Sunday, April 3, 2011

C if for Common

Common (also called the Common Tongue or Common Speech) is a widespread language descended from the largely unwritten, non-standard form of Thulian spoken by the lower classes and conquered subject peoples of the Thulian Empire. In the years following the collapse of the Empire, Common came to be used as a trade and diplomatic language between the various city-states and nations that arose from the ashes. Of course, Common shows much local variation in orthography and vocabulary, which is why there is a 1 in 6 chance that a speaker of one dialect may either misunderstand the speaker of another or fail to convey his own meaning, if the speaker has not familiarized himself with the new dialect beforehand. Nevertheless, knowledge of any dialect of Common is usually sufficient to get by in all but the most remote or far-flung regions previously governed by the Thulian Empire (and in many regions outside it).

EDIT: I had thought I'd set this post to publish tomorrow morning (April 4, 2011), since Sundays are excluded from the A to Z Blogging Challenge. Since I erred and Monday's post appeared today, I will delay "D is for Demon" until Tuesday (April 5, 2011).

11 comments:

  1. Um...if you post letters on Sundays, you're going to need a 30 letter alphabet.
    ; )

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  2. Really like the different dialects rule. I thought this post was going to be about a rapper/actor.

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  3. That just means he has to give us another C, tomorrow. :)

    Love the Dwimmermount info by the way.

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  4. Lolz yea, I was gonna say, what time zone are you in?? It's Sunday here in Japan, so you would have to be on the moon or something to be a day ahead of me :P

    Good post btw.

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  5. He posted at 12:01am. At least from where I'm at.

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  6. I've seen a fair few people posting their Cs today. oh well! :P

    I love languages!

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  7. I love the 1-in-6 rule for variances in Common. Gotta start using that one!

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  8. Anyone know where the idea of the 'Common Tongue' in RPGs and fantasy novels originated from? Was it LOTR or something earlier? Just curious.

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  9. I'm not sure about the fantasy/pulp literature origins, but the idea of a "common tongue" or lingua franca is at least as old as Latin in the West and Greek in the Byzantine East.

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  10. In my AD&D campaign, set in a world comprised of several nations (each with their own politics, agendas, etc...), each nation had their own unique language.

    As part of chargen, players had to determine which nation the character was from and that established the 'native' tounge. If a character had an intelligence that permitted additional languages, they could select other races (Elvish, Dwarvish, etc...) and/or other native tounges (which was valuable since much of the gameplay took place in various nations... and language could be a significant barrier).

    This made languages an interesting and strategic part of the roleplay experience.

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  11. What I'm adopting today for "common" in my games:
    Rojak language often regarded as the World's 2nd International Language by experts for its diversity and uniqueness by combining various languages. It consists of Malay, Chinese, Tamil, English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Hokkien, Thai, Elven, Orc, Pokemon, Digimon, Mars, Venus, and many more. With that, everyone can communicate without the need to know more than 1 language.
    Ahem.

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