Writing styles of Zalanthas

[Teleri]

A thought came to my mind while I was practicing some calligraphy earlier today: what sort of writing technique would the races of Zalanthas have developed?  Of course, only the literate would have any use for the writing and reading, and the majority of the population of the world probably would have no use for it...but I was just curious.

I imagine it would depend on the language what sort of writing was used.  I would think that sirihish would use something like standard letters to spell out words (though different from our alphabet, each letter would have its own sound and whatnot), because of a certain room description somewhere defining the actions of scribes.  Mirukkim, probably runes or something like Cyrillic, due to the nature of dwarves and the language.  Allundean, I would imagine would use heiroglyphs because of the tribal nature of the elves, they would likely just use rough sketches of basic objects to convey deeper meaning.  As for heshrak, I would think the gith might use ritual-based runes and scratches due to their harsh customs.  Cavilish, due to the merchant-based nature of the language, I would see best using something like heiroglyphs as well, and Bendune with the Arabic or Sanskrit text.  Whatever the halfling language is (I forget), I best picture characters like in Chinese or Japanse...forgot what the exact term for them was, though.

Anyways...what are everyone else's thoughts on what certain writing styles look like?  Can these really be defined, or is it one of those things where it's what the individual player pictures, and whatever that is goes?  I'm just curious, and maybe I'm wrong in assuming that each language has a writing system developed from it.  I'm particularly interested in what the staff envisioned these writing styles as being similar to in the real world, if anything at all...just because they're all authoritative and such.

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

Wow. Those all sound like fairly sound theories. I would like to challenge, however:

I would think the gith might use ritual-based runes and scratches due to their harsh customs.

This sounds (to me) that you think gith writing might be primative. However, in the Heshrak helpfiles it states:

Requiring a strong sense of culture to assist them in maintaining their lives in the face of a high death rate, their written language was greatly developed.

That is, due to the fact that the older members of their society died often, and they needed some way of passing on their beliefs and customs, the written form of Heshrak is highly sophisticated... Maybe even more than the spoken form.  :shock:

Just a thought.

[Stroker]

Teleri wrote:

Whatever the halfling language is (I forget), I best picture characters like in Chinese or Japanse...forgot what the exact term for them was, though.

It's Kentu and you're just saying that because they're both short, aren't you?

[Stroker]

Hehe, oh yeah - almost forgot, there is no written form of Kentu .... or at least that's what the docs say.