Martin Crim said (I'm sure everyone saw !that! coming):
>Let's get rid of the embarrassing names already. For one >thing,
it'll help >us recruit new players. I, for one, don't want to have
to >explain to new >gamers that the Sartarite word for "town" is
"town," since >it's not "Swen's >Town" but "Swenstown." The
suggestion that "Swen" is a corruption of >"Swan" suggests that the
Sartarite word for "Swan" is "Swan." > Have I, like >the bourgeois
gentilhomme who didn't know he'd been speaking >prose, been
>speaking Sartarite all this time?
I don't know; do you insist that your !players! speak Sartarite when they are speaking in character? That's the natural extension of your argument.
NO ONE is saying that the Sartarite name for Swenstown is Swenstown. That is a straw man of your own creation. We are saying that a rough translation of the Sartar name would be Swenstown. As in, someone named, roughly, Swen was involved in the town early on, and they tacked whatever the Sartar word for town is to his name for the name of the town. The Sartar name would be something else altogether, such as Pthathloc. Or Pthathswen. Or whatever.
And I very seriously doubt it would help to recruit more gamers overall if we moved in your direction. I know that all of the people I have introduced to Glorantha would have probably run screaming instead if I told them "Oh, before you can game here, you have to learn this other language." That is precisely why I don't game in Tekumel.
Names like Boldhome give players with characters from there a sense of pride that they would probably never get if they knew it by Sartarite translation. I have had players working on character background ask me who Jan of Janshome and Jon of Jonstown were; this would never have happened if the names were given in Sartarite.
>I could continue to heap invective and ridicule on the
>embarrassing and >ridiculous relics of the wargaming past, relics
which haunt >the present >like platform shoes and naugahyde jackets
in the bottom of >the trunk, but >my point is made and the arguments
against it, if I may say >so, smack of >inertia and a
counterproductive nostalgia.
Smack this. I have presented a number of arguments for the current names which have nothing to do with inertia or nostalgia. Address them if you want, instead of dismissing them out of hand.
In the same digest, Bryan Maloney said:
(An interesting example of Praxian language that I would probably
never use in game deleted)
>
> But "The Block" is just fine for common usage.
I vote this the "Digest Understatement of the Year" award. :)
Cheerful Yule
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