Aphabets (was: Testing ++)

From: Andrew Barton <AndrewBarton_at_compuserve.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:55:36 -0500


John English:

> Does anyone know anything about Gloranthan alphabets?

> We recently had the characters discover an ancient scroll written in =

> Sartarite. While there was a Sartarite-speaking character in the party =
he

> was illiterate. However our literate Pavisite suggested that he simply
read =

> the scroll out loud phonetically and then the Sartarite could work out
what =

> it meant.

<snip>

> In the RW there are far fewer scripting systems than languages (in Euro=
pe
we =

> only have Roman, Greek and Cyrillic but dozens of countries, many of
which =

> have more than one language) and so the players trick could have worked=
. =

Many of the languages that use the Roman alphabet don't use it phonetically, and those that do don't all use the -same- phonetic scheme.=  =

Many have extra marks added to the letters.

Russian is written phonetically in Cyrillic but that's only because there=

has been a fairly recent spelling reform - the alphabet was phonetic when=

St Cyril invented it but the language had drifted over the centuries. Ev= en
so, you can't always tell how to pronounce a Russian word by sounding the=

letters because they vary according to where the stress is.

So, if you want to stop the player's trick you can do so even if you have=

Pavic and Sartarite using the same script.

Andrew

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