Must we?
> So when you write down the name of Thunder Brother #1 you really can't
> -- you have to use the "Storm" and "Child" glyphs.
I think my whole point was that the God Learners quite self-evidently _could_ do this, from all the documents they left doing just such things. Effectively you're proposing you can't write a letter to a colleague saying: "Hey, Elmal, and Antirius and Daysentarus are all the same!" without it coming out: "Cold Sun, Cold Sun, and Cold Sun are all the same!"
That two representations of the same idea might have the same ideogram doesn't seem a very compelling reason to me. (Much less, deep.)
Mind you, it'd make for "lively" Conferences... "That's not what your paper in the Proceedings says!" "Yes it is!" *thump*
> (Note of course that, like Japanese, Western could have both a proper
> ideographic system, and a katakana-like system for representing barbaric
> sounds.)
Katakana is definitely not a good example of how to represent barbaric sounds, though it is certainly phonetic of course. And yes, it's a completely different script from Kanji (and the other two or so...).
If "Western" is ideographic, but has an alphabetic (more likely than syllabic) component, then I'd bet large sums it was a historically late add-on to "unchanged" Brithini. Which seems a bit messy to me, but I won't claim it's not possible.
I think I agree with Simon H's comments -- one of the Irregular Nouns, I say Intuitive Mythic Resonance, you say Stereotyped Analogue. (He/she/it says "What _is_ this guff?")
Slainte,
Alex.
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