Re: Constructed Languages in History

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Paul Bennett wrote:

>=20
> I have to be honest, and say that I've yet to see a magickal script that =
didn't
> look _incredibly_ corny, but maybe I'm just young, brash and inexperience=
d.  It
> strikes me that any self respecting thaumaturgist would use a logographic
> script, but I can't for the life of me explain why...
>=20
It of course terribly authentic, if a magickal script is tacky. I mean, I
used to know an archeologist, and he showed me some twelfth or thirteenth
century pottery he had found with inscriptions he couldn't make sense of -
 comb-like crosses, circles with dots and whatnot. I recognized them as
the symbols and letters presented in the clavicula salomnis, as authentic
as you can get, but they weren't any less tacky for being old ;-).

Strangely enough, the magical versions of Tibetan (as shown by Bacot
_Grammaire du Tib=E9tain Litt=E9raire: tome I et II: index Morphologique
(langue litt=E9raire et langue parl=E9e_, 1946/49) are just as bad. And
the great seal script Chinese characters used in daoist seals don't
look as good as even the plainest printing font.

Perhaps that's because neither magical script is used as often as plain
script and thus cannot develop into something natural.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt