Re: Language

From: Douglas Seay <douglas-seay_at_...>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:58:40 -0500

> Light Castle wrote:
>

>>> 
>>> Heortling and Esrolian are related.
>>> The game actually gives the heortling homeland "speak Sartarite" as a language. Do I 
>>> assume those are interchangeable, or is Heortlander speech and Sartarite speech just 
>>> really similar?

>
>
> Heortlings resettled Dragon Pass ~275-300 years before the Hero Wars,
> yes? In a largely-illiterate society, without telecommunications, that's
> a long time--quite enough for some linguistic drift. Certainly enough
> for "Speak Sartarite" to be considered a distinct skill from "Speak
> Heortling". Maybe they aren't two different languages--I expect a native
> Sartarite could converse with a Heortlander without much trouble--but
> enough to make it hard to understand someone speaking quickly in the
> other tongue.

I think that they're the same language because the "talk slowly and loudly" trick might actually work. If you really feel a need to do linguistic variations (something I did once and regretted), use the distance between the two dialects as a modifier and ignore political boundaries. This way someone from Wilmskirk can understand the Whitewall dialect better than the Jonstown dialect. Maybe throw in an extra penalty for hard to understand dialects like understanding anyone from Far Point, or mitigate things a bit for the Boldhome dialect because it is a bit of a pidgin to start with.

As I understand it modern languages like French and Spanish are a relatively new concept. I believe Catalan Spanish is still fairly close to that of Occitanian French. Similar logic around the French/Italian border.

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