Talk:Gargish

I wanted to point out an error on this page, but feel that I lack the experience and knowledge to actually correct it.

The Gargish langauge is NOT the language of Britannian magick. That would be the Britannian langauge, which is called Runic in game. Each Runic character has a "word of power" associated with it, which are used to form the magic spells.

You're getting confused between the scripts and the languages. In the entire Ultima series, the Runic alphabet is only ever used to translate English words. However, the Gargish script is used to write words in an actual Gargish language. Twenty-six of these words of the Gargish language have been chosen to correspond to the twenty-six single-letter runes of the Britannian Runic script. These twenty-six Gargish words are the so-called "words of power". Neither the runic script nor the Ophidian script is actually a "language" - they are no more than second-level writing systems used to encode English. Gargish is actually more developed than this, and is a proper language on a par with, say, Klingon. That's why, even if you know the Gargish alphabet, you still can't translate the Gargish signs and books of Ultima VI directly into English. (Try it sometime if you don't believe me.) thefamouseccles 13:15, 09 Apr 2006 (UTC)

As a side note, Ultima features a third written language, called Ophidian. To my knowledge, it was only found in Ultima VII Part 2: Serpent Isle.