> Has the Lunar Empire managed to arrange affairs such that sheep bred within
> the glowline grow red wool? He figured that white sheep were an image of
> the clouds that Orlanth herds in the Sky, hence Orlanthi herd them too,
> following the example of their god.
Sheep are Heler's animal, as much as Orlanth's, and presumably it rains just fine in the Lunar Empire. Unless all clouds in the Lunar Empire are red (and I don't think they are), sheep are still the same color.
Lokamayadon's people had rams with golden wool, and they're more or less part of the Lunar Empire these days...
BTW, I'm not completely up on my wool history (perhaps Andrew Bean could chime in), but I believe black sheep weren't such a bad thing, once upon a time. It was the commercial wool companies (Pendleton) who wanted only white wool (which is of course easier to dye) that gave them a bad name and pretty much drove out the breed.
Alex Ferguson suggests
> Despite popular demand, I have another Thought to throw into the
> discussion about the written form of Western. One advantage to an
> alphabetic script is that it's better at "spelling out" foreign words
> and names than an ideographic script would be. (Naturally this requires
> that a "phonetic" reading of such be possible, whether or not the script
> is normally read strictly phoneticly.) Not very much use to the
> "unchanging" Brithini of course, but damn handy if you're (say) a God
> Learner, and you have to write down the name of Thunder Brother #1 in
> your paper to appear in that upcoming conference in sunny Umathela on
> Minor Storm Deities.
Aha, I think you've stumbled into the founding of the God Learners.
Let's assume that Western is some form of ideographic script (I favor something more like hieroglyphics than Chinese, but maybe old Chinese is OK). So when you write down the name of Thunder Brother #1 you really can't - -- you have to use the "Storm" and "Child" glyphs. Of course, you partake in endless scholarly arguments with your colleagues that "No, this is Hedkoranth, not Doburdun." Then it strikes you. They're written the same -- maybe despite the barbarians not knowing the true name of the god, they are the same. After all, the written language is purer. A few quick experiments (and a grant to import storm worshippers to Umathela, which is after all more pleasant than Dragon Pass and its bitterly cold winters) and you've got the beginnings of not just a paper but a major work...
(Note of course that, like Japanese, Western could have both a proper ideographic system, and a katakana-like system for representing barbaric sounds.)
David Dunham <mailto:dunham_at_pensee.com> Glorantha/RQ page: <http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html> Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
Powered by hypermail