Trying to stay away from this, but I do not agree with :
> When Dante set out to write a great poem in Italian, he didn't
> have to do anything new to be able to write it down in the Roman
> alphabet. But a French speaker wouldn't be able to read the result.
Not true. In fact, Dante's contemporaries (and especially any literate ones) were well used to deciphering many divergent Romance dialects (encountered in the Universities and markets, frinstance). They were known as 'vulgar' latin ; 'Italian' as such didn't exist, and Dante set out (following but not imitating the french Romance novelists, and the Troubadours) to write an epic poem in a vulgar form.
In a dialect of latin.
And a French contemporary of Dante would have had far less trouble deciphering him than a modern French speaker would have to decipher, frex, Umberto Eco.
The various Romance tongues *did* have a single written form (medieval latin), until people like Dante upset the apple cart.
The proposal that the Western languages of Glorantha are similarly structured is an eminently sensible one, although I personally tend (upon seeing the GL runes in HW) that they use shared logograms* instead.
cheers,
Julian Lord
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