So I'm reading the newest Lady Trent book

[conuly]

which of course is not about her but her granddaughter, and not in the form of memoirs but in various people's letters and journal entries and receipts and oh yes, lots of translation of ancient myth. With footnotes. I think close to 50% of this book might be translation, with an additional 5% being footnotes of said translation.

This is 100% my jam, and I could read a thousand more books like this. I WANT MORE.

If, however, you like a little more action in your plots, pass this by. Yak herding was more exciting.

One thing in which I want to defend the ancients, both in the real world and not. Early in the translation one character complains that the Draconeans had an unnecessarily convoluted writing system, and our main character points out that it appears to be the first writing system so it's not that surprising that they didn't get it wholly right on the first try.

That's a fair point, however, it skips an important consideration.

To people who have seen the advantages of widespread literacy, and especially the advent of print, it's self-evident that you want a writing system to be simple and transparent. But is this obvious to scribes and rulers who haven't seen such a society?

Scribes might complain to themselves about the difficulty, but changing the writing system to make it easier would only serve to put themselves out of business, going in one generation from valued scholars to... nothing, really. I suppose they might put themselves to inventing and learning a simpler system if the ruling class told them "Do it or else", but is the ruling class going to do that? Sure, the peasants might like to write sales receipts and love letters, but what else are they going to write? Pornography? Heresy? Treason?

Writing is risky. Better keep it prestigious and difficult and elite.

Comments

[dark_phoenix54]

What series is this book?

[conuly]

https://www.goodreads.com/series/107373-the-memoirs-of-lady-trent

[wpadmirer]

Yeah, I think reading and writing were definitely controlled by the elite. Remember, it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write in the USA for years.

[conuly]

Indeed. Many people know that hangul, the Korean alphabet, was invented precisely to spread literacy among the people, as Chinese characters were not very well-suited for writing Korean. This was very far-sighted.

What they don't know is that after its invention its popularity waxed and waned as successive governments were uncertain about the wisdom of, among other things, encouraging the poor to seek justice against the elites.

[skygiants]

I don't know about other media, but there is a whole 24-episode kdrama about this and it's really fascinating - Tree With Deep Roots, which covers the historical King Sejong's attempts to create an easy-to-learn writing system conducive to widespread literacy, and the subsequent attempts of various threatened political elites to murder everyone involved so that the new alphabet never happens because they find the idea of it so existentially heretical and threatening. I have no idea how much of the political conflicts around literacy portrayed in the show are based on known historical fact, but I've been hunting for some kind of nonfiction book on the period so that I can find out, because the whole thing is really fascinating to me.

[oloriel]

That's such an important point about the history of writing. I've seen complaints about different writing systems and scripts being inaccessible (and, in the case of fictional writing systems, "unrealistic" for that reason). As if writing wasn't a specialist skill for centuries in the very real world! As if either scribes (who, after all, earned their living with their specialist skill!) or readers (who, again, earned their living because they could decipher writing!) or the ruling class, literate or illiterate, had much reason to care about accessibility. They could hire specialists if they needed them, and as for the masses, just as you say, "what else are they going to write"? What are they going to read, for that matter? (I recall reading the letters of an early Anglo-Saxon scholar who argued that you absolutely shouldn't translate the Bible into Anglo-Saxon, because there were so many things in it that would give (uneducated) people bad ideas, along the lines of "Well if the patriarchs had several wives then why can't I? It's in the Bible!" So the people shouldn't be able to read the text for themselves, because someone needed to keep close watch and take care they didn't discover the naughty bits, or explain why they couldn't try that at home, at least.)

So yeah. Who knows whether they even wanted to get it right!

[conuly]

I don't know if the murdering everybody plots were true, but I do know that hangul was alternatively promoted and suppressed as various governments had their own opinions on King Sejong's ideas about equal justice for the poors.

[conuly]

Unrealistic? Unless a writing system is literally more difficult than jury-rigging Chinese characters to work for a non-Sinitic language, it's not that unrealistic.

When it comes to literacy, "good enough" is, for most purposes, well... good enough.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

And magical! Only those specially consecrated and dedicated may learn the difficult and perilous art of Words That Stay. It's greatly to the advantage of a priestly caste, to be the sole gatekeepers of literacy. Magi are always inventing new and more convoluted runes and secret languages with which to keep their secrets.

LOL, I devised my own when I was ten, and have never taught anyone else how to read it. I use it for writing down anything I don't want anyone else to read. My mother had a +3 super-power of code-breaking; she could read any simple cipher without difficulty, so my writing-system doesn't correspond to the English alphabet, is written right-to-left, has no breaks between words, and some letters are written in what looks like two characters. I made it as obscure as I possibly could, so no one would ever read my pornography, heresy, treason, unflattering personal opinions and embarrassing personal problems, and it's worked just fine.

[conuly]

Now you have to add some weird drawings to it, and ensure that it's stored away for a few hundred years. Voila, you are the next Voynich!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

LOL, now there's a thought!