Thank you for actually giving me criticism, other than "Ho-ho, no no." I honestly appreciate it.
It's definitely not my intention to make anybody overly constrained by this, no more than I imagine Napanii (as an old Caldari language or as a state
lingua franca) is intended to constrain people. My only intention is to create a basis for an asset that may (however little) help make the roleplay of EVE more immersive.
I don't want this to be a one-person project, because it won't get anywhere if anyone regards it as such. All comments and items of criticism will be valued, as long as they are complete sentences
Addendum: If we take the rest of the available content into consideration, Ginger and company were wrong about the nature of the scriptures. Because the rest of the content indicates that the Scriptures contain the full sum of published and respected knowledge available to the Empire, not just a few religious volumes.
I'm not sure I see how that is mutually exclusive with the texts (originally) being written in a language foreign to the commoners.
Before the Moral Reforms, as far as I can tell, the Empire was a complete theocracy. The Emperor as head of the Council of Apostles might as well have been titled Pope. The church was the bureaucracy, and had the power to interfere in everything with absolute power. It needed the populace to be kept ignorant and subservient, and for the nobles to be completely dependent on the church.
If a religion wants to control the thoughts of a nation, what better way than to make sure that all scientific and authoritative writing is penned in a language only available through education from the representatives of said religion? The Catholic church controlled Europe from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance by this very technique, keeping knowledge of Latin and literacy in general confined to within monastic walls.
Would it be such a stretch to imagine that the Empire played the same game? That the theocratic state controlled the populace in part through the monopolization of Scriptural language, and ensuring that all scientific texts were written in that same language (ostensibly to ensure that those texts could be elevated to the same level as other Scriptures)?
There are a significant number of references to how scripture encompasses practical knowledge as well as esoteric information, art, literature, and most mainstream cultural product. EVERYTHING goes into that cauldron-pot. If we were to construct a comparison using real-world examples, the set of information that would go into such a collection would include the full range of expression of religious thinkers from now into prehistory, all published academic papers from every source that were judged to have even a modicum of truth, all literature that made it past a publisher, histories of every nation on earth, trade records, tables of data, tabulated scientific observations, and anything else significant. A paper on the production processes of laser weaponry is a scriptural document. In the Kingdom, so is Khanid's propaganda and ideology from the time of secession and the war (think Declaration of Independence). So are the records relating to the capture, administration, and award of all Mandate territory to appropriate vassals (think Louisiana purchase). The 'scriptures' that the theology council stamps 'approved' on are added to hourly; they must be - and it is only the highest source of these documents. There are plenty of others.
I completely agree with this view of the Scriptures. The vast majority of the Empire's scientific literature would be found within the libraries of Scripture, and any dedicated scientist in the Empire would likely need to study those same texts if she wanted to get anywhere in her work. When religious power was absolute, all scientific knowledge would likely have had to been directly approved by the precursor to the Theology Council before it was allowed to be applied to anything. That said, the Moral Reforms was a strong movement away from the theocratic control in Amarr, and this would have also applied to the control of scientific thought.
While the Theology Council - which is described as "the last vestige" of religious control in the Empire - is likely still busy with reviewing research papers for heresies or scriptural qualities, I don't think there are any indications that science in the reformed Empire needs to be expressly approved (though I imagine it can be declared heretical). This change was necessary to keep the Empire from stagnating, and absolutely vital when Amarr started bumping heads with other starfaring nations. Using a Caldari shield emission theory to design a more efficient shield booster would be neither heretical nor held up as Scripture - it would more likely fall in a broad field of "Acceptable" that might not have existed before the Reforms (or if it did, it would have been very narrow).
In addition, I believe most of the Scriptures has been translated from Amarrad to modern Amarrian (they would have had over a millennia - plenty of time, even if there's a lot of work), plus new modern texts being approved as Scripture. This is something I don't think would have happened in the pre-reform society, but has become accepted (and, indeed, the standard) after the theocratic rule was ousted from power.
I hope that explains some of my thoughts on the matter further.
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Topic: [Language] Amarrad (Read 68937 times)