>BUT I am not so convinced that Ice Age Brithini (actually,
>pre-Ice Age : this is Golden Age Brithini, isn't it?) used an
>alphabetic script.
Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as a Golden Age Brithini. They don't really exist until sometime later, although they are largely descended from the Enrovali.
As for the writing script, this is what was once up at www.glorantha.com:
Tadenit invented writing by making marks in the dirt.
His family invented writing tools, several pictorial
scripts, and experimented with every media.
Tadenit one time got all his catalogers together, and
they made the First Book. It had all their knowledge
in it at that time. They gave it to Zzabur, who had it
copied and then sent it to the Great City. At the city
the scholars looked it over and made a few experimental
changes, and then wrote down the Book of Real Script and
gave it to Zzabur, who then showed it to the Tadeniti.
They were astonished at this, because Zzabur had revealed
to them a pure distillation of their own magic. They copied
the Real Script and took the copies home with them.
Afterwards, Real Script was the written form for all
documents and books of Danmalastan, and descendant forms of
it are still used today.
Hence I'd say that the evolution of writing scripts in the west happened in the Golden Age and after that, it's just modifications of the Real Script.
>Remember that we're speaking of a writing system that's
>*at least* 2.500 - 3.000 years old (or 3.500 - 4.000 years
>older than comparable RW C20/21 writing systems ; if the
>'Brithini Latin' camp is in the right).
Over 15 000 years in fact (since the first disappearance of the Sun). But then we don't know how long the Golden Age (or rather the Third Action Period) was.
>The basic unresolved problem is whether the Malkioni continue
>to use the 'Core Runes' as idiograms or not : if so, then written
>"modern Brithini" isn't fully alphabetic (because key concepts
>would be routinely written with those idiograms, which are very
>basically unlike the abbreviations used in Latin manuscripts and
>early printed texts)
One could make the same argument for modern languages for many key concepts (largely mathematical) are written down using logograms (+, -, x, /, $, =, <, >, _at_, & being the ones on my keyboard) rather than being spelled out (unless IIRC one is cursed to program in COBOL). It's just that when the script itself is logographic that one starts to have problems...
For this reason alone, the issue of whether logograms still exist in written western becomes trivial. As for the abbreviations used in Latin manuscripts, yes, the Brithini do have those: Talar Malaskan Phillippe was known to his troops (and Arkat was one of them) as "Tamp".
Peter Larsen:
>Do the Waertagi have a script? One imagines elaborate navigational
>notation, and they must have had some sort of record keeping for their
>merchant activities. Would they just use Western?
AFAIK they just use Western or a variation of Real Script.
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