<< Basically, there are two camps. The case for the first one is pretty much as you summarise it - it seems the natural position if you take the statement about several mutually incompatible languages sharing a writing system literally, and I see no good reason not to take it literally.>>
I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason that I don't take it literally is that when I asked Greg about it he said that the statement in question was "false information", and he never intended it to be a true description of Glorantha.
<< Trotsky, is this the official Gregly view? >>
Yup. By sheer coincidence I happened to be talking to him on this very topic a few days ago.
<< >Sadly, because most literate people can only read the Abiding
>Script, and don't actually know how they're supposed to *pronounce* it, they
>find it very difficult to read these old texts, even though they're written
>in their own language...
If its Ice Age Brithini, surely they can go and ask the Brithini? In Loskalm, for example, a fairly large number of the educated populace have probably attended the University at Sog? And while the Brithini at Sog probably do not date actually from the Ice Age, I can't see them being so removed in terms of generations of Brithini that they no longer even remember how it was pronounced.>>
I believe its supposed to be 'difficult' rather than impossible. Being taught by a Brithini would certainly help, I agree, but I don't think most educated Malkioni have had that benefit.
<< >It is the closest we can get today to the perfect, maximally efficient and
>rigorously logical script of the Golden Age (which is what the original copy
>of the Blue Book of Zzabur is written in, incidentally - pity nobody knows
>how to read it any more)
Bad luck for all those sorcerers who have the Blue Book as their grimoire, in place of the Abiding book, then.>>
I said 'original copy'. No doubt it was translated back in the First Age, but the hundreds of years of copyists since then might make many of the current texts a little suspect.
<< OK, so we have to assume that the modern sorcerers who use it do not use the original Golden Age version, but a modernised one.>>
I assume that's what Greg meant, too.
<< Even so, I find it pretty unlikely that no one knows how to read the original Blue Book of Zzabur - given that there are modern translations at least, and you also have the resources of institutions like the Sog City university (and if translating the Blue Book of Zzabur and other old Brithini texts isn't exactly the sort of thing a Brithini University would devote its greatest resources to, I don't know what is), >>
The Brithini translations are likely the best, I agree, but without a printing press, they won't be widely distributed IMO.
Forward the glorious Red Army!
Trotsky
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