languages

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_voyager.co.nz>
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 23:05:41 +1200 (NZST)


Julian Lord:

Me>> Which I take with grains of salt snorted liberally up the nose. In
>> paricular, I doubt the implications that everyone spoke Old Mantongue
>> in the Good Old Days.

>Actually true, during Grandfather Mortal's Life, but I wasn't talking
>about the good old days [...]

>Also, compare with other races: Trolls speak Uz, Elves speak Aldryami,
>etc... I'm curious; which implications of Old Mantongue being spoken by
>everyone (ie all Men, that is) do you doubt?

Grandfather Mortal's lifetime is what most gloranthans consider to be the good old days. But even in those days, people spoke different incomprehensible languages. There was no pre-Babel Tower period where all spoke Mantongue IMO. Some Malkioni may try and claim that various languages are derived from Brithini or Old Malkioni but I trust such claims as much as RW attempts to prove that Arabic is derived from Persian, the Pharoahs spoke Latvian or Swiss German is related to Finnish. (No, I am not making these examples up).

>In fact, in modern times, an offshoot of Seshnegi, a language which
>is still fairly close to Mantongue (Brithini is the parent tongue of
>Seshnegi), has become a common human language. This language is
>Tradetalk, and one of the reasons it has spread so successfully is
>IMO that it is fairly similar to the original Mantongue.

Seshnegi is as close to Brithini as French is to Latin. But I would doubt your contention that Tradetalk is derived from Seshnegi. I think it more like a teletubbled pidgen version of Stormspeech.

>The original mortal language was actually SpiritSpeech, though, which
>has hardly evolved since Godtime ('cos: no phonetics). For Spirits of
>all races, the good old days is now...

I strongly doubt that spiritspeech exists and think that most spirits would speak the language they spoke when alive if they can speak at all.

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