This seems the obvious answer to me, as well. I've never quite understood why there is furious opposition to it, either.
Basically, there are two camps. The case for the first one is pretty much as you summarise it - it seems the natural position if you take the statement about several mutually incompatible languages sharing a writing system literally, and I see no good reason not to take it literally.
The competing camp is to interpret 'the several western tongues share a common written form' as 'the several western tongues have no written form, but the cultures that use them share a mutual written language that is related'. This seems to me to be a very big difference, but others disagree.
The summary of positions seems to come down to some folk want the West to be more like a familiar medieval European (or Arabic) model, and so they go for 'Brithini Latin' even though its a stretch from what is said, and some folks want the West to be less like a familiar model and more uniquely its own, and so they favour a Brithini Kanji model. Many dubious argument of various varieties has been introduced on both sides (some of them by me), including varying explanations of how much the Runes (which are of Western origin) are related to Western script. I think ALL the arguments introduced have been pretty inconclusive (including mine, and Alexs, and Nicks, etc), and it comes down to how personal taste (and to a lesser extent, how literally you take sources).
I'm not sure which exactly ended up as the official view. Julian asserted that it was idiographic and sparked of a fresh skirmish, but Trotsky's summary is probably the most recent. Trotsky, is this the official Gregly view?
Trotsky wrote:
>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...
If its Ice Age Brithini, surely they can go and ask the Brithini? In Loskalm, for example, a fairly large number of the educated populace have probably attended the University at Sog? And while the Brithini at Sog probably do not date actually from the Ice Age, I can't see them being so removed in terms of generations of Brithini that they no longer even remember how it was pronounced.
>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)
Bad luck for all those sorcerers who have the Blue Book as their grimoire, in place of the Abiding book, then.
OK, so we have to assume that the modern sorcerers who use it do not use the original Golden Age version, but a modernised one.
Even so, I find it pretty unlikely that no one knows how to read the original Blue Book of Zzabur - given that there are modern translations at least, and you also have the resources of institutions like the Sog City university (and if translating the Blue Book of Zzabur and other old Brithini texts isn't exactly the sort of thing a Brithini University would devote its greatest resources to, I don't know what is), it seems like it would be a reasonable assumption that its understood. Of course, there might remain arguments over the specific meaning of particular words and phrases (much like modern day biblical scholars). (Of course, you don't need a language problem for that to happen - cf above description of disagreements among Gloranthan scholars)
Cheers David ------------------------------
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