Old Pavic

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_bigfoot.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 11:45:15 +1300


Bob Stancliff:

>Old Pavic
>should almost certainly be at the bottom of the list since nomads are
>usually in and around Pavis, and Old Pavic is a dead language.

RQ2 (p103) calls it "nearly dead" but spoken by the native humans of Pavis. It is also spoken in the religious ceremonies of Adari, but not spoken by the populace there.

As for an RQ3 reference, Old Pavic is mentioned in the Glorantha Book (p33) as being "a Theyalan tongue found near Kethaela". Hence rumours of Old Pavic's death are slightly exaggerated.

>Pavic is the derived form of Old Pavic after 500 years of semantic drift
>and is the language of the city natives. Only a scholar of the city can
>understand Old Pavic, but several of these would be nobles.

I really don't think we need to bother about when semantic drift spawns a new language. Just impose a penalty on reading old pavic documents written during the Second Age rather than add a new language for little gain.

>In RQ1 & 2 it was the human learnable form of the
>Dragonnewt and Wyrm language(s). By RQ3 Greg had decided that [Auld
>Wyrmish] could not be written since most of it was like a sign language
>with sounds most humans couldn't make, so Auld Wyrmish became a spoken
>only language.

Although the Introduction to Glorantha book implies this, what Greg actually meant (Glorantha Book p35) was that no humans could actually attain a skill of any higher than 25% in the _spoken_ language (Elder Secrets revealed that newtlings can go up to 50%) *but* there is no restriction on the written language which was invented by "clever humans" during the days of the EWF. It is still popular today among "pedants"

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