Re: An ancient conlang rediscovered

--- Clint Jackson BAKER <litrex2@...> wrote:
> And then the Zinuvians grew up and became Ancient
> Romans.  Very cute, very clever hiding of cognates.
>
> Peace
> Clint
>
Actually the story is slightly more twisted than I let
on.  Since Zinuvian has been a dead language for more
than 14 million years nobody has a clue how it might
have been pronounced.  What's worse is that the
original alien texts were pictographic and so it fell
to the early scholars of the language to coin "names"
for each pictogram as they idfentified its meaning.
Thus the names of the glyphs, which have, for all
practial purposes, come to be "standins" for the
actual Zinuvian words, tend to have their origins in
various earth languages.

Clearly these "names" are not at all realated to how
the Zinuvian pictograms might have actually been
pronounced by that ancient alien civilization.

--gary