Perhaps what is magical about Tradetalk is that the many widely scattered traders who speak it all appear to be able to communicate, hence it does seem to undergo very little drift. The various trading cults probably have something to do with this - whether its magic, or some standardised teaching method, or somewhere in between (they are visited by spirits who talk Tradetalk, so they all learn the finer points of pronounciation from a central source, so the language does not have as much drift?).
Other than that, I have always assumed it to be a pidgin, and thus fairly easy to learn, like bahassa Indonesia, like many major real world trading languages.
Cheers David ------------------------------
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