Languages of power: From making linguistics a bigger part of the game

[Elder_Basilisk]

Over in the http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...rt-of-the-Game
Making Linguistics a Bigger Part of the Game thread, Nifft posted some homebrew rules for languages. I love the idea but think it's worth exploring more to come up with some fun rules.

Languages of Power
Mortals cannot lie in Celestial, and Celestials do not lie, but Devils are not so restricted. Demons cannot understand Celestial, but they know it causes them pain.
Oaths spoken in Infernal are eternally binding, sometimes in horribly literal ways. (Some cultures have dabbled in using Infernal for wedding vows, with dark and disasterous results.)
Mere knowledge of Abyssal by mortals saps their sanity. -2 to all Will saves vs. Tanar'ri, and Tanar'ri make Intimidate checks against speakers with a +4 Circumstance bonus. ("He who gazes into the Abyss..." and all that.) However, against other mortals or Evil outsiders, Intimidate checks made in Abyssal confer a +2 Circumstance bonus to the speaker.
Sylvan is vague and euphamistic, and it's difficult to even ask for directions without also making several indecent proposals. Intimidate checks are impossible. Listeners attempting Sense Motive checks suffer a -4 Circumstance penalty, and speakers gain a +2 Circumstance bonus to any seduction attempts conducted in Sylvan.
Draconic is the language of Arcane magic. Knowing Draconic grants a +2 to Spellcraft checks vs. Wizards, and +2 to Knowlege (Arcana) dealing with things written in Draconic. Also, speakers of Draconic know exactly how weak the language's creators consider humanoids, and therefore gain a +2 Circumstance bonus to Sense Motive checks against dragons, but take a -2 penalty to Will saves vs. a dragon's Frightful Presence.
Druidic oaths are as binding as Infernal ones, but the agency enforcing the oath is far more benign. It is a pity that the language is not more wide spread. However, Druids always trust each other's word, and this lets them to function together more cohesively than their loose organization would seem to allow.
The Elemental Tongues are said to be heard in the dreams of Elemental Princes, so secrets should not be told in Aquan, Auran, Ignan or Terran if there is a large quantity of the corresponding element nearby.

I love the idea of this but I'm not so sure about the specific effects.

In general, I'm concerned about the "-2 to saves" type effect which would punish players for learning a language. I can see that as appropriate for Abyssal or a far realms language--put some mechanical teeth into the "things man was not meant to know" flavor. In fact, just a straight -2 to will saves or -2 to Will saves against [fear] or confusion effects might work. However, there should be some temptation to learn the language beyond the knowledge in forbidden tomes that are written in it. +1 to the DC of [fear] or confusion effects you cast in Abyssal might work. Or +1 caster level for [chaotic] and [evil] spells (which I think would just be summoning spells to summon chaotic evil outsiders).

The celestial notes are more appropriate to a game using the 4e alignment system where chaotic good does not exist. In a system with Chaotic Good, it seems odd that Eladrin cannot lie in their own tongue. Still, it makes sense that some people would believe that it is impossible for mortals to lie in Celestial.

I really like the idea that demons cannot understand Celestial but that it causes them pain though. Perhaps it adds 1 to the DC of spells used to banish or trap demons.

Infernalthe idea of a binding oath needs some rules to back it up.

Then again, what constitutes an oath? Is it formal, "I swear by the Iron Throne of Dis to do XYZ"? Or would any declarative statement "I'll take out the trash" be good enough? Being cagey about what you actually say in Infernal might be good flavor, but I'd be tempted to make it actually a little harder to do. Perhaps I'd import the Oath spell from Arcanis and knock it down to first or second level if you take the oath in Infernal. You could just allow the language to have the effect of the spell without any ritual or spell--just by formally taking an oath and spilling blood but I'm not sure I would want the language to be quite that powerful--especially since none of the other languages of power get anything close to that.

I'm not sure it should be impossible to intimidate in Sylvan. The wild hunt, the great good pan, and some of the literary interpretations like dunsany's elf King and Imric the elf Earl from The Broken Sword would certainly be able to be intimidating in their native language. For that matter, Oberon does intimidation too. A bonus to seduction attempts and a penalty to sense motive, though--I can see that.

Druidic-not sure why oaths in Druidic should be binding. This doesn't really fit the theme to me-especially since old school druids had to be neutral and in fact could not be lawful and druid circles were competitive rather than cooperative in old school game lore (you get to be a high level druid by killing the current druid of that level). Druidic ought to have some power, but I don't see oaths as a good fit. If rangers didn't get animal empathy, I'd be tempted to make animal empathy a function of the druidic language.

Elemenal tongues and princes-undiluted awesome. However, also pure flavor. It doesn't offer players or anyone else a reason to use the languages. Maybe +2 to Spellcraft when scribing spells with the appropriate descriptor using the relevant language. If I wanted to make them a big deal, I could also give +1 caster level to spells with the appropriate descriptor when cast in the relevant language.

