Signs, Sounds, and Spurious Meanings

[mfbrandi]

7 hours ago, scott-martin said:

One of the interesting things revolves around the relationship between L for Lodril, which in the sacred Dara Happan is of course the ‘awakened earth’ rune or ‘the eye in the box,’ and G is for Genert, which is clearly the Pamalt upright. This conceals one of the more profound mysteries. And as in the earthly Hebrew, we can read F for P throughout.

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Much as I love it, shouldn’t we perhaps move this symbol stuff to its own thread?

If I get time tonight, I will try to do a cleaned up Dara Happan Sacred Font decoder ring as a PDF, so those without the font installed can see what is going on.

There was a Dara Happan Sacred Alphabet Word document that used to do the rounds with the font file. For those that don’t have that — or The Fortunate Succession (buy here) — I present a PDF crib sheet so you can follow S-M — although if you are not as slow-witted as I am, you may not need it.

dara happan alphabet 1.pdf

Now the ball is in Scott-Martin’s court to provide an equivalent with his preferred pronunciations of the common-or-garden runes. The meanings you own multiple copies of the crib for.

Then extreme silliness may ensue.

Edited May 14, 2023 by mfbrandi

[Scotty]

10 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

There was a Dara Happan Sacred Alphabet Word document that used to do the rounds with the font file.

Do you have a source for this? I ask as I never come across this and I've no copy of it.

10 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

For those that don’t have that — or The Fortunate Succession (buy here) — I present a PDF crib sheet so you can follow S-M — although if you are not as slow-witted as I am, you may not need it.

FYI, Appendix E of The Fortunate Succession is here:

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/greg-stafford/stafford-library/fortunate-succession-the/dara-happan-sacred-alphabet/

 

[scott-martin]

15 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Then extreme silliness may ensue.

Definitely. So until recently I never really examined the runes as transliterating to the Roman letters since they usually function more as ideograms (hieroglyphics, 康熙部首, glyphs, तत्त्व) than a more combinatorial alphabet. While advanced sorcery may deploy long programmatic strings of runes like mantras and the dwarves can have whatever they have, this rarely emerges in the everyday linguistic experience of the theist belt, where people speak whatever mortal or spirit language gets them results while leaving the runes to be the runes that directly power spell effects. This makes sense. Building out a universal Gloranthan kabbalah would be a fairly stupid kind of mischief, right?

However, we have the Dara Happan rune set, which is explicitly alphabetic (known English transliteration) and overlaps with the post-God-Learner standard grouping in a few key respects. Most notably, the sound /t/ is written as something like for terminatus, an entity who does not appear elsewhere in FS but is clearly humakt (GROY 16).

And while since at least the court of Khordavu they have pronounced  as /z/ to make sure that modern yelm gives his initial Y to the "triangle sun" character, this political expedient does not seem to have been followed universally. When Elmal accepts the truth rune and becomes Yelmal(io) we do not pronounce the new name "Zelmal." Furthermore, the extremely archaic cult of Dayzatar and others tend to cluster /y/ and /z/ (and Y and Z) together as though trying to keep both old-school traditionalists and modern pragmatists happy. (Despite the cosmological prestige awarded his otherwise insignificant cult after historical reforms, he does not appear under that name in the sacred carver list.) All in all, I still think  was originally /y/ and the Khordavic attribution is artificial.

But even if you have two glyphs that resemble Roman letters and are pronounced roughly the same way, it's barely a curiosity worth mentioning in polite company. Where it gets interesting is when we see yumat, who would be written YMT in a consonantal system like what we know prevailed in parts of the archaic west where they spelled death's name as HUMCT and I have tended to go with a slightly more familiar HMKT for convenience. These are already transliterations so the letters are pronounced as they are in the glossaries, pivoting in use along roughly the same axes as pronunciations do in our modern earthly languages. For example, "yumat" with a slightly different aspiration on the front becomes "humat" and both are only a hasty breath or a few centuries of isolated development away from "umath." All are something like storm gods. All have a relationship with death across the theist belt. And all start out with more or less the /hyu/ complex that we might spell in English with an initial "Y" . . . which is in turn looks a lot like the other rune of modern humakt, the otherwise largely solar "truth" rune or  that "y"elmalio also has but "e"lmal really doesn't unless you're looking very closely.

OK. So the family resemblance among these entities (and keep in mind what "family resemblance" entails among the gods) resolves to an initial  and a "final" (death is always final but nothing ever really ends)  with a persistent /m/ and some vowels along the way. I initially skipped the vowels as overly complicating what in my MGF is a primarily consonantal western magical lexicography but let's reserve them for later. Two runes that resemble Roman letters and are "pronounced" much as the letters in the sacred names of entities that prominently hold those runes.

