Re: Western Script second try from Roland Volz on 1998-10-19 (Glorantha Digest Vol 06)

From: Roland Volz <roland_volz_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 13:09:10 PDT

Joerg Baumgartner writes (regarding Runes):
>I personally lean more to the alphabetic script of the Arabs or
>Hebrews. A couple of similar, but different deities have certain
consonant combinations in common, but not (all) the vowels.
>My favourite example:
>(Y/H)LM(L) for sun deities.

Damn! Beaten to the punch. I was just preparing a post in scholarly Lankhor Mhy style for the list about the possibility of the Runes being associated with sounds or groups of consonants (like Heiratic Egyptian.) Admittedly, the theory doesn't necessarily work for all the Runes, but I always supposed the God Learners started with a subset of the final form of the Runes and added some from cultures they came across.

But I do believe the Runes have some function in a written language. As evidence, take a look at the picture of the sarcophagus from Esrolia illustrated in Wyrm's Footprints. There are only 11 different characters on the lid, 7 of which occur multiple times. This seems to me to be strong evidence of a phonetic character to the script. In addition, the Fire/Sky rune appears four times. I believe there are two likely possibilities here:

The rune stands for a particular phonetic component, presumably 'LM'.
The rune stands for the "meaning" of Fire/Sky, in much the same fashion as the Mayan script sometimes uses an logogram in an otherwise logosyllabic inscription.

*Sigh* Better late than never, I ssuppose.

Hail Harshax!

Roland

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