I had a professor in college who read Anglo-Saxon like he'd grown up with it. This was the language of "Beowulf", a rolling, singsong way of speaking, full of portent. Like thunder, rumbling for miles over a windswept plain. After the passage of time, this professor explained, ancient languages become the language of magic, the meanings forgotten but the power of them remembered. The Catholic Church could chant Latin, and it didn't matter that no one knew what the words meant a thousand years later. He'd been speaking metaphorically. But he was right.
"There is no distinction between debate and combat to a dragon. Tinvaak los grah. Translation For us it is one and the same."
— Paarthurnax, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The mage merely swept her hand upwards and brought it down with a controlled flourish. Daggers of ice fell and scattered on the sand.
Catherine scribbled furiously, lacing the white page with black ink. She was not writing words, but a glyph as intricate as those mystic signs that shimmered in the air when a summoner conjured forth an aeon. Yet this symbol was looser, all whirls and calligraphic strokes. The mage peered over her shoulder as Catherine completed the complex design. Studying it more closely, Lulu picked out a few familiar patterns: a network of crisscrosses at the bottom, a sweeping curve with a burst of squiggles at the terminus, and four vertical lines with a fan of four spines where they met in a knot at the top. All these shapes were overlapping, intertwined. Lulu was not sure whether she was imagining herself in those abstract lines or simply seeing shoopufs in the clouds.
"Are you taking notes, or is that a portrait?"
"It's Garo-hevtee," Catherine said, looking down at the page, perplexed. "It is signs like these that we use to Write our books to other worlds. Garo-hevtee is not ordinary writing; it is sacred. Each sign captures the Whole of a thing."