>I'm not saying that 'common tongues' and 'lingua francas' don't exist. I am
>say that the source indicates that this is not what is happening here.
Oh? And which sources are these?
>What it says is that the Westerners have spoken languages that are different
>though related and just ONE system of writing. And to me that means the
>written language MUST be an ideographic one whose systems don't relate in
>the slightest to the spoken system.
And we have pointed out the examples of Church Latin and Classical Arabic that fit the criteria imposed by the sources. Do you have any problem with these examples?
In the case of Latin, the vulgate forms (ie the forerunners of modern italian, french and spanish) were not written down for several centuries. The first person to write anything down in Italian was Dante circa 1320 AD. French is written down in England soon after the Norman conquest to replace native saxon records. Yet these languages were growing apart from each ever other since the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Despite this people were using written latin to communicate with each other. I've already pointed out that spoken latin was little good for communicating with foreigners and gave the example of Katherine of Aragorn.
>An alphabetic system must relate to the spoken system or it won't work.
And what makes you think that it _doesn't_ in the case of Western? The Western Languages are descended from one very ancient tongue that is highly respected and people still write in it. Despite this, most westerners speak a vulgar form of this language which is incomprehensible to outsiders. This is a good description of the languages of Italian, French and Spanish around the turn of the millenium. It is also a good description of Loskalmi, Seshnegi, Carmanian etc in glorantha.
AF>> Just like English you mean, whose spelling has of course mutated
>> to _exactly_ match pronunciation?
>Compare English, Dutch and German for a more comparable spread of change in
>languages. Languages tend to get partially frozen when 'the rules' get laid
>down and spelling standardised (Dr Johnson has a lot to answer for) but have
>a look at what common prejudice and ignorance are doing to the spelling of
>'lite', 'nite' and 'thru'.
FYI this happened as a result of the Printing Press. There are no printing presses in glorantha.
>> I think there probably is a common(ish) spoken form, it's just what
>> you hear on the streets. A sort of "Church Western", as it were.
>This is directly contrary to the sources.
Could you then give a source citation? The Church Western would be similar to if not the same as spoken Brithini which is mentioned in the sources.
>Now, that (not being a scholar of that part of the world) I didn't appreciate.
>All right try written Chinese as a communication between the very different
>dialects of spoken Chinese. Oh, no someone argues with me against that analogy
>a little further on.....
Which gives the lie to the argument that only an ideogrammic system can represent the Western Script, does it not? A RW alphabetic system can represent Western script and a RW ideogrammic system does not have the virtues of comprehensibility that is commonly supposed.
>Why don't people like this? I don't understand why you want to alter the plain
>sense of the source to change something that will not make all that much
>difference. Just to preserve the analogy with Western Europe?
Given that the source mentions nothing whatsoever about an ideogrammic system and given that the parallel of arabic has been brought up, I find accusations that I am trying to 'change' something to preserve the western european analogy to be utterly bizarre.
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