On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Mark A Mandel wrote: > 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. Maybe SKZB stripped out all the maps/paintings/psiprints from the Paarfiad. I take it you think I should have written "oral". > 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. I.e., you're willing to trust the semi-canonical "Jhereg" on this critical matter (and SKZB generally). > [...] 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. I think I agree for the native language but I rather doubt this is the case for Dragaeran. Anyway, it's not clear to me that a language that uses morphemes can't distinguish between "Morrolan" and "Morollan". "Mor" might be "star" or "dark", but so might "Mo". Actually we know that "rollan" is likely a unit or group (from M's father), so "Morollan" makes a good deal of sense to me.