I'd agree--learning New Pelorian (which the heortlings probably call something like "Moon Speech" and becoming lunar. I would guess most Heortlings aren't very aware of illumination per se--although they may have heard horror stories about lunars who can abuse and rob the gods with impunity.
I suspect that New Pelorian is stunningly flexible by Gloranthan standards. For example, I suspect that Heortling has differing pronouns depending relationship, so there is something like: you (kin), you (stranger), and you(foreigner). Because of the way language guides thought, for most Heortlings you pretty much can't think of someone without classifying them in this way. Now, Heortling is probably incredibly less detailed than old Dara Happan which no doubt has a dozen words for "you" depending on rank, seven ways to say "yes," and twice that many ways to say "no." By contrast, in New Pelorian "you" just means the person being addressed, no matter whether they are your king, your slave, a stranger, or a chaos monstrosity. This makes it much easier to talk about foreigners as being people, amongst other things. Matters as simple as this are apt to make people who've learned New Pelorian seem frequently weird and dangerous to their Heortling kin.
I'm sure there are also issues of structure, where New Pelorian lets you state odd, circular, or self-contradictory thoughts that most other languages probably don't support without broken grammar ("I am my mother." For example), but most people steeped in another language first are probably slow to take advantage of these liberties.
I suspect the process of learning New Pelorian is a little bit like learning the HW rules. At first it all seems very strange and insufficiently structured, but eventually it soaks in that it lets you do (say) anything! Some will remain suspicious of this freedom, while others will embrace it. These latter are the ones that are in danger of becoming Lunarized.
-Bryan (a big fan of the freedom of the HW rules....)
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