In Dragon Age Origins, Vallaslin is introduced as the facial tattoos of Dalish elves and translated as "Blood writing". The question I have is which part of this word means "blood" and which part means "writing"? vallas or lin?
Before they settled on what was in the cipher, they used both parts of this word in both ways which muddled things. So you get lin → len in a kind of "blood/kinship" way and vallas in a kind of "blood/life" way.
Vallaslin means "my blood", vallas means "blood" and lin means "my (possessive)".
We know that these were slave markings. There might have been blood magic. I think there's some cases of how the Evanuris saw slaves/people with their vallaslin as extensions of themselves. Here's some other words that led to this theory:
1] Elgara vallas refers to a setting sun, which turns bright red on the horizon. So maybe this phrase literally means "sun bleeds".
2] Vallasdahlen is literally translated as "life trees".
dahlen: "tree", but probably "woods/forest". (see: Vir Adahlen).
vallas: logically, this probably means "life", which has a loose connection to "blood".
3] da'durgen'lin means "my little stones".
da: "little", often as a prefix (e.g. da'len: little child).
durgen: "stone"
lin: as the untranslated part of this phrase, "my".
Some additional parts to this is that da'durgen'len is translated as "little dwarves", (durgen'len is literally "children of the stone"). It's posited in that codex that lin became len which could also be possessive in the sense of "children belong to their parents".
The issue with the second theory is really that I just have more clear examples of vallas meaning "blood" than lin meaning anything. Here's a bunch of words that have lin as a syllable and I don't know if they're related:
Arulin'Holm - An ancient elvhen tool used for woodcutting that is an old as Arlathan. Used by Merrill to repair the eluvian.
amelin - From something Solas says to Abelas, "Malas amelin ne halam, Abelas."
lethallin - "friend", but also "lin" in this word is the one gendered ending in the entire language. Maybe a kind of "my love (platonic)" sort of way.
Halin'sulahn - The golden halla. "Sulhan" means joy, I have no idea about "halin".
sahlin - "come", but in the sense that death is here.
There's a couple other words that might also be related to vallas, which are Dhal Vallasan (a unique bow wielded by the Emerald Knights) and vallem (from a line of dialogue said by a spirit in Trespasser) but these also don't have enough context for me to guess.
Last instance of this word is bana'vallaslin from Where Willows Wail. The bit that probably corresponds to that is "failing of our markings", so this is probably the cultural idea of vallaslin. In this text, vallaslin might not refer to the markings but instead the people who wore those markings.
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