On Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:05:10 -0400, Rob Davenport wrote:

>I did run into some people online saying Vilani was inspired by ancient
>Sumerian with a link to this YouTube video of a guy singing Sumerian with
>an ancient style stringed instrument:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
>Makes me wonder about ancient Vilani bards singing tales like that about
>the ancient war machines and the struggles of living on Vland.

Sumerian or perhaps Akkadian; I don't recall which, but I think that
whichever one it was was confirmed by Marc. But one thing that you need to
remember, that may have been overlooked throughout this thread:

The Latin Alphabet is not native to Vilani.

When you adapt a writing system for a language that it's not native to,
you're going to get some weirdnesses, and those will depend on just who was
doing the adaptation, and under what circumstances. That's why you get
words in Croatian or Albanian that have umpty-three letters, only one of
which we would recognize as a vowel. It's also why you get some letters in
Cyrillic and Coptic that have odd resemblances to Greek and/or Hebrew
letters, and in the case of Cyrillic (including the Old Church Slavonic
variant) you have letters that look like ligatures of "I" with other
letters - they actually are.

Vilani might well be the same way, and the glyph from Vilani that was
transcribed as 'aa' might well be completely different from the one
transcribed 'a', and who knows what the linguists - or non-linguists - who
did the Accepted Transliteration were thinking when they assigned
transcribed graphemes to the phonemes they were hearing. It's entirely
possible that when the transcribers heard the sound that was eventually
transcribed as 'aa', one of them said something along the lines of "that's
a sound that has one of the funny combined symbols in the pronunciation
guides, use that", and someone else misremembered the a-e ligature (used
for the "a" in English "cat, bat, fat" etc) as being an a-a ligature, and
so wrote it as "aa" (when it would have been less incorrect to write it
"ae"). And once the "official" desk gets it, trying to change it might not
be so easy. No nefariousity required, just bureacratic inertia and
inadequately-trained linguistics researchers.

(There's actually some discussion of this sort of thing also occurring in
translation, in Diane Duane's nove _Spock's World_.)

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