What are your thoughts? Even ideas that don't make it into formal house rules can be things that people believe in-game. For example, people could believe that oaths spoken in infernal have special power even if they do not really have that power without a ritual.

[Nifft]

First off, thanks for starting a thread about this! Languages & their quirks are interesting to me.

Over in the http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...rt-of-the-Game
Making Linguistics a Bigger Part of the Game thread, Nifft posted some homebrew rules for languages.

Secondly though: ow, my formatting! That wall 'o text in the quote which throws away all my paragraph spacing & mark-up makes it pretty hard to read.

Spoiler: Original Formatting

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Languages of Power

Mortals cannot lie in Celestial, and Celestials do not lie, but Devils are not so restricted. Demons cannot understand Celestial, but they know it causes them pain.

Oaths spoken in Infernal are eternally binding, sometimes in horribly literal ways. (Some cultures have dabbled in using Infernal for wedding vows, with dark and disasterous results.)

Mere knowledge of Abyssal by mortals saps their sanity. -2 to all Will saves vs. Tanar'ri, and Tanar'ri make Intimidate checks against speakers with a +4 Circumstance bonus. ("He who gazes into the Abyss..." and all that.) However, against other mortals or Evil outsiders, Intimidate checks made in Abyssal confer a +2 Circumstance bonus to the speaker.

Sylvan is vague and euphamistic, and it's difficult to even ask for directions without also making several indecent proposals. Intimidate checks are impossible. Listeners attempting Sense Motive checks suffer a -4 Circumstance penalty, and speakers gain a +2 Circumstance bonus to any seduction attempts conducted in Sylvan.

Draconic is the language of Arcane magic. Knowing Draconic grants a +2 to Spellcraft checks vs. Wizards, and +2 to Knowlege (Arcana) dealing with things written in Draconic. Also, speakers of Draconic know exactly how weak the language's creators consider humanoids, and therefore gain a +2 Circumstance bonus to Sense Motive checks against dragons, but take a -2 penalty to Will saves vs. a dragon's Frightful Presence.

Druidic oaths are as binding as Infernal ones, but the agency enforcing the oath is far more benign. It is a pity that the language is not more wide spread. However, Druids always trust each other's word, and this lets them to function together more cohesively than their loose organization would seem to allow.

The Elemental Tongues are said to be heard in the dreams of Elemental Princes, so secrets should not be told in Aquan, Auran, Ignan or Terran if there is a large quantity of the corresponding element nearby.

Anyway, here's the problem I was trying to solve, and here's why special drawbacks for Languages of Power was a solution.


Problem: I wanted regional languages to matter. I wanted no such thing as Common. This removal has some unintended consequences.

If you try to make terrestrial languages matter more by removing Common, then each regional language becomes a less-valuable Common. The sorts of people & beings to whom you generally wish to speak will have Common + some racial or planar languages. Thus the immediate consequence of trying to make terrestrial languages "matter more" was that terrestrial languages became undesirable relative to planar languages -- so by trying to make regional languages matter more, instead they mattered less.

You'd just get a world where every ambassador and merchant speaks some well-known international (and interplanar) language like Draconic, and only stupid peasants speak regional tongues ever, at all.


Solution: Balance the increased relative value of planar languages by imposing penalties for using them, or even for knowing them. Make it so that knowing multiple regional languages is not a stupid thing for a character to do.

In general, I'm concerned about the "-2 to saves" type effect which would punish players for learning a language. I can see that as appropriate for Abyssal or a far realms language--put some mechanical teeth into the "things man was not meant to know" flavor.

There's no need to go so far to find Things Mankind Was Never Meant to Know™.

- Dragons are huge, ancient, and reptilian. They have super-human intelligence, and they eat people. Their language might very well be inherently unsuitable for short-lived mammals. Why should their language be harmless to humanity?

- Devils are all about harming humanity. Why should the language of Devils be harmless to humanity?

- Etc. You could even add a penalty for non-Elves learning Elvish. They're alien things that never sleep and spend 90 years in puberty. Suffer -2 vs. Enchantment spells for staying up all night.

The celestial notes are more appropriate to a game using the 4e alignment system where chaotic good does not exist. In a system with Chaotic Good, it seems odd that Eladrin cannot lie in their own tongue. Still, it makes sense that some people would believe that it is impossible for mortals to lie in Celestial.

I really like the idea that demons cannot understand Celestial but that it causes them pain though. Perhaps it adds 1 to the DC of spells used to banish or trap demons.

Why should Eladrins lie more than Angels or Archons?

Bearing false witness isn't a Chaotic act -- it's an Evil sin, just like all the other sins.

Also, I don't think Celestial needs any perks: having a language that guarantees the truth of your statements is pretty buff for diplomacy.

Infernalthe idea of a binding oath needs some rules to back it up.

