Re: Gloranthan ?! Linguistics

From: Pomeroi <pomeroi_at_KWnKc7dplja4muoOFjhIGeyeHt2KQtn_sansIl9TWdWX-wWuVgBe-hCixu1i-TalJ3f7>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 23:59:59 +0200

On 19.08.2011 23:00, bryan_thx wrote:
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>> I wonder how Gloranthan names have changed since the Dawn? For that matter, is Pavis really pronounced the way Pavis would have spoken his name?
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> I think spelling on earth tended to evolve with pronunciations, gradually getting frozen after the printing press started bringing about questions of standardization, but even then things kept drifting for a while. Languages where literacy arrived later, and pronunciations have chnaged more slowly, tend to be wonderfully easy to pronounce (I'm jealous of the Finns!).
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> That only applies to alphabet or phoneme based writing systems. Chinese gets around this issue nicely :) I always figured LM scripts would be more like the chinese system, with symbols having meaning. On the other hand, I could imagine Buserian script having essentially no relation to modern pronunciations....kind of like writing french using latin spelling, or some such.

Bryan has a good point here. First there was speech, then came writing. Speech is more important, of course. Writing is just a tool to "paint" sounds (13th Warrior), but yes, only in phonetic alphabets, in other writings you "paint" feelings, situations, status, actions... like in Egypt or China.

But still, Hervé's original question sounds interesting to me. *I* started stupidly the real world question, but we are still interested in the pronunciation of original Gloranthan names, and eventually only Greg can answer most of this. I like the phonetic writing Nick Brooke used. I would like Greg to help us out by using the same or even a TRUE phonetic system (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet ) But indeed, Greg did some here:
http://www.glorantha.com/library/prosopaedia/ scroll down to bottom. I am not sure it covers all questions, but its a start.