Why not more? In particular, what standard rune looks enough like our M that we can prolong this high-tension wire act until something snaps? How about ? I am doing a lot of work with archaic water societies right now as well as digging canals in the backyard. Let's say as a dumb theory that M is for something like magasta. Obviously this association does not appear in the Dara Happan sacred alphabet because for them the water rune is pronounced /o/ for oslira. They are not a sea people. Neither were the pony people of Ralios who built the Hrelar Amali pantheon and were only introduced to sramak and other deep salt forces later . . . but certain tribes were tutored by "triolini" of the lakes and rivers. And as we all know, the ancestral patriarch of the western caste peoples was half fish on his mother's side. 

Modern or even classical malkion does not take the sea rune. Mostal definitely does not. But for now, let's leave the door in the back of history open to the possibility that archaic malkion participated in symbolic processes that we now wrap up in aquatic experience like old fish in yesterday's newspaper. His teaching derives in large part from the tutelage of the western triolini, the people of nralar and so forth. In that origin, it resembles their way of life and their unique perspective. Like the fish whisperers in an old von Daniken paperback, the ontogeny of the west recapitulates its phylogeny. And gods who are especially central to his teaching can demonstrate this by taking the  and pronouncing it /m/ . . . flamal, ehilm, hykiMikyh, mata, umath, yumat, humakt. Lhankormhy. Yes, mostal. Not a sea god but a "god" by virtue of his connection to a sea god. "M" not as elemental rune here (that would come later) but as something like one of the Dara Happan honorific characters that identifies someone cosmologically important. Even dromal alone of the classical castes but not dronar.

Now obviously we might say there was no historical malkion depicted as a patriarch with a fish hat and net in periods when they tolerated representational art and smashed into an abstraction when they didn't. Maybe all this is the historical Dangkal instead or some rival culture hero with humble mortal roots or the result of a long process of early syncretism. Go for it. For me the important thing is that if we have our /m/ we can start running additional combinatorial substitutions like Sherlock Holmes trying to crack the dancing men cipher. 

After all, the /hyu/ complex also features behind the names of many of the theyalan gods who ultimately find their way into Hrelar Amali under various guises, recognitions and translations: hyurlanth, hyurmal and yes, hyurnalda. Suddenly other phonemes are in play: /r/ was always in plain sight () but what about /l/ and /n/ and /d/? And is it important that hyumath in ancient times did not incorporate a /k/ or hard /c/ but hyumakt does?

So we go hunting. /L/ may be the easiest because hyurmal in particular is a god of sexual license and hyurlanth/hyurnalda also share in this libidinal mystery within occasionally more circumscribed limits depending on how Greg was feeling in a given year. I think at their origins hyurlanth and hyurnalda are young gods with more in common with the mature trickster than they have today . . . and we are talking origins so this is part of their shared inheritance, what they have in common. In Dara Happa, the libidinal mystery that can be named is of course lodril. There are many Pelandan equivalents but their writing is complicated enough to escape scrutiny here. 

Unfortunately in the Khordavic alphabet /l/ is written as the "square sun" and so looks nothing like our L. But immediately nearby (mysteriously wedged between Appendix B and Appendix C) we see that in at least one archaic Dara Happan system they pronounced  as /g/. OK, G for genert. And modern RuneQuest players know that after the death of genert in the north the only true source of  is pamalt. We can productively ponder the root similarities between pamalt and lodril and fill in the historical record of how perhaps the secret of  died out in Dara Happa and lodril rushed in to fill that hole left in their world. Their /g/ now belongs to gerendetho. Their /p/, in the absence of proximity to living pamalt, gets taken over by pela and is written as what we would recognize as the shaman rune , which is of course fascinating in any study of how their sense of gender evolves despite all protestations. P is for pela where you have pela and P is for pamalt where you have pamalt.

And where you have pela, perversely, G is for "pamalt" and he is a dying god. Death in the earth complex takes the hard /g/ for gor because terminatus is a foreign concept. The /b/ in babeester is  her hungry axe. Only in the more genteel times we live in, alienated from direct experience of the grower ecology and its cycles (see the upcoming board game Shadows Dance), do people who don't know what to do with this rune any more classify it as revolving around the undead. We already have an undead rune and it is , "dwarf," which might be /d/ when stood up.

is the dying god in bloom. As in hebrew, /f/ = /p/ after another order. Flamal contains a repeated /l/ and an /f/. Pamalt contains an /l/ and a /p/. Both also incorporate that /m/ but in the "p"amalt phase you also see in the post-God-Learner spelling. I would not be surprised to hear that this terminal death rune is swallowed or secret in general usage in the south. They don't really need it. It's already there whenever you cut a hornbeam and sharpen a spear. It goes away again when you're done with the spear, plant it and it roots in that great dirt they have down there.