Then again, what constitutes an oath? Is it formal, "I swear by the Iron Throne of Dis to do XYZ"? Or would any declarative statement "I'll take out the trash" be good enough? Being cagey about what you actually say in Infernal might be good flavor, but I'd be tempted to make it actually a little harder to do. Perhaps I'd import the Oath spell from Arcanis and knock it down to first or second level if you take the oath in Infernal. You could just allow the language to have the effect of the spell without any ritual or spell--just by formally taking an oath and spilling blood but I'm not sure I would want the language to be quite that powerful--especially since none of the other languages of power get anything close to that.

In my game, an Infernal oath was not something that could happen by accident.

I'm not sure it should be impossible to intimidate in Sylvan. The wild hunt, the great good pan, and some of the literary interpretations like dunsany's elf King and Imric the elf Earl from The Broken Sword would certainly be able to be intimidating in their native language. For that matter, Oberon does intimidation too. A bonus to seduction attempts and a penalty to sense motive, though--I can see that.

Sylvan didn't see much use in my game.

Druidic-not sure why oaths in Druidic should be binding.

It's so Druids can trust each other.

They range from good to evil, from pure law to pure chaos. They're a disparate bunch, and yet by the book they can all work together:

Spoiler: PHB

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Background: Though their organization is invisible to most outsiders, who consider druids to be loners, druids are actually part of a society that spans the land, ignoring political borders. A prospective druid is inducted into this society through secret rituals, including tests that not all survive. Only after achieving some level of competence is the druid allowed to strike out on her own.

All druids are nominally members of this druidic society, though some individuals are so isolated that they have never seen any high-ranking members of the society or participated in druidic gatherings. All druids recognize each other as brothers and sisters. Like true creatures of the wilderness, however, druids sometimes compete with or even prey on each other.

A druid may be expected to perform services for higher-ranking druids, though proper payment is tendered for such assignments. Likewise, a lower-ranking druid may appeal for aid from her higher-ranking comrades in exchange for a fair price in coin or service.

Druids may live in small towns, but they always spend a good portion of their time in wild areas. Even large cities surrounded by cultivated land as far as the eye can see often have druid groves nearby—small, wild refuges where druids live and which they protect fiercely. Near coastal cities, such refuges may be nearby islands, where the druids can find the isolation they need.

How can they form a society or even have enough trust to attend a gathering with strangers, some of whom are Evil and all of whom like free magic items? I came up with "Druidic = oath enforcement" so they can trust each other's promises.

Figure out a better mechanism if you can -- I'm actually really interested to see if anyone can improve on this. Druidic society is an interesting and unexplained element of the game.

Elemenal tongues and princes-undiluted awesome. However, also pure flavor. It doesn't offer players or anyone else a reason to use the languages.

Per the top of this post, the lack of Common meant that these Elemental tongues (and all other Languages of Power) were already more attractive than regular non-powerful languages -- that was carrot enough for PCs to learn a few of these languages.

The elemental tongues didn't come up much in play, though, so I never got to use the drawback.

[SkipSandwich]

These are some really interesting ideas!

let's see..

Celestial: Spoken celestial can be perfectly understood by all good-aligned beings, and partially understood by non-evil beings. Evil beings experience it as painful dissonance(evil beings CAN become fluent in Celestial with enough effort, and this does have the side effect of making them more resistant to this effect.)
Speaking in Celestial gives you Advantage on bluff or pursuasion checks made to convince others of your friendlyness or good intentions.

Infernal: Spoken Infernal can be perfectly understood by all Evil beings, partially understood by non-good beings, and is very uncomfortable for good beings to listen to(though this can be blunted via fluency in the language). While speaking Infernal, you have Advantage on Intimidate checks made against good-aligned creatures.

Terran/Ignan/Aquan/Aeran: Fluency in one or more of the elemental languages gives you Advantage on Arcana checks made to identify spells of the marching elemental descriptor.

Sylvan: It is impossible to speak outright falsehoods in the Sylvan tongue, though the Fae are masters at presenting truth in misleading ways. A creature fluent in Sylvan cannot be compelled to lie against thier will, and will at worst give statements that are true, but misleading.

[martixy]

I like the idea of Celestial - limitations are the crucible of creativity.
Though I do agree that lying is more chaotic than evil.
One option for mortals is imposing a DC15 charisma check to lie and/or a -6 penalty to Bluff/+6 bonus to Sense motive.
Although just saying "you can't lie" does simplify things a great deal.

And I particularly like the asymmetric nature of these effects - which makes me dislike SkipSandwich's "standardization". I think such a fringe part of the game benefits from being kept interesting, if it is to ever see use.

[Deophaun]

I would think that you wouldn't speak Infernal or Abyssal just to avoid attracting the attention of fiends. That should be enough. As for secrets man should not know, that would be a language of the Far Realm; some precursor to undercommon.

