>From: donald_at_...
>
>Of course there are individuals who show
>off by making their speech incomprehensible to strangers.
Many Pidgins are like this. It's not precisely showing off, but sociologically it's about establishing cultural identity. We are not you. Or, when used as indicated above, it means, "You are not one of us." Note that the base language can be used similarly in many cases. For example using lots or rarely used words like "perspicacity" or "loquatiousness" (instead of perceptive or wordy, say) with somebody who uses a pidgin may exclude them from the conversation. Note that occupations do the same thing with Jargon. When the computer geek says, "I think it's a problem with one of the modules making a relative reference to a literal," to somebody who's not a programmer they're either being dense, or saying, "I know things that you don't know" (and either way that's the message that the recipient gets).
I'm very interested in the ideas of these specialized languages. First introduced by Gygax in gaming with the "Thieves' Cant" and "alignment languages. He made a mess of this, and most people have ignored it since. But with HQ, I think there's good uses for them. I think that often the best use for languages is in playing like this. For example, using a shared language that a third party doesn't know to exclude them from the content of the conversation. Or, again, to make the third party feel uncomfortable. Lots of cool (or uncool) things to do there.
Tradetalk at a high level might operate like this, but for the Gloranthaphiles out there, are there other such occupational languages anywhere, or languages associated with magic use, perhaps? Does "SurEnslib Tradition Knowledge" or "Myths of Kolat" give you such knowledge to speak a special language of the spirits, for instance? Or should it come along with?
Mike
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