Old Mantongue

From: Julian Lord <julian.lord_at_hol.fr>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 04:41:33 +0200


Thanks for answers re: my doubts about the Horse taboo.Looks like the historical
explanation is good.

> Peter Metcalfe:

> >> 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.
>
> Which I take with grains of salt snorted liberally up the nose. In
> paricular, I doubt the implications that everyone spoke Old Mantongue
> in the Good Old Days.

Actually true, during Grandfather Mortal's Life, but I wasn't talking about the
good old days, and I also retreated from my (false) initial argument that Pentan
and Praxian were nearly the same.

Also, compare with other races: Trolls speak Uz, Elves speak Aldryami, etc...
I'm curious; which implications of Old Mantongue being spoken by everyone
(ie all Men, that is) do you doubt?
In fact, in modern times, an offshoot of Seshnegi, a language which is still fairly
close to Mantongue (Brithini is the parent tongue of Seshnegi), has become a
common human language. This language is Tradetalk, and one of the reasons it has
spread so successfully is IMO that it is fairly similar to the original Mantongue.

The original mortal language was actually SpiritSpeech, though, which has hardly
evolved since Godtime ('cos: no phonetics). For Spirits of all races, the good
old days is now...

BTW, some more conjecture I find amusing : Given that Storm came after Fire, Light existed before Air, and it could be that
in Glorantha written language existed before speech, as opposed to RW.


> >From whence comes your impression that 'non-mystics' have invaded the
> Perfecti? The writeup does not imply that and the Perfecti are _very_
> new having sprung up only within the last thirty years or so.

Didn't have access to the proper write-up, so this wasn't immediately clear. The
one I had read like dogma, sorry about the confusion this engendered. Also fell into the trap of Nick having done such a good job of writing up
questionable doctrine. So I *did* question it !!


Powered by hypermail