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
Isn't there a source that claimed that all Westerners can read the script, even though they pronounce it differently? It's kind of hard to imagine this with characters representing sounds or syllables, but, I suppose that you might have a set of characters (Brithini?) that have been added to and deleted from as the various mainland languages diverged from the original. If you assume that written Brithini was vowel-less, that makes it easier, as different vowels could be inserted at different places (as Larry Gonick pointed out, you can say "Jehovah," but you can also say "Yahoo-Wahoo").
>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.
Or, more in keeping with the image of Westerners, alchemical symbols and mathematical formulae, either using non-standard characters or standard characters in a specific technical way.
>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.
There's also the possibility of coded language. When regular believers hear the story of how St. XYZ healed the beggar, they hear an uplifting moral tale. The liturgist decodes the story using secret knowledge to cast the blessing "Bless Health." An adept of some sort might further decode a spell -- "Cure Leprosy" or some such. Seshnegi and Loskalmi believers might sound very different reading the story out loud, but they can both tease the same benefits out of the text (should it be one shared by their churches).
I know of no reason to believe that the Godlearner rune system was a common part of Western culture in the 2nd Age, even though the system developed within that culture. Modern mathematical symbols are hardly a common part of modern society, despite the fact that the average person can recognize at least a few of them (even if that person might not know the symbol's precise meaning) and the notation derives from some of the same roots that produced the society. On the other hand, maybe everyone used those runes like crazy.
Probably, the answer is somewhere in the middle -- scriptures, etc are full of allegorical language and technical symbols that different levels of users process in different ways. Some of the symbols have sounds attached while others are merely skipped by the reader (or used to denote a gesture or ritual action -- when the liturgist sees "*^," he or she raises the chalice). Others, more in the know, use those same symbols to unlock magic. And so on.
>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.
Consider the idea further derided -- surely Sartari is descended from Stormspeech, Pelorian from some ur-Solar tongue, Western from Brithini, etc.
Peter Larsen
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