As for why draconic shouldn't be harmful, because there are good dragons. An entire class of them, even. There's no one "what dragons really think" of mortals. Some are negative, but some are also positive.

I generally think 3.5 had too many fiddly modifiers already.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Primary problem with the inability to lie or break your oath is that you bake a definition of "truth" right into the language, which is extremely tricky. For example, can mortals talk about hypotheticals in Celestial? Can they tell funny made-up stories in Celestial? Can they measure the world by evaluating what they can and cannot say in Celestial?

Two basic ways of dealing with truth:
1) It's only relative truth: you cannot say anything which you know to be false. Very interesting roleplay here, especially in a game with opposed political ideologies.
2) There's some absolute cosmological notion of truth, evoking Aristotelean theories of truth*; perhaps the Ordial Plane (sometimes called Plane of Proof) serves, perhaps something else is needed. Also opens up some very interesting opportunities, particularly in the 'investigating the world through Celestial' side of things (or through Infernal, which requires a sadistic streak a mile long).


*Aristotle sums it up as: "To say that that which is, is not, and that which is not, is, is a falsehood; therefore, to say that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, is true". That is, truth means there is some correspondence between what you say and what really is.

[Eldariel]

Primary problem with the inability to lie or break your oath is that you bake a definition of "truth" right into the language, which is extremely tricky. For example, can mortals talk about hypotheticals in Celestial? Can they tell funny made-up stories in Celestial? Can they measure the world by evaluating what they can and cannot say in Celestial?

Two basic ways of dealing with truth:
1) It's only relative truth: you cannot say anything which you know to be false. Very interesting roleplay here, especially in a game with opposed political ideologies.
2) There's some absolute cosmological notion of truth, evoking Aristotelean theories of truth*; perhaps the Ordial Plane (sometimes called Plane of Proof) serves, perhaps something else is needed. Also opens up some very interesting opportunities, particularly in the 'investigating the world through Celestial' side of things (or through Infernal, which requires a sadistic streak a mile long).


*Aristotle sums it up as: "To say that that which is, is not, and that which is not, is, is a falsehood; therefore, to say that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, is true". That is, truth means there is some correspondence between what you say and what really is.

I think it would actually be interesting if the language simply lacked a hypothetical construction entirely. This would be a pure linguistic trait rather than a trait of innate power, but such features could really modify how a language can be used. Even more so if it had an obligatory evidential linguistic category so whenever a person says something, the sentence would be ungrammatical if it doesn't contain information of the source of the knowledge (say, personal visual testimony, personal auditory testimony, personal other testimony, inferred, hearsay, quote - you have to pick the one for your sentence to make it grammatical á la having to say "I saw X" instead of just "X"). Because it would make an awful lot of sense for planar languages to be affected by the nature of their inhabitants. Though again, the issue with Celestial is that it's spoken by all the good-aligned Outsiders who are a mixed bunch.

Infernal and Abyssal are comparatively easy to design; Abyssal probably has a million words and distinctions for different kinds of suffering, torture, fall from grace, etc. that are completely alien to any other language as well as a very varied vocabulary for any kind of betrayal, disloyalty, madness, mental damage and so on. It's probably also morphologically very free, to the point that a similar clause can express many different things and the argument order is probably poorly coded. I'd assume Abyssal would have infinite variety in idiolects and no standardised form - thus every user would use the language differently and there'd always be problems understanding one another without context.

Infernal seems like the kind of language that would have an obligatory honorific category and very strict hierarchy built into the language itself; obligatory reference for whether your discussion partner is higher or lower ranking than you can different ways to linguistically pay homage and show subservitude. It would also probably be transparent but with extremely complex syntax and morphology, since it needs to be able to express extremely fine nuances for pacts et al. and it needs to be a language that's suited for devils finding and create loopholes in agreements. Polysemy seems well-suited to their needs too, but there needs to be some way to tell them apart. Something like identical writing with tonal unmarked tonal difference for the different meanings of the same word (perhaps something like writing signs too). Indeed, Japanese seems like it would be a perfect real world substitute for Infernal.


Of course, this would be completely aside from the actual effects of power, which I find fascinating and will definitely implement in my next game. But the languages themselves can also have features that characterise their speakers and thus lack or contain some special obligatory categories, which affect what you can express with each.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Edit: This is a reply to your post pre-edit. Reply to your post post-edit forthcoming.

I think it would actually be interesting if the language simply lacked a hypothetical construction entirely.

Philosophically and linguistically highly problematic, buuuut... it might just work in a D&D setting. Kind of locks you out of discussing the past, future, or anything you're not currently looking at (arguably, also anything you are looking at, but that aside), so I wouldn't use it to plan your birthday. It might work for some radical empiricist culture, LN extremists who take "seeing is believing" to the limit, but not for all celestials, I think.

