> ME>I've been going through my OOP stuff again, and I remembered that I
> >never really found out WHY it was, exactly, that Horses were taboo
> >among the Praxians.
>
> Because they are not beasts of Waha.
Are all Beasts not-of-Waha taboo in Prax? I think not. Horse has always seemed to have been singled out as a taboo Beast. Is it unclean? Is it Evil? Is it Forbidden for some other magical reason? What, really, is the motive behind the taboo nature of Horse? It seems more of a magical reason than a socio-political one, IMO, although microcosm mirrors mesocosm mirrors macrocosm (bla-bla-bla) as always in Glorantha.
Waitaminnit. Is it because Horse is really a carnivorous mount ? (or should be, but not the wingless wonder version we've got now ...) Might just be a pretext. There's probably some weirdo Praxians somewhere with meat-eating Beasts. (I like to think of Cannibal Cult Bolo Lizard people, but there's Steven Spielberg and Junk Food Culture for you ...)
Actually, I've got this pet theory which says that Jaldon's mount is actually a winged carnivorous horse, unnamable as such because of the taboo. So it's the Mystery Beast, or whatever they call it. Doubt that it can be right, though ...
Could be a link here: Jaldon's been banished, and Horse is taboo. hmmm...
> woolly mammoth
Do the Praxians have a taboo against wooly mammoths? first I've heard of it ...
> >The discovery of a linguistic link between the Horse
> >Nomadic and Praxian Nomadic Languages, (ie the fact that they descend
> >from the same prehistoric group) spurs this question.
um. no they don't descend from the same prehistoric group, (except that
they're all Men) but a GodLearner, or Fourth Age philologist might come
to this conclusion.Sorry.
They lived in the same places, and have many words in common.
An incompetent Fourth Age philologist, of course ... except that he'd
draw his conclusions from toponymy, given that Praxian has no written
form. And place names would be similar to Pentan ones, because it's Land
stuff.
> There is no linguistic link between the Pentans and the Praxians.
Well, my inference (not necessarily correct, BTW, which is why I bring it up) comes from the OOP source "Languages of Dragon Pass" from WF No 6. This says that Praxian Nomadic (mind you, this is Old Praxian Nomadic, not the modern language) was a form of Stormspeech laced with Old Mantongue (a language v. similar to Brithini, which is derived from it, and is in fact nearly pure Mantongue.). BUT, the form of this language which was dominant in Prax and the Wastelands was Horse Nomadic, the ancestor of modern Pentan. (The Horse Nomads used to be the bosses in Ancient Prax. Used to rule most of Central Genertela in fact, and this was LONG before the Dawn, before the Darkness even ... Of course, this would also have been before Horse was broken. Might be wrong about this, actually.) It seems likely, anyway that the Mantongue influence in Ancient Praxian was Horse Nomadic, which means that there IS a relationship between the two. (Or that there used to be at least, for the languages have had enough time to evolve into two completely separate idioms. The main similarities, I think, would be in vocabulary, and in Earth things. If this theory is right.)
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