Re: Western Scripts

From: Sergio Mascarenhas <sermasalmeida_at_mail.telepac.pt>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 17:26:32 +0100


After reading all the debate about Western Scripts, I would like to give my opinion on the issue. In fact, it seems to me that most people are relying too much on RW analogies and forgetting the important issues from a Gloranthan POV.

If I understand the problem well, people are trying to address three questions:

  1. Why the western culture needs to have a single writen language and doesn't allow for the emergence of other writen languages.

IMO the answer must result from its consequences in terms of the gameworld. Since languages (both oral and writen) are tools for communication, the answer must result from knowing what is people attempting to communicate through a given language. First, let's look at the human 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.

IIRW this is not quite true. Classical latin always coeexisted with several vulgate forms, even before the fall of the western roman empire. In fact, the need to communicate in writen form dictates whether the oral will or will not be reduced to writen.
But, what makes people need to communicate in script?

RELIGION
After the fall of the western roman empire, latin was kept by the church as its lingua franca, both in the oral and the writen forms. In this case the need to communicate in writen form resulted from the need to transmit the knowledge of the Bible. And to have an ortodox version of religious truths. Ence the adoption of latin by the church. One religion, one church, one language. Latin was an instrument in the centralization of religious matters.

The same can be said of Arabic. Enforcing the usage of Arabic as the only writen language across muslim peoples was both a form of ensuring religious unity.

Outside of the church writing almost disapeared. The barbarians saw no use on writing. It was the movement of centralisation of power, and the emergence of the urban life that made people need to write again. Write what?

LAW, POLITICS, and TRADE
Writing came back to serve the powers of the time. This happened throughout Europe at the turn of the milenium.
Which writen language was adopted? Unlike religion, there were two issues here: how to communicate within a given linguistic community; how to communicate among different linguitic communities. In the second situation the answer was to keep writen (and spoken) latin as a common media.
But on what concerns the first situation, writen forms of the different languages emerged very soon. This was very important to the powers of the time. It allowed them to become less dependent on the churchmen escaping Rome's control; and to mark their frontiers from the next king. The political conditions of medieval Europe required the development of writen languages corresponding to the spoken languages.

In the case of Arabic, the frontiers between religious powers and lay powers was much more fuzzy, so enforcing the usage of Arabic as the only writen language across muslim peoples was both a form of ensuring religious and political unity. (BTW, the several empires that existed in North Africa and the Middle East never enforced writen Arabic as the only writen language to be used within their borders. Arabic always coexisted with other writen languages and alphabets used by non-muslins - jews, christians, etc.)

CULTURE
>The first person to write anything down in Italian was Dante circa 1320
>AD.

This is not true. People were writing in the neo-latin dialects before Dante, even in Italy. The question is that Italy had several languages (that survived in their oral form until today). The importance of Dante was that he was the first to write in what would become the language of the learned and cultivated people. Since Dante and until last century there existed in Italy several writen dialects, but among these one would become the writen language of the cultivated people and be adopted after the unification of Italy as THE Italian. Once more, culture mixed with politics in order to impose a cannon.

In fact, the emergence of a lay culture independent of the church and concerned with common people interests and needs prompted the development of writen languages besides latin. So, my conclusion is that we should focus on what are westerners using Western Scripts to communicate:

Is it for law, politics, trade, culture, or religion? It seems to me that the answer to the first question is simple: Western Scripts are used for religious, magical, cultural , political, and trading reasons, IN THAT ORDER OF IMPORTANCE.

The main reason to use scrips is to record and transmit religious scrits. These are first of all an instrument for religious unity. I think that in this, Western Scripts should be closer to the Choran then to the Bible. Where is the difference? Christians accept the notion that a translation of the Bible from the language in which it was writen to any other language is still the word of God. You can reach the word of God through a Bible in English, Portuguese, Lebanese, etc. The reason is that the version that became the cannon of the Bibble in Western Europe until the Reformation was the Latin translation and not the original script. So christians didn't have an original in the first place.
Muslins have a completely different POV: the only way to access the word of God is by reading the Choran in Arabic. There are translations, but these are not translations of the Choran, which is the work of God. They are only the work of men. They are not the Choran, but the interpretation of the versicles of the Choran in [a given language]. You can read a French translation of the Choran (I have one) as many times as you want, you still didn't access the word of God, and cannot claim to be a Muslin and true believer. I suppose that the Western Scripts are like this.

Highly connected with this is the fact that writen language also transmits the knowledge of sorcery. I suppose that we can say that IT IS THE language of sorcery. (This raises the question of whether western sorcery is dependant on language to the extent that no language - meaning 'that' certain language - equals no sorcery.)

Next comes culture. A single writen language allows for the stabilisation of culture. This is specialy important when dealing with people outside of the western world.

Next comes politics. If I understand it well, in the West political power is dependent on religious power. At least much more then in medieval Europe. This is easy to understand: after all, sorcery is connected to religion and sorcery is a very important source of power. Dito to trade.

And who writes the rules? Lay powers, or religious powers? It seems that it's mostly religious powers. And they control the best instrument of social control: sorcery.
I suspect that these powers don't want the development of any other form of writen language that they don't control, or the dissemination of the knowledge of writing to 'unsuited' people. (They would behave a lot like the monk in charge of the library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.) No question of teaching how to read and write to the masses.

2. The second question resulting from the present discussion is whether Western Scripts should be based on an ideographic or a phonetic script.

I think that the most important point to reach an answer to this question is related to the question of the connection between writen language and sorcery. IMO, sorcery and writen language should be very connected. I would be temped to think that in Western Scripts evolved along the next lines: The primitive scripts would be pictographic. They would represent and transmit the knowledge of very simple magical effects. These would evolve into an ideographic alphabet (runes ?) that allowed a greater degree of freedom to the magic user, but still very dependent on  particular magical effects, even if more complex then in the previous stage.
Eventualy this system evolved into a new sytem where the scripts don't represent anymore particular magical effects, but how the magician generates magical effects. In that sense writen language became more similar to phonetic alphabets then to ideographic alphabets. Since Western Scripts are connected to sorcery, they represent more then simply oral language. They represent gestures, light, mental states. Also, I tend to think that sorcery is more stable then common language, changing or evolving at a slower pace. Since writen language would be based in sorcery, it would also evolve at a slower pace. Finally, since sorcerors are the keepers of the writen language, and since powerfull sorcerors tend to live a lot (centuries or thousands of years), they act as stabilisers of the writen language of sorcery.

3. A final question is whether Western Scripts correspond to a given spoken language or are independent from any given spoken language.

As I just said, I suppose that Whether Western Scripts represent much more then an oral language. They contain also body language, emotional language, etc. I suppose that most western cultures share common standards on those other ways of communicating. In that sense, it corresponds to a common language. On the oral part of it, I tend to think that it should correspond to the language of sorcery. Provided that there is a language of sorcery independent of laymen languages...

Sergio


End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #134


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