Anyway, somewhere within all of this you will find the secret of the /l/ in hyurlanth, hyurnalda and the third mind between them, the hyurmal. Use any of these runes that work for you but maybe  is the best.

/K/ or hard /c/ has been discussed. There may have been a deeper trick involved here where  rotated left became the K and  rotated right became C but as with the Khordavic alphabet I don't think there was much practical difference in which direction the sacrificial man was facing. I like HMKT and karmania. You might prefer humct and carmania. Either way, it is ty Kora teK, two Ks for the queen of the book of the dying way, psychopomp of the earth complex. 

/N/ and /z/ or /s/ are a little more challenging given the rune set we have to work with. Dara Happa is little help on /n/ but the occasional confusion between /m/ and /n/ in the archaic documents (much like modern Japanese) makes me think the /n/ that distinguishes hyurlanth and hyurnalda indicates their foreigner status. They come from a slightly different system. Until a better rune shows up, I tentatively think we would have originally written them with the  as well and pronounced their names something like /hyurlamt, hyurmalda/, which is obviously unwieldy on the tongue and would have invited something easier. None of this rules out the hypothetical vestigial presence of two separate "water" influences here to reflect competing malkion and nralar currents, which, come to think of it, is why the modern rune is doubled to reflect its broader scope.

But /z/ (and especially /zz/) may or may not suggest  turned on its side to defy its natural flow. Khordavu mysteriously pronounced  as /v/, which is interesting. And there are other letters. All of this is provisional and can be changed when evidence is put forward. For example, I keep glossing over the vowels because I was never too happy with the convenient way the Khordavic alphabet is a straight substitution cipher for middle english more or less. Did they really need a /q/ and a /k/ and a /kh/ and a /ch/ and exactly our vowels? Hard to say. Mysterious. However, the first thing I would look into would be differentiating /y/ from an aspirated /h/ or the /u/ that is written  . . . maybe the /y/ in yomat and the /h/ in humct are actually signs of initial disorder and not what we would now call truth and the "truth rune" exemplified in the modern sword cult is originally scribal error.

[scott-martin]

There are other confusions as well. For example, in at least one archaic Pelorian script, something that strongly resembles a slightly more naturalistic  was used to write /e/ and so we could explore cases where "scribal error" ended up transliterating /e/ for /f/ or vice versa much as we would run into trouble if an E lost its lower bar or an F nearby acquired it. Possibly this is why E is for "elf" but the dominant sound in that word is arguably the F for flamal, why some lists of grain goddesses include both the familiar frona as well as erona, why the erontree is in Fronela (perhaps they pronounce it more like farontree, forontree) and so on. 

Interestingly but trivially, this would make EWF something like a palindrome with a form of  on either end and  in the middle. Maybe that's how they started that particular adventure and why people have a hard time translating the glyph today. We know they had strange botany.

And we can guess that the initial /e/ in that archaic Pelorian plant rune was probably short for the strange botanical phenomenon now remembered as the "yarm" or "earm" tree, the recombinant chimera generating all forests and fields. Yarm probably did not take the  we would assign it today and definitely would not take the  for stormy /hyu/ . . . E was for elamal.

Hey wait a minute

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Khordavu mysteriously pronounced  as /v/, which is interesting.

Or just German.

I always think of the crown of Mastery as one worn by the Devil — with prongs upon which to impale its Victims. As a perverted thing, Mastery does not have the expected M orientation but the inverted W. (I always like an it’s a dead one of those joke.) Or maybe you are just seeing my anarchistic tendencies leak out: mastery —> wastery —> wastefulness. (Vastery —> Vasterie takes us to another set of scrolls entirely.)

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

maybe the /y/ in yomat and the /h/ in humct are actually signs of initial disorder and not what we would now call truth and the "truth rune" exemplified in the modern sword cult is originally scribal error.

The beast is constrained by some (per)version of law in the dragonscale rune, but in truth it has escaped from its cage — savage, wild, untamed — ask any Humakti broo, or any cold equation. No scribal error, then. (But disorder is not wrong, either: from Humaktsson to born-again ZZ troll is not such a step.)

Is it in any way odd that while people and gods in Glorantha have “Gloranthan” names, I cannot name the runes in any Gloranthan language? I would probably just reach for the owner’s name. Not that one would want to go the full Klingon or Silmarillion.

Right, better do some more real work!

