On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Philip Hart wrote: #On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: # #> the authoritative representation in our alphabet of the given name of #> the lord of Castle Black, whose meaning is "Dark Star" in the language #> of the Silites, is "Morrolan", with double-R and single-L. # #How do we know? The "Texts" may be entirely verbal records... 1. That they most assuredly are, since they incorporate no maps, graphics, illustrations, or any other content than words. 2. However, those words, in the form in which we have them, are not spoken but written -- actually, printed -- and the spellings which are used for them may be taken as canonical, insofar as any text on these subjects we have is canonical. That is, the spelling "Morrolan", with double-R and single-L, is authoritative in our alphabet regardless of how it may be represented in Dragaeran symbols or Eastern characters. Indeed, from the discussions of writing that appear therein I infer that Dragaeran is normally written in characters representing a word or a morpheme, like Chinese and Japanese in our world, rather than in an alphabet such as the Roman, the Cyrillic, the Hebrew, or the Devanagari. But that is another story. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel http://cracksandshards.com a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]