> 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'.
I fear to get involved in this argument, but here goes: Couldn't it just mean that the Western languages all share a writing system? Sort of the way that (modern) French, Italian, English, German, Latin, etc. all share the same basic set of characters and rules about how to separate words, sentences, etc. There are differences -- extra symbols, rules on capitalization, etc. and these differences grow as the system gets applied to languages farther afield (e.g. Chinese is a nightmare), but any reader of a European Roman Alphabet language can make at least a stab at pronouncing a word in another European Roman Alphabet language. I don't imagine that Western languages are all that foreign to each other, anyway.
I, personally, would prefer the West to "be its own thing," as little like Medieval Europe as Dara Happa is like the ancient Middle East. However, since a lettered Western script suits my theories, I'm happy for it to be lettered.
Your comments on Ice Age Brithini and the Blue Book of Zzabur are on target. I think the "lost in the mists of time" dodge should be used sparingly in a world where those mists aren't all that deep.... Especially because that excuse has been used vigorously already -- the Bright Empire, the Godlearners, the EWF -- one wonders how the Cult of the Blue Moon gets any sleep, they're so busy supressing knowledge.... It's a languange used by many people, after all, not Craigspider's highschool yearbook information. If you want Ice Age Brithini to be unavailable, certainly it would be easier to say that the pure form of the language takes many decades to fully understand, so mere mortals are out of luck...
Peter Larsen
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