—艾 is more or less meaningless, and just a sound (ai) and 洛 is also more or less meaningless except for the sound (luo).
also not really a chinese language thing but... i keep seeing fics try to reference actual asian lit, and then just... failing... so uh, here's a crash course; traditional chinese poetry from the tang dynasty uses something called 五言绝句, aka there are four lines, and each line contains five characters (syllables). there are four big important novels, called 红楼梦 (kinda about forbidden romance)，水浒传 (about a bunch of rebels sort of pursuing vigilante justice; each rebel has their own talent or skill), 三国演义 (...basically just a dramatic version of the warring states period?? lots of chinese idoms come from here, eg “说曹操他就到” which is basically "speak of the devil")，and 西游记(xuanzang the buddhist monk + his chaos gremlins (eg: monkey king) wreak havoc whilst xuanzang tries to find scriptures)。 another really famous romance is 梁山伯与祝英台, which is like forbidden love with a trans-ish twist. i'll make a post about these later, but please do your research, and don't just use characters from these in a shakespeare plot....
atla uses translation convention for speaking but not writing
atla script is basically traditional chinese, so no letters.
if we're assuming atla is in the 1850s, there are no punctuation or gendered third person pronouns. there are particles, which can kind of fill in gaps left by punctuation.
no one uses quills and everything is characters
learning to read/write takes up a substantial part of people's educations growing up, since its a pictorial language.
if you're gonna write about chinese classics, do it right.
