Interestingly, the main reason that English is largely an uninflected language is that different Norse dialects and languages (from the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc.) shared their most of their roots, but not their suffixes. Dumping the word endings, and relying instead on sentence word order to convey meaning, created a creole that everyone could understand.
What this would mean in Glorantha is up to interpretation (pun intended). However, a stripped-down pidgin, developing into a genuinely composite language, is quite likely.
Joerg's point about the ancestors demanding adherence to the old language is probably highly germane. What I suspect could happen is that a priestly language would be retained to speak with the ancestors, and the acceptance of and reliance on more recent ancestors (who grew up with the new way of speaking) would more rapidly replace the less necessary old ones.
Alison
- On Fri, 1/16/09, Gianfranco Geroldi <giangero_at_im10c3t95ppDembeac5kGIg-leTgtDJVpFK3JzaQhyAUqJqYUAAc3nmeWca8PqvHHd-RkzwTC5eBCw.yahoo.invalid> wrote:
I don't know exactly, but I doubt that in an oral (verbal and direct based) community, accents matter as much as in our Real World (written and indirect based) community. I mean: many dialects are an obstacle in our world because we don't strive to comprehend our neighbors. We have TV, email, telephone, written papers a lot of other means of different communication which is not dependent on dialects. In an oral world (like the ancient Earth or Glorantha) I suspect dialects are less an obstacle because people are trained from their childhood to overcome this small but grevious problem. When you have no alternative to contact neighbors except using intermediaries (specialized communicators) or war, you make substantial more efforts before saying "I don't understand your dialect".