I think I'll double post ... <g>
There's been a lot of confusion between language and script in this ever-so-old ever-so-arcane thread. I personally agree completely that the Brithini linguistic family can confidently be based on latin and the romance languages, rather than on the semitic tongues or Chinese agglutination (although an old French Broos fanzine article implicitly supported the agglutinative model). But IIRC it has been at least semi-officially stated somewhere (don't ask me where) that the scriptural system used is more similar to the arabic than the latin, which is to say that Brithini is written using a cursive stream of consonants and no vowels.
But something else to ponder is that ancient scripts _always_ used "special characters" which were annotations representing entire syllables, prefixes, suffixes, whatever (because paper was EXPENSIVE), and that Brithini scripts are likely to use similar systems for similar reasons (but does the Abiding Book do so ? One for the theologians !).
To give you a better idea, if this is meaningless to you, &, x, #, and % are examples of special characters in modern Western script.
Me in 2000 : Julian Lord: "It does now appear that Western script is ideographic, after all..." ...
Well, I'd still defend this POV somewhat, for magical reasons, from what has been published in HQ. Western spellbooks are non-magical formularies telling wizards and/or sorcerors how to cast spells. It follows that magical concepts can be communicated using Brithini script, and it seems to me that certain magical concepts are only expressible in a mundane script by using an ideograph, aka a Rune.
If
a) Western spellbooks are non-magical formularies and
b) the GL Runes represent a Western sorcerors' worldview,
then it follows that the GL Runes are not inherently magical
as the Dragon Pass Runes are, but that they are linguistic symbols
representing the magical concepts referred to.
Therefore these Runes are ideographs, and Brithini is at least partially written using ideographic symbols. I would move, in a conservative manner, that the Runes are special characters in a basically phonetic script.
As far as Western parlances are concerned, there's not much to suggest that they shouldn't be based on a RW romance languages analogy, but OTOH New Pelorian is _strongly_ linked to latin, where Western languages aren't, and the differences between the two analogies need to be worked out. FYI 2000 years ago, latin was part of a group of languages including the Celtic group and Etruscan. It was also somewhat related to Greek.
My much-derided opinion that all of the human languages of Glorantha are descended from an original "Mantongue" is, I think, the only explanation for these various analogies that can hold water.
But of course, this doesn't help us discover what the various Western scripts look like, except that the information in HeroQuest does seem to suggest that the GL Runes are ideograms, NOT magical foci.
Whether these Runes are used as consonants or vowels in ordinary writing or not is one for the speculators ...
Julian Lord
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