Yes, well, that's because you lot appear to think in terms of analytical languages (you add more words to the sentence to expand on your meaning; for example, modern English is largely, but not all the way there; some syncretic elements remain) with more or less fixed word order in the Nexus (modern English is definitely there, with but one exception, and but one exception to the exception). Take a syncretic language (you inflect and add bits to existing words to indicate gender, case, etc. and therefore which word is the subject, the object, the subject predicate, and other parts of speech) like Old English without a fixed word order (almost no word order at all in Old English, in fact), and things are very different.
I was just thinking, the Dark Sun setting probably has a lot of characters who are intelligent but illiterate. In Dark Sun, characters roll 8-20 for stats, rather than 3-18. The average on a roll of 4d4+4 is 14, whereas the average on a roll of 3d6 is 10.5, which means that Dark Sun characters are on average 3.5 points of Intelligence smarter than Forgotten Realms characters. On the other hand, in Dark Sun I'm not sure how much stuff there is to write on (there certainly aren't many trees), and I wouldn't be surprised if the sorcerer-kings keep any sort of literacy education under firm control so that only their own cronies are taught to read.
The answer to the OP question is - yes. I have IQ ~140, can understand some Japanese thanks to a hundred anime titles watched with English subs, but never bothered to learn the arcane symbols they use to write.
I am pretty much irriterate and not even that much intelligent, I hope, hehe. If that counts. Not that I care.
Intelligence is totally ovarrated. It will only give you loneliness and grief. You want to be cunning, kinda smart but not too smart, smartass, and cute. Intelligence is the bane of existance.
Intelligence, as described in most D&D manuals, measures a character's problem-solving ability, capacity to learn, and ability to retain knowledge. Under this definition, a modern computer, especially deep AI, could be considered highly intelligent, despite having 0 Wisdom and 0 Charisma. :P
So yes, I believe it is perfectly possible for an illiterate character to be highly intelligent. Illiteracy simply means that your character is unable to read or write; it does not mean they are unable to speak or to grasp complicated concepts. Their illiteracy may stem from cultural origins (there are some ancient Earth cultures that have no written language and their history is passed down purely as an oral tradition, for example), or perhaps they were simply never given the opportunity to learn literacy or numeracy.
don't know if it can help, but i remember that many years ago a boyfriend of my sister that was studying philosophy at the college told me about a philosopher that had read only 5 books in his own life.
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But that's neither here nor there.
Intelligence is totally ovarrated. It will only give you loneliness and grief. You want to be cunning, kinda smart but not too smart, smartass, and cute. Intelligence is the bane of existance.
So yes, I believe it is perfectly possible for an illiterate character to be highly intelligent. Illiteracy simply means that your character is unable to read or write; it does not mean they are unable to speak or to grasp complicated concepts. Their illiteracy may stem from cultural origins (there are some ancient Earth cultures that have no written language and their history is passed down purely as an oral tradition, for example), or perhaps they were simply never given the opportunity to learn literacy or numeracy.