[scott-martin]

27 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Not that one would want to go the full Klingon or Silmarillion

God no. That would be crazy because as we all know this is not the game where the analytic philosophers ended up and which effectively ceases to engage with structural approaches in the late '60s.

I would not be surprised to see a wholly triangular script deployed in sorcery to record and communicate the evolutions of LAW as you have hinted at here. Such a system might work a little like Japanese heraldry with its radial symmetries (and so a little like the devices of the Noldor in said Silmarillion) and a little like Hegel or at least the more materialistic interpretations. The implied "trinary logic" is designed to give avowed dwarves pause but otherwise this is the route humans take when they want to learn dwarftongue. 

Anyway the important thing is that the erasanchula who became ehilm () got greedy for  like all incomplete creatures and took it for his own in the lands that become Dara Happa . . . in his arrogance it acquires the dot of ego ("the solar eye") and the pronunciation /y/ for ehilm. Likewise laderal claims the  and it becomes the pelorian /l/. Other gods of  and  carry on with their common runes. Ultimately (after Khordavu's era) the (y)ehilm rune is hammered free from its triangular / sorcerous / legalistic entanglements and a slightly more "humble" but also smooth  rises, spherical this time but still imperial.

And the secret is that the empty triangle inverted and filled is the dragon.
 

[mfbrandi]

6 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

this is not the game where the analytic philosophers ended up

But perhaps Genertela is where they started out, or at least passed through on their way from Homer to Plato and Aristotle — and then the long trudge to Frege and Russell, and then …

[Eff]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

/K/ or hard /c/ has been discussed. There may have been a deeper trick involved here where  rotated left became the K and  rotated right became C but as with the Khordavic alphabet I don't think there was much practical difference in which direction the sacrificial man was facing. I like HMKT and karmania. You might prefer humct and carmania. 
 

Let's get stupid. We've got a goddess named Charmain who presumably had some cultic existence around Lake Oronin before Syranthir arrives. We have a "child" of hers, Carmanos, who gives the followers of Syranthir an endonym and eventually a toponym- Carmanians, Carmania. I think we have a bit of a shibboleth situation here- Charmain uses that pesky /ch/, Syranthir's followers say it "sibboleth" (well, "carmain" or "carman"), and then we have the terminal masculine -os added on. Leaving aside the question of whether this is "Charmain's boy" or "Boymoding Charmain" or "Char Aznable", the noble caste are karmanoi, firmly with a hard-c or /k/. But I suspect that the Pelandan peasantry of Teelo Estara's day would have referred to themselves as under the reign of the "Charmanians" (the dipthong compressing down), part of the empire of "Charmania". /ch/ is supposedly rare and foreign to Dara Happa, but Charmain herself would also be foreign to Peloria, given that Lake Oronin replaced a "mountain of fire". 

I suspect linguistic difficulties like these would be understood as part of the Combine and Separate sorcerous actions acting on gods/the world... 

[scott-martin]

() = malkion, the patriarch, "name of the father of the law." note that the second  is the neliom /n/ form, sometimes called "mem final" in orthodox proceedings. the  has been stolen
 = talar, lawspeaker, justice balanced between death / necessity and magic / inspiration
 = horal, "the brother from another mother," stormy but not necessarily fatal
 = dromal, the younger brother, practical person
 = menena, ancestral principle, the witch (compare to )
 = zzabur, the man in the high castle, antichrist
 = dronar, replacement worker, no access to "mem initial" /m/ 
 = lhankormy, the new life
 = neliom, "reverse malkion," father of the other brother
 

Edited May 15, 2023 by scott-martin
lacan

[mfbrandi]

15 minutes ago, Eff said:

Leaving aside the question of whether this is "Charmain's boy" or "Boymoding Charmain" or "Char Aznable"

Oh, yeah, we know that guy:

Spoiler

Carmanian? Schmarmenian! Շահնուր Վաղինակ Ազնավուրեան

[mfbrandi]

On the wearing out of signs. I saw this quoted disapprovingly in a book review — the reviewer didn’t like such blatant insertion into what purported to be a translation of the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus:

—————————————————————————————
No,
this isn’t the famous Cyclops; this is the other, the son
of Eilatus, king of somewhere or other. The names that once
had meaning are wearing away to bare phonemes. Time’s
passage is stupefying, and epics, if they delay,
cannot prevent forever the ruin they ought to defy.
We’re nearly done.
— David Slavitt
—————————————————————————————

I mean, that is some kind of genius, right? Should be a set text for Gloranthan fourth wall-breaking illuminates and tricksters and for wor(l)d-weary bards everywhere.

Edited May 20, 2023 by mfbrandi
the damned whitespace