Literate Tribals

[jcljules]

"Bendune follows in the nomadic language convention of using seven vowels for speaking and no vowels for writing."

http://www.armageddon.org/intro/tablelands.html

So does this mean that elders and important people in the nomadic tribes might just be able to write?? Or did some bored templar invent a way to write bendune down for absolutely no purpose?

[Yam]

I'm pretty sure you already know the answer to this one.

[Rairen]

Tagging onto this...

... How much trouble would a commoner from the cities get into if they started to invent their own written language?  (I thought of doing this once, when my character had to keep track of a massive inventory and needed a ledger, but erred on the side of not wanting to die.)

[Yam]

Tagging onto this...

... How much trouble would a commoner from the cities get into if they started to invent their own written language?  (I thought of doing this once, when my character had to keep track of a massive inventory and needed a ledger, but erred on the side of not wanting to die.)

Noisy execution or quiet execution, depending on what city they were in.

[Tisiphone]

Tagging onto this...

... How much trouble would a commoner from the cities get into if they started to invent their own written language?  (I thought of doing this once, when my character had to keep track of a massive inventory and needed a ledger, but erred on the side of not wanting to die.)

A lot.

[tortall]

Tagging onto this...

... How much trouble would a commoner from the cities get into if they started to invent their own written language?  (I thought of doing this once, when my character had to keep track of a massive inventory and needed a ledger, but erred on the side of not wanting to die.)

If you wanted to keep something like this icly, I would say sketch a general outline, and draw symbols for what's in each trunk. Like a skull for bones, a feather for archery supplies, ect.

[Rairen]

Tagging onto this...

... How much trouble would a commoner from the cities get into if they started to invent their own written language?  (I thought of doing this once, when my character had to keep track of a massive inventory and needed a ledger, but erred on the side of not wanting to die.)

If you wanted to keep something like this icly, I would say sketch a general outline, and draw symbols for what's in each trunk. Like a skull for bones, a feather for archery supplies, ect.

Yeah, but then... you want to be able to differentiate between shells and shards of it... and then there's leggings vs. cloaks vs. spare cloth... and there's different kinds of gems... and... yeah, next thing you know, your high wisdom character has a rudimentary written language (admittedly, with enough time on their hands, but I had that in spades).

[jstorrie]

Commoners get away with being literate in Cavilish, now and then, and I think the understanding is because a) Cavilish is not great for writing about non-mercantile stuff and 2) Cavilish literacy is very carefully controlled, tracked, and restricted. If you tried to make your own language IG, I bet you'd probably get away with it as long as a) it was relatively useless and/or 2) not many other people could use it.

The helpfiles definitely make clear that written Bendune exists. Whether or not tribals exist who can still read it is Find Out IC territory.

[Jingo]

Eh heh.

Find out IC.

That is all.