Now, obligatory evidentiality, that's quite interesting, because it opens up so many new ways to lie . Again, I'd associate a proverbial "chain of evidence" with Law, but the treatment of evidentiality could be an interesting dialectal and cultural difference between archons and eladrin.

Incidentally, related to this, one could do something really exotic, like overt marking of causal reference. That's just crazy, though.


(yes I'm a linguistics student just off a philosophy course, I'm going to milk this for all it's worth)



Post post addendum:
For Abyssal, I agree there would be huge dialectal variation and a massive cultural exchange of new and exciting ways to describe torture. It might be interesting to do something agglutinative. Something about demons yelling (apparently) single-word epithets that are detailed descriptions of torture and misfortune strikes me as appropriate. Also because a stupid demon wouldn't even need to learn the internal structure .

For Infernal, I could even see several strata of higher and lower speech amongst devils, to the point where rank-and-file baatezu--and not even the stupid ones--can't understand pit fiends talking amongst one another. Certainly I would expect Asmodeus to use a dialect of Infernal that puts anyone besides himself on the back foot, and lesser devils could emulate that.

[Nifft]

Primary problem with the inability to lie or break your oath is that you bake a definition of "truth" right into the language, which is extremely tricky.

That definition of "truth" was already necessary by D&D in general, though -- for example, whether your utterance demands a Bluff check or not.

[Lapak]

Anyway, here's the problem I was trying to solve, and here's why special drawbacks for Languages of Power was a solution.

Problem: I wanted regional languages to matter. I wanted no such thing as Common. This removal has some unintended consequences.

If you try to make terrestrial languages matter more by removing Common, then each regional language becomes a less-valuable Common. The sorts of people & beings to whom you generally wish to speak will have Common + some racial or planar languages. Thus the immediate consequence of trying to make terrestrial languages "matter more" was that terrestrial languages became undesirable relative to planar languages -- so by trying to make regional languages matter more, instead they mattered less.

You'd just get a world where every ambassador and merchant speaks some well-known international (and interplanar) language like Draconic, and only stupid peasants speak regional tongues ever, at all.


Solution: Balance the increased relative value of planar languages by imposing penalties for using them, or even for knowing them. Make it so that knowing multiple regional languages is not a stupid thing for a character to do.

This is a great thread, and I like your solution. As long as we're on the topic of languages, though, it's also possible to model the real world a bit by having languages that are accepted as the lingua franca but are only typically known and used by particular professions/castes: if you learn church latin you can talk to priests in any part of the world but shopkeepers are going to give you blank looks, because it's a language for worship and discussing theology, not bartering for spices in the marketplace.

After all, learning languages is neither free nor easy (barring magic) so it's likely that if you have regional languages the vast majority of people you meet are only going to speak the local one.

I still like your approach to special/planar languages though, and would keep that element even if I introduced a region-wide diplomatic/specialist language.

[Eldariel]

Edit: This is a reply to your post pre-edit. Reply to your post post-edit forthcoming.

Philosophically and linguistically highly problematic, buuuut... it might just work in a D&D setting. Kind of locks you out of discussing the past, future, or anything you're not currently looking at (arguably, also anything you are looking at, but that aside), so I wouldn't use it to plan your birthday. It might work for some radical empiricist culture, LN extremists who take "seeing is believing" to the limit, but not for all celestials, I think.

Now, obligatory evidentiality, that's quite interesting, because it opens up so many new ways to lie . Again, I'd associate a proverbial "chain of evidence" with Law, but the treatment of evidentiality could be an interesting dialectal and cultural difference between archons and eladrin.

Incidentally, related to this, one could do something really exotic, like overt marking of causal reference. That's just crazy, though.


(yes I'm a linguistics student just off a philosophy course, I'm going to milk this for all it's worth)

Aye, that's the point. Creatures with such an alien mind would necessarily view reality in a different way. A Lawful Neutral language could certainly pull the "no contrafactual expression" if the creatures were simply minded as such, but you're correct, it wouldn't work for celestials. I was thinking Lawful with capital L at the time forgetting for the moment that Celestials are all Celestial speakers. Of course, there could be a huge number of different ways to generate a less extreme defective hypothetical system. However, care must be given that the language the game is played in can also reasonably be used to express these things; that's why Evidentials are easy, since it just means you have to say "I saw/heard/was told by X/inferred based on Y/etc. that Y is true" instead of "Y is true" - it's rather easy to use in-game. That's rather a problem with overt obligatory causal reference category for instance; 90% of the players would probably mess up producing sentences even though it's technically rather intuitive

But yeah, that's part of why I thought about Evidentials; a language with an obligatory evidential category combined with a supernatural inability to lie would be very tricky indeed. On the other hand, that certainly wouldn't work for Chaotic Good and indeed, there could be different restrictions for different "dialects" of Celestial. That would actually make sense - Chaotic Good and Lawful Good are so far removed from one another as to be entire different metaphysical beings and them using the same language as is seems extremely illogical. So make separate mutually intelligible Chaotic Good Celestial, Neutral Good Celestial & Lawful Good Celestial dialects with some overt marking and actual syntactic dialectal variation (language contact with Lawful/True/Chaotic Neutral languages?).

