As several messages have suggested, the notion of alphabets galore is
perhaps dubious. I'd advance that uz, among others, don't have alphabets
- -- they have pseudo-pictograms.
If uz *have* time, then their "writing" is probably detailed bas reliefs, detailing as much as possible. Since it's not, uz writing (like hooman) is intended to give simplifications; the thing is, it's a simplified _darksense_, not _visual_ image, so the images are a bit weird at best. And in "better" uz writing (intended for show) density and material composition become crucial components.
To make things even more difficult, uz (with that fab hearing ability) are hearing far more than a human can when listening to another uz: there are "overtones" and "undertones" extending into the supersonic and subsonic that can change meanings of letters. Two words that sound the same to humans can mean different things (a debt owed here to Chinese, of course). So human transliteration of uz words are a bit dubious at the best of times.
Turning to writing style, the crucial thing (as Peter Larsen points out
- -- uz don't see well) is that it's three dimensional. Uz writing is
intended to be darksensed; a human would essentially need to run their
hand over it, like braille (or, as Nessus suggests, the tongue -- surely
more sensitive). Luckily, troll senses are good enough that relatively
small differences in height and shape can
Finally: I'd suggest it's almost impossible for humans to learn more than a very small amount of written darktongue. The problem is, the characters resonate to uz senses -- the pictograms "look" like what they're supposed to, but without darktongue it's very difficult to get a true feeling for this.
And to repeat something that, I believe Dan McCluskey offered years ago
- -- most uz can't learn other written languages, either, because without
some heavy magic* they can't use them. So they have to train good
trollkin slaves who can be trusted to read for them...
The upshot of all this is that darktongue is not "dark orkish" or "generic evil language" or something that characters just magically learn -- it's tremendously difficult (the Inheritor series by Cherryh gives a great idea of it, I think), and very alien. And it's the *easy* non-human language to read... ;)
James Frusetta
Powered by hypermail