> > Light Castle wrote:
> >>> 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?
Unless a definitive answer crops up, it'd have to be doing what seems fun. Ignoring language as an issue is the common solution, but I wonder what you're planning to do with it, out of curiosity? I've a couple of observations below (directed at playing games I hope).
Someone said Americans couldn't understand the Yorkshirese in All Creatures...well, as a namby-pamby English sootherner, I've got news for you :-) Same language without any dialect issues can be unintelligible (me in Aberdeenshire or Skye, some dialect but not that much), so you'd expect folk in DP really to rely on those Issaries folk. Hell, I'm amazed Merry and Pippin's accent "issues" never cropped up in the films. For games, you could easily go all the way and have almost no-one understand anyone if you wanted, but it'd be limiting.
Or particular peoples could be unintelligible to the rest (e.g. Gustavo Kuerten is from Santa Catarina State in Brazil where their Portuguese is heavily Madeiran - even in Portugal they subtitle Madeirans). Or they could link with people way off - Friesian is sometimes quite intelligible to an English speaker, but is a different language from Dutch.
...[someone, lost in the reply] wrote:
> > 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.
Inevitably it is more complicated than that. On the whole, Portuguese speakers understand Spanish and can speak "Portunol". But Spanish speakers can have a rough time trying to understand anything in Portuguese. That directionality could be fun, as in: "She seems to understand what you are saying if you speak slowly, but you can't get a word of what she's saying, it's gibberish".
I think Catalonian Catalan and Occitanian Occitaine would be closer, if mispelt. Portuguese is a "language", as Peter said, because of an army and a navy (plus a monarchy and empire). I've yet to convince a Portuguese person of that, mind. It has a number of links to French, Occitaine and Catalan (as well of course as Castillian), but is *incredibly* similar to Gallego (Galicia). These links are not related to being neighbours, as with say, words for cheese, which are the same in English, Dutch, German (probably) and Portuguese and Castillian, but different in Italy, France and I think from memory Catalan. Go figure.
So, you could definitely play with PC's perceptions of where someone is from, say if they fail a roll - their Speak [Own Language] could be a skill to detect where someone is from, rather than just filling up space on the character sheet. If you wanted, you could use it to avoid startng a feud with those strange folk in the next valley, as in that war in Hitchhiker's Guide.
So, with all that typing I have finally worked out what I would suggest that LC do: Define language in the broadest (geographical) sense possible, so you have an escape route if it gets messy, but where it is interesting to do so, get the characters to use their Speak [Own Language] to understand even their grandma (who still speaks funny), without getting the message garbled.
Sam.
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