        “Royal Unicorn is more flexible, though,” Twilight countered.  “With forty-six characters, it unambiguously covers every single sound ponies use.  What if it thinks we aren’t civilized because we have a simple alphabet?”  She started flipping through a dusty tome of historical orthography.  “Earth ponies started with pictograms, before the pegasi adopted them to ideographs.  Unicorns changed it to a syllabic alphabet, then the earth ponies took that and simplified it further, while the unicorns added more symbols to more clearly share spells.”  She looked at Lyra as if that would settle the argument.