On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Philip Hart wrote: #> #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. Quite possible, but unprovable, and as far as I know not supported by any evidence. #I take it you think I should have written "oral". Indeed, if that's what you meant. #> 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). Have you a better suggestion? And as to the canonicality of Jhereg, while it is known to contain some significant Cracks, it is no less canonical than any other of Mr. Bruce's printed volumes on the subject. I explicitly exclude "A Dream of Passion", which is neither printed nor a volume, and that RPG production whose name I have forgotten and which I have thankfully never seen. #> [...] 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. I haven't got time now to look up the quote. It has something to do with a single symbol of one of the Eastern languages' being able to represent part or all of a Dragaeran syllable or word. As for the rest of your paragraph, it would be perfectly sensible, when writing in English, to spell the name of the capital of Russia as "Mosko" (it isn't supposed to run with "cow"). But the existing standard in English dictates the spelling "Moscow", so that's what we use. Similarly, we have an existing standard in Mr. Brust's works for the English spelling of names and words from the world of Dragaera, and that is what we should follow. -- Mark A. Mandel http://cracksandshards.com a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]