Concerning Colchis

[Urauloth]

So I'm still hovering on the brink of greenstuffing parchment onto everything I own and going all-out for a Word Bearer warband (reading Know No Fear is what swung me away from my beloved Black Legion) and I want to make the force - and the accompanying BFG fleet - as fluffy as possible when it comes to naming conventions and inscriptions and the like, so I'm naturally interested in any resources there might be about Colchis and its native dialects.

 

I know there's a smattering of Colchisian words out there, but I haven't seen them collated yet (I may have just missed this) and I'm also curious to see if I can wheedle out some real-world analogues as a basis for getting names that sound and look "right". Most fantasy dialects are a blend of elements that visually or phonetically resemble a melange of real-world languages, and recognizing that can be helpful in maintaining a cohesive sounding set of names.

 

The word "Colchis" itself is an old Kartvelian word referring to what is now Georgia and Abkhazia, suggesting an eastern European influence, but a lot of the names we have for legion characters have much more of a Turkic, Persian or Mesopotemian sound to them (historical Colchis bordered the Persian empire and at one point included some of what is now Turkey, so this makes sense in that context) and a few are drawn directly from Babylonian mythology.

 

As I understand, Colchisian script is written vertically, but I'm unsure as to whether there's any fluff for what it should look like, visually, or indeed whether it's written with characters aligned horizontally or at right-angles to the page, can anyone help with this?

 

I'm not looking to be super precise here, I'm just herding ideas together into a general ballpark. Any insights would be useful!

[Kol Saresk]

I believe in False Gods, one of the Remembrancers said something about it looking like a type of cuneiform. Which came from that area of the world right? Although I think that cuneiform severely predates the Median Confederation correct?

 

EDIT: Hope this helps.

[Urauloth]

Yes it did and yes it does, respectively! A resemblance to cuniform would make a lot of sense given the general sphere of influence. Combining the aesthetics of a cuniform system with, say, the chaos runes scattered around various sourcebooks would probably produce a good result.

[Nehekhare]

The word "Colchis" itself is an old Kartvelian word referring to what is now Georgia and Abkhazia,

 

Colchis is also the greek word referring to that area, mostly known from the myth of jason and the argonauts who went there to get the golden fleece from king Aietes, son of the sun-god helios, fought against the dragon guarding it and got back to greek Iolkos with the help of Aietes' own daughter, Medea.

 

In a way, this is the story of Aurelian (the golden)...