Post post addendum:
For Abyssal, I agree there would be huge dialectal variation and a massive cultural exchange of new and exciting ways to describe torture. It might be interesting to do something agglutinative. Something about demons yelling (apparently) single-word epithets that are detailed descriptions of torture and misfortune strikes me as appropriate. Also because a stupid demon wouldn't even need to learn the internal structure .

For Infernal, I could even see several strata of higher and lower speech amongst devils, to the point where rank-and-file baatezu--and not even the stupid ones--can't understand pit fiends talking amongst one another. Certainly I would expect Asmodeus to use a dialect of Infernal that puts anyone besides himself on the back foot, and lesser devils could emulate that.

It also occurs to me that Devils would make words up on the spot a lot á la Japanese rampant onomatopoeia. They just say that "flapaflapa kawkaw a lot today" (bird caws a lot today) instead of bothering to remember actual words for those. And yeah, I agree - a vast array of registers would also make perfect sense for Infernal to the point that it would constitute a vast array of languages-within-languages and the higher ranking individuals could dominate discussions on a purely linguistic basis.

This is a great thread, and I like your solution. As long as we're on the topic of languages, though, it's also possible to model the real world a bit by having languages that are accepted as the lingua franca but are only typically known and used by particular professions/castes: if you learn church latin you can talk to priests in any part of the world but shopkeepers are going to give you blank looks, because it's a language for worship and discussing theology, not bartering for spices in the marketplace.

After all, learning languages is neither free nor easy (barring magic) so it's likely that if you have regional languages the vast majority of people you meet are only going to speak the local one.

I still like your approach to special/planar languages though, and would keep that element even if I introduced a region-wide diplomatic/specialist language.

It's worth remembering that there has never been a global lingua franca. At best continental; even in today's world, you'll probably need 20+ languages to get along in any random place. A simple matter of linguistic genealogy and on the other hand, a lack of global linguistic contact on a larger scale. Individual travelers do not usually produce language change but there needs to be constant and prolonged language contact and there needs to be a period of some sort of communal upheaval for anything beyond diffusion to probably take place.


EDIT: It just occurred to me. Dragons are really, really old and age really slowly. Logically Draconic would therefore be a really short language á la Entish in Tolkien's world. This is particularly true if it's capable of intimate description of basically anything in reality (dragons are very interested in items of any value as well as abstract thought and reality from what I've gathered; at least the ones that live to be old) - thus there should probably be an awful lot of nuance and precision to the language, at the cost of efficiency. Thus it could very time consuming and slow (Sanskritish but perhaps Polysynthetic and of course with far more precision), where everything must be described at immense detail making a simple clause like "I will go now" impossible to utter in a short period. This would make it undesirable for any kind of casual conversation for shorter-lived races, but more than optimal for the description of any arcane phenomena, any items in reality, any intent, any philosophy or such.

This could be coupled with it having an immeasurably deep and complex lexicon thus making it impossible for anyone to truly master the language. Perhaps the effect of power could also be related to its complexity and depth. Something like needing Mental Stat (perhaps Wis, Int and Cha could all work - something like DC 10 + 1 per clause with the option of taking 10 outside combat but not so while fighting) checks vs. 1 round dazzle or daze to keep your mind straight while hearing/speaking the language on a level more complex than "I orc you". Though my mind is inevitably drawn to Glaurung's enchanting voice and whether that should also be modelled in part in the effects of the language (while certainly a trait of Glaurung, not the language, it would make for a rather cool extra for some minor enchantment effects woven into the language itself; Charisma-check vs. Will-save enabling slipping suggestion while conversing in Draconic?).

[Malimar]

This is mostly fluff instead of crunch, but a few language-related details have made it into my canon. Specifically:

Archons and other LG types speak Celestial with exacting precision, making full use of its complexities. Eladrins and other CG types speak Celestial much more loosely and slangily. So an experienced reader can tell who wrote a Celestial text by how precisely the rules of the language are followed.

Similarly, Abyssal is an ever-changing morass of dialects and slang and meme-references and words like "bae" and "fleek".

Contrariwise, Infernal is a single unchanging monolith that resists new terms being added to the lexicon, a bit like French except there's nobody enforcing this other than the natural inclinations of the devils themselves. (I used this as a minor plot point when I introduced a text written in an archaic dialect of Infernal -- there should be no such thing, Infernal has not really changed since the creation of the world.)

I also enjoy Qualith, the Grell language, and the like, as containing elements that people outside the native populace simply can't access because of their physiology. A human can learn to get the basics of Qualith, but they need to be telepathic to get the full impact of the text; similarly, you can have a complete, albeit unsubtle, conversation in just the audible half of Grell, but you need to be able to manipulate electricity to have the full range of communicable ideas.

[Telonius]

Google is failing me, but I remember a thread about Infernal several years ago. Basically, the idea was that Infernal has a couple of extra tenses that don't exist in Common. Like, there are particular tenses in Tagalog that involves recently completed actions and actions not yet taken but being contemplated. Several other tenses that might be imagined, too. So where the translation might be ambiguous in Common, it's perfectly clear in Infernal. In contract-language, that's exactly the sort of thing that can make a "lose-lose" proposition for the person who signs it if they aren't careful.

[Prime32]

Abyssal: Sounds incredibly Evil; to low-level creatures it's supernaturally terrifying.
Celestial: Sounds incredibly Good; to low-level creatures it's supernaturally calming.
Draconic: Information-dense. Used in the majority of scrolls and spellbooks, and allows you to decipher them (as read magic). Some languages have specialised forms that can be used instead, like the High Elven used by bladesingers and duskblades, but these have a lot of "flavour" towards a particular style of casting that make them unsuited for general use.
Druidic: Does not count as a language for the purpose of magic that interacts with languages (e.g. tongues will fail to decipher it). The "written" form of Druidic is more like feng shui, and scrolls of druid spells are always one of the variants that don't involve writing (like tiles you snap in half to activate).
Elemental languages: Lets you hear the voices of an element. E.g. a speaker of Terran could listen to soil and tell how fertile it is, a speaker of Aquan would make a good sailor, and so on.
Elven: Grants a bonus on Perform (poetry, sing) checks.
Goblin: Can announce directions and tactics very clearly and concisely, even complex feint maneuvers in 3D space. Goblins don't have a word for "Attack!" - the closest is "frontal visible aggressive lethal attack", but they can say it just as quickly.
Halfling: A pidgin of various mortal languages; gives you a limited ability to understand and be understood by speakers of those languages.
Infernal: Speakers cannot tell a direct lie, nor make a promise that they intend to break. You can swear to automatically fail your saving throws against a specific effect, which is binding unless something violates your contract.
Sylvan: Can be understood by animals (as speak with animals).

[ExLibrisMortis]

So make separate mutually intelligible Chaotic Good Celestial, Neutral Good Celestial & Lawful Good Celestial dialects with some overt marking and actual syntactic dialectal variation (language contact with Lawful/True/Chaotic Neutral languages?).

I would be very interested to see such archons played out.

Afroakuma has stated several times that archons aren't so much 'ruled' as they instinctively recognize their leader's (ultimately, Zaphkiel's) superior insight into what the LG thing to do is (approximately--don't eat me, angry Afro!). Assuming a community of archons so finely calibrated that they have their ethics completely in common (meaning: archons of equal rank (=insight into LG) always agree on what to do), they wouldn't particularly need to plan or review or discuss campaigns; they would simply "do the right thing" in parallel, only communicating to make one another aware of 'the state of affairs in the real world'.

At least, that might work. It would make them incredibly frustrating to argue with, though. Like, genuine certified triple-A quality military-grade non-bio-degradable purified frustration (handle with care, dispose in Abyss only).

EDIT: It just occurred to me. Dragons are really, really old and age really slowly. Logically Draconic would therefore be a really short language á la Entish in Tolkien's world. This is particularly true if it's capable of intimate description of basically anything in reality (dragons are very interested in items of any value as well as abstract thought and reality from what I've gathered; at least the ones that live to be old) - thus there should probably be an awful lot of nuance and precision to the language, at the cost of efficiency. Thus it could very time consuming and slow (Sanskritish but perhaps Polysynthetic and of course with far more precision), where everything must be described at immense detail making a simple clause like "I will go now" impossible to utter in a short period. This would make it undesirable for any kind of casual conversation for shorter-lived races, but more than optimal for the description of any arcane phenomena, any items in reality, any intent, any philosophy or such.

This could be coupled with it having an immeasurably deep and complex lexicon thus making it impossible for anyone to truly master the language. Perhaps the effect of power could also be related to its complexity and depth. Something like needing Mental Stat (perhaps Wis, Int and Cha could all work - something like DC 10 + 1 per clause with the option of taking 10 outside combat but not so while fighting) checks vs. 1 round dazzle or daze to keep your mind straight while hearing/speaking the language on a level more complex than "I orc you". Though my mind is inevitably drawn to Glaurung's enchanting voice and whether that should also be modelled in part in the effects of the language (while certainly a trait of Glaurung, not the language, it would make for a rather cool extra for some minor enchantment effects woven into the language itself; Charisma-check vs. Will-save enabling slipping suggestion while conversing in Draconic?).

I personally have a problem with the idea of a slow language for creatures that are fast and curious. Ents are, fundamentally, not interested in just about anything faster than a tree, and so can afford to spend days exchanging information. Dragons--or at least most dragons--are fast fliers with keen senses, hunter-killers with a love for magic explosions, so they should have a high-bandwith language. It can still be incredibly precise, but it'd carry an incredible amount of information per unit of time. This might result in information overload (n.b. not sensory overload, conceptual overload, occuring later in input processing) in creatures with lesser cognitive throughput. (I seem to recall that TV images saturate our visual information processing, making it harder to look away, as the brain is occupied with the backlog of stimuli. I can't find a reference right now, so it might be bogus, but that's the effect I mean.)

Of course, your second paragraph is perfectly in tune with that. Glaurung could be enchanting in the same way a fast flashy action movie continually draws attention (or a slow sensual movie featuring a favourite actor, of course ). In keeping with that, it would not at all be unreasonable to replace dragons' sorcerer casting with higher-levelled bard casting and bardic music. That way, dragons get casting more appropriate to their bloated HD (especially in terms of CL), without overwhelming boss-seeking parties with overlevelled save-or-die abilities (possibly a dragon-only epic bard progression into sor/wiz 7ths to 9ths).

P.S. Language is already capable of describing basically anything in reality. Don't need no stinkin' Draconic for that! (but you need a lot of time)

[Eldariel]

Google is failing me, but I remember a thread about Infernal several years ago. Basically, the idea was that Infernal has a couple of extra tenses that don't exist in Common. Like, there are particular tenses in Tagalog that involves recently completed actions and actions not yet taken but being contemplated. Several other tenses that might be imagined, too. So where the translation might be ambiguous in Common, it's perfectly clear in Infernal. In contract-language, that's exactly the sort of thing that can make a "lose-lose" proposition for the person who signs it if they aren't careful.

That's not so much tense as aspect, more precisely the prototypical imperfective vs. perfective split. Turkish is a good example of a complex TMA (Tense/Modality/Aspect) system with all the finesse that entails: the language makes distinction between objective (due to external/universal factors) and speaker-generated (one feels personal need/responsibility/etc.) obligation/necessity/possibility/capability/etc. and it has two different kinds of imperfective and perfective suffixes, though the different options mostly code differences in registers. It also has more options for diathesis than just active and passive (reciprocal and causative constructions, which are fairly commonplace in synthetic languages to be fair), and it's possible to apply different TMA markers to the auxiliary verb and the main verb. With these constructions it's possible to make predictions in present tense or express oneself being certain that one's assumption is true or things of that nature. The system also features few different kinds of evidentials though that category isn't so well-developed as you'd assume of a language like Infernal

I would be very interested to see such archons played out.

Afroakuma has stated several times that archons aren't so much 'ruled' as they instinctively recognize their leader's (ultimately, Zaphkiel's) superior insight into what the LG thing to do is (approximately--don't eat me, angry Afro!). Assuming a community of archons so finely calibrated that they have their ethics completely in common (meaning: archons of equal rank (=insight into LG) always agree on what to do), they wouldn't particularly need to plan or review or discuss campaigns; they would simply "do the right thing" in parallel, only communicating to make one another aware of 'the state of affairs in the real world'.

At least, that might work. It would make them incredibly frustrating to argue with, though. Like, genuine certified triple-A quality military-grade non-bio-degradable purified frustration (handle with care, dispose in Abyss only).

That sounds absolutely brilliant and an excellent way to code in their nature; they are truth and law so there's no need nor room for argument. They aren't simply searching for the concepts, they are those concepts.

I personally have a problem with the idea of a slow language for creatures that are fast and curious. Ents are, fundamentally, not interested in just about anything faster than a tree, and so can afford to spend days exchanging information. Dragons--or at least most dragons--are fast fliers with keen senses, hunter-killers with a love for magic explosions, so they should have a high-bandwith language. It can still be incredibly precise, but it'd carry an incredible amount of information per unit of time. This might result in information overload (n.b. not sensory overload, conceptual overload, occuring later in input processing) in creatures with lesser cognitive throughput. (I seem to recall that TV images saturate our visual information processing, making it harder to look away, as the brain is occupied with the backlog of stimuli. I can't find a reference right now, so it might be bogus, but that's the effect I mean.)

Of course, your second paragraph is perfectly in tune with that. Glaurung could be enchanting in the same way a fast flashy action movie continually draws attention (or a slow sensual movie featuring a favourite actor, of course ). In keeping with that, it would not at all be unreasonable to replace dragons' sorcerer casting with higher-levelled bard casting and bardic music. That way, dragons get casting more appropriate to their bloated HD (especially in terms of CL), without overwhelming boss-seeking parties with overlevelled save-or-die abilities (possibly a dragon-only epic bard progression into sor/wiz 7ths to 9ths).

Certainly Dragons can be imagined differently too, but considering their extremely slow growth reaching maturity in some hundreds of years, I think they must view reality rather slowly. Like, humans too live