> 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?
Not so specifically.
Think 5th century AD and the proto-romance dialects of Latin.
And Latin _continues_ to be written and spoken even today, even though no-one has it as their mother tongue (although modern Sard retains some of the Latin cases, much of the vocabulary, and I believe similar verb endings).
Or more specifically, think of all pre-20th century dialects, where everyone spoke their own local dialect, and also had more or less knowledge of the officialese language. In the West, the officialese is Brithini, and the other tongues are dialects, and are also purposely kept from straying too far from the Abiding Book's perfect tongue by the clergy, nobility, etc.
> 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").
Actually no, because if linguistic shift does occur in the West, then the consonants won't be stable either.
But I think that linguistic shift is much slower than RW, anyway, because magic and functional rituals will induce far more conservatism amongst the populations. IMO
> 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).
Certainly, some people interpret the texts in that manner.
> I know of no reason to believe that the Godlearner rune system was
> a common part of Western culture in the 2nd Age,
OK, proto-GL system.
It's worth remembering that the GLs started out as a sect of people devoted to the study of the Abiding Book, and that it's the ruin of the GLs that led to the modern malkioni sects.
So the GL system is at least tangentially linked to the Abiding Book and the Abiding Tongue.
> >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.
I'm thinking about a Green Age ur-language, before the original destruction of the original mixed world.
Anyway, it's very difficult to apply modern linguistics to this problem without assuming the existence of such an ur-language, because one of the very foundations of linguistics is that all speech evolved from a single root. Ob-Glorantha, from Grandfather Mortal.
Chuck out this premise, and any linguistic** analysis of Gloranthan languages will sudenly become inherently unfeasible.
Alternatively, you could wait until the flying saucers land and linguistics professors get exposed to entirely alien parlances, and revise their theories accordingly ... :-)
Julian Lord
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