Black Horse Troop
Zoberan (Magician) Caste Occupation Keywords
Zoberan Liturgist
Mental Skills: Lead Prayer, Read Old Slontan, Write Old Slontan.
Wizard
Mental Skills: Read Old Seshnelan, Write Old Seshnelan, Symbolic Sight.
While having different languages for black horse troop liturgists and wizards looks like another silly erratum (unless perhaps Old Seshnelan is the older form of Slontan used as a secret arcane language by Wizards for the grimoires and other texts that can't be trusted to mere Liturgists), given that HW references must logically trump OOP RQ references* the whole argument about what sort of language the one western written language should be if it is to fulfil the criteria of being universally comprehensible looks somewhat redundant.
i.e. if Seshnelans and/or Slontans wrote their own language/s at the time of the Black Horse Troop's formation (the second age as Ethilrist began trooping after the Arkat wars and attained agelessness in 1050 before apparently disappearing into the underworld for most of the third age) then it is not true that there is only one universally understood written western language as if there were the Atroxi being a pretty conservative western sect would surely be using it.
The only way to reconcile HW and GCotHW that I can see would be to assert that in fact Old Seshnelan/Slontan (and not some weird logographic form of Brithini) is the One Written Western Language in which case not just the Seshnelans, God Learners, Akemites, Loskalmi and Safelstrans but even the Brithini are/were all using a language that presumably only developed a written form sometime in the Dawn Age.
One way of explaining this would be to argue that while various Malkioni states developed their own languages in the Dawn Age some of which may have had written forms, ultimately the tongue of imperial Seshnela out-competed them and became the equivalent to medieval Latin or Church Slavonic throughout the Jrusteli empire (I don't have the sources in front of me but this would presumably also be connected to the creation of the Abiding Book which would have fixed and standardised the written language in much the same way as Luther's and the King James Bibles did for German and English)
An analogy would be the way Old English was a written language from the 9th
to the 11th century written along with Latin by a literate class who were
(Alfred excepted) generally able to use both but died out in the century
after the Norman conquest as the new ruling elite were not interested in
supporting chronicles and other literature written in any language other
than Latin.
It might seem odd that the Brithini write in a language developed long after
their own but this would make sense if as someone suggested the Brithini
written language is in fact a sort of logical/scientific/magical notation
incomprehensible to non-Brithini and that the Brithini (or more probably
just selected Talars and Zzaburs) use Old Seshnelan/Slontan as it firstly
allows them to communicate with lesser breeds and secondly to express ideas
(as even Brithini must do occasionally) that cannot be expressed in the
pure, perfect and thus for ever unchangeable language of the Kingdom of
Logic.
To summarise:
Based on the HW description of the Atroxic Church I'd suggest that what GCotHW calls written Western would be described as Old Seshnelan or Slontan by modern Malkioni.
Old Sehnelan/Slontan uses an alphabetic God Learner Runic script and while closely related to the vernacular tongues is a separate language closely analagous to Church Latin or Old Slavonic that is used by all literate mainstream Malkioni but no longer spoken by anybody as a first language.
This then also implies the existence of Malkioni heretics who dare to translate the Abiding Book into the vernacular and must be rooted out with fire and sword as well as the Brithinising heretics of God Forgot who reject the Abiding Book as it is written in a fallen and imperfect language.
If we assume that the Aeolians, Henotheists and Stygians are amongst these heretics it gives us an additional rationale for their worship being misapplied and their magic less powerful than that used by other Malkioni - the spells don't work as well because something is lost in the translation so the sorcerer has to work much harder to master the magic.
(* except where a HW author admits that he or Greg screwed up a la the
Maboder/Dundealos mix-up)
ROGER
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