> I wouldn't assume Western is purely logographic, merely mostly.
Are you suggesting logosyllabic, then? (Or logoalphabetic, which is a non-category as far as the RW is concerned.)
> The God Learners may well have used a more sophisticated script than the
> original Western. Your objection is noted - but its not a killer argument
> against a basically logographic language.
I agree. David D. and I have discussed this half-to-death offline (isn't _that_ a debate you're glad you all missed!), and it's been a veritable Jutland, as far as decisive killer blows are concerned.
> And besides, we have the example of Japanese (Kanji plus other
> scripts) for one solution to this problem that occurs in the real world.
With solutions like Japanese, who even _needs_ problems? ;-)
This has been mooted, but itself weakens the claim of there being a common script, if "Jrusteli" has a katakana/romaji, and Brithini does not. Rebus-spelling using the existing script would be a yet more flakey solution to the problem, though one that doesn't require changing or adding to the actual _script_ itself. ("That means it _sounds like_ 'Luxury yacht', not that it _is_ a luxury yacht." "But in South Central Seshneg, we pronounce those signs 'Mangrove throatwarbler'." "D'oh!")
> Its certainly a creative rule of thumb for
> Glorantha that no gloranthan culture should be based on only a single earth
> culture (though there is often a single most obvious model).
That's true, though I'd recommend Easy on the Aztec as any sort of explicit analogue for Kralorela. Certainly anything even remotely Eastern is fair game, though. (And I don't say "exclusively", either.)
> David can hardly be expected to provide a convincing case for thematic,
> magical, or logical unity in a couple of lines
100 word limit does not apply, in this case. ;-)
> - which doesn't make his initial reasoning any less valid.
The reasoning _seemed_ to be that Kralorela is currently "too Chinese", and hence that systematicly diluting this pernicious influence is a Good Thing, in and of itself. That I don't accept. (I don't think David would really say this, but it's the (possible) interpretation I was objecting to.) That Kralorela should not automatically ape China I naturally agree with. Indeed, if it's closest to anything, perhaps it's "China as it should have been"; for example, while RW China drops the ball and has a large number of more-or-less related languages spoken there, Kralorela sagely Improves on this by having some pre-Time emperor combine all extant dialects into one.
> It does mean he has some more work to do if he
> wants us to accept his idea.
Quite so.
> I personally think that I am doing pretty much that as far as Western goes
> by rejecting a Latin model and suggesting a language model with more in
> common with the ideographic runes that seem to have originated in the West.
> And you don't like it. C'est la vie.
Let's just say you have some more work to do, too!
The runic connection "feels" wrong to me, too. If there was a script of ideographic runes already kicking around, then the God Learners got their research grants decidedly easy for "discovering" them. Come to that, we have strong indications that some of the Runes are principally, or at least significantly, of Dara Happan origin, and they don't have a logographic script at all.
Slainte,
Alex.
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