Roland himself was no expert in incantation studies.
In fact, his grounding in the field was rather weak.
But that did not mean he had no way to achieve his goals.
He had people supporting him.
Without a second thought, Lunifis ran a few tests on Roland's behalf and soon reached a preliminary conclusion.
"These Ous Incantations perform well in continuous utterances of three to thirteen syllables, but poorly with one or two syllables, or anything over thirteen.
In other words, the effective portion of an incantation can be neither too short nor too long."
The incantations modified using this Ous Alphabet phonetic-symbol scheme did indeed have inherent limitations!
Lunifis continued, "After several eras of refinement, the incantations for many low- and mid-level spells happen to fall within this range.
They do have some practical applications among low- and mid-level spells.
And further improvements may make up for their shortcomings."
Roland sighed with a smile. "Those people really are something!"
He gave it some serious thought. This seemed to relate to the fundamental structure of morphemes.
The vast majority of Chinese characters were monosyllabic and represented morphemes. Sequences of these single syllables formed words and sentences.
Only polysyllabic morphemes such as "ballet" and "Himalaya" resembled English words in that they could not readily be divided into meaningful components.
There were a few exceptions where a single character had multiple syllables: units of measurement such as 兙 (ten grams), 兛 (kilogram), 兞 (milligram), and 瓩 (kilowatt), almost all of which had fallen out of use.
In alphabetic writing systems, however, polysyllabic words were everywhere.
The "granularity" at which sound and meaning were divided was entirely different.
Still...
"If the range is three to thirteen syllables... spells like the True Word Spell and power word spells probably aren't its strong suit, are