<< I'm a bit puzzled about written Western. Isn't that a writing system that
all the people of the West could read and understand even if they didn't
speak the same language.>>
The written language of the West is the 'Abiding Script' (so named because its what the Abiding Book was written in, thus proving its obvious superiority over any alternative). Its an alphabetic script, but not used to write your *own* language in, seeing as how whatever you speak is obviously a debased and profane version of the logical and precise ancestral language of Danmalastan. Instead, they write using the oldest and purest language they can get away with, i.e. Ice Age Brithini, the language from which all modern Western tongues derive. The reason they can all read and understand it is that only educated people are literate, and they all understand Ice Age Brithini (as she is written anyway). Rather like Latin in the middle ages, really.
In the Second Age there was a bit of a trend for writing in the vernacular, and you can still find a few texts written in, for instance, Loskalmi. Sadly, because most literate people can only read the Abiding Script, and don't actually know how they're supposed to *pronounce* it, they find it very difficult to read these old texts, even though they're written in their own language...
<< I've assumed that Western is a chinese-like logographic writing. >>
In the sense that the squiggly bits on the page don't bear much resemblance to how they speak, this is true*. But it is an alphabet, and there are various contradictory schemes of how to use it to write foreign words and names, should anyone be mad enough to want to write about the unwashed barbarians out in Bongoland.
<< Are some writing systems magical in Glorantha? Is Western "superior"
because of
a spell of Zzabur? >>
The Abiding Script is superior because:
a) The Westerners use it, which is evidence enough, surely?
b) It is the closest we can get today to the perfect, maximally efficient and
rigorously logical script of the Golden Age (which is what the original copy
of the Blue Book of Zzabur is written in, incidentally - pity nobody knows
how to read it any more)
c) Look, God Himself wrote in it when he penned the Abiding Book - what more
proof could you possibly want?!
<<Are the Tradetalk and the Heortling languages written using the same technique? >>
This doesn't appear to be the case, given that they are all separate Read/Write skills in RQ, which Western specifically isn't. Quite likely the same technique as each other, though, if that's what you mean.
Forward the glorious Red Army!
Trotsky
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #94
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