> Are you implying that humans are not animals?
Wrestled with this one myself for some time, but it doesn't get you anywhere. It is a sterile issue of semantics. There IS a human/animal dichotomy, and that's basically it. In Glorantha, Person/Beast.
The issue is obscured in a V. pleasing (and quite absurd) fashion by the existence of Beastspeech and awakened Beasts in Glorantha.
Just a bit of fun, eh?
> Or that there was some
> point in the evolution of Homo sapiens when all instincts suddenly
> vanished overnight?
Yes. This happened when the "intelligent/instinctive" dichotomy was invented.
The erudite Charles Domino :
> Grandfather Mortal/Flesh Man
Flesh Man was GM's son. He was the Witness to the murder, and was driven insane by Death. And so on.
> Are we SURE that Waerans, Vadeli, Pamaltelans, and
> Kraloreli are all the same species?
Yes. see above. But this is the Human/Non-Human dichotomy. More semantics.
> This also keeps us from falling into a trap of
> assuming Babel based on runes was the original
> state of affairs. If it were so, how did Orlanth
> ever challenge Yelm? At least on the Godplane,
> there must be a common language from the very
> beginning of the Celestial Court! This would be,
> IMO, Spiritspeech. If you wanted to be picky, you
> could say the gods have Godspeech, as they would
> be dealing in concepts beyond the ken of mere
> mortals and minor spirits.
I agree with most of what you're saying. My understanding of SpiritSpeech (and here I could be wrong) is that SpiritSpeech approximately conveys the Ideas which are expressed by Signs in mortal languages. Plato tells us that Ideas are eternal, of course, but he also clues us in on how SpiritSpeech can be a pan-Gloranthan magical language. NOT modern linguistics, anyway, but good old grammar - -..Anyway, the concepts of SpiritSpeech ARE within the bounds of mortal experience, but mortal languages are V poor at signifying them. Godspeech would be the "language" of Truth, or perhaps Time, rather than Ideas, I imagine.
Steve Rennell makes a nicely priced offer against Tradetalk being the GL Esperanto ...
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