>> All (85%) Gloranthan societies are high context. You get that with
>> homogenous societies a lot.
>As I recall, Edwart Hall is the main writer about this sort of thing, and
>he made the distinction between high context Southern European cultures and
>low context Northern European cultures (British, German). I imagine Britain
>or Germany were as homogeneous as Spain or Italy, so your argument isn't
>valid.
Au contraire. Modern English (the language) developed so that people living in the Dane-occupied northeast of what is now England could talk to the Anglo-Saxons in the rest of the country. That's how the language losts its inflections. This has been carried to extremes in the U.S., where a kind of flat, Cincinnati accented American is the standard and a lack of cultural literacy means that our only common frame of reference is pop culture (which, in turn, is aimed at the broadest possible audience).
Germany standardized its language through Martin Luther. Maybe they lost some of their context at the same time. Don't enough to say.
The Italian language wasn't standardized, though, until Mussolini. (Still isn't, if anecdotal reports are true. For example, there seem to be about four different ways to pronounce Prosciutto, all of which are supposed to be the only correct one.)
Without language standardization, context rules. Once the language gets standardized and local differences disappear, it becomes necessary to provide more content through the actual words.
"And there's the Gone Sparal look on the front of his head." --Python, Monty
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #505
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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