Re: Writing

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 11:20:59 +0100 (BST)

Peter Larsen:
> >>And that Plentonian alphabet looks
> >>pretty much like all the other runic sets Mr. Stafford has created.
> >
> >That is as it should be for there's only very limited ways one
> >can represent the sun as a picture (and there are similarities
> >between archaic Sumerian and Shang dynasty tablets).
>
> By this reasoning, all RW writing systems should look pretty similar.

No, because most RW writing systems aren't pictographic, or indeed even ideographic. I don't see what huge, egregious similarity you're noting between Gloranthan writing systems, that's utterly above and beyond that of RW scripts. It strikes me we have already seen (proposed or cod-official) a perfectly reasonable variety of alphabets, syllabaries, logograms, rebus-systems, and whatever else anyone has been able to come up with, at that level of abstraction. The actual similarity of the various scripts is a completely different matter

• we don't know at this point, there being one (cod-official) alphabet, and an outline for one set of logograms, and pretty much nothing else. To accuse any of the scripts of being too similar seems to me to be wildly premature.

> The Entekosiad says (or strongly suggests) that Pelandan is syllabic.

No it doesn't; it claims (directly) that it's ideogrammatic. (Thanks to Peter for the quote, and apologies for my leaky memory.) The actual examples of the language don't really bring matters to the crux of whether it's actually syllabic or logographic, though: indeed, since all the glyphs are transliterated, it would be unlikely to have done so...

Slán,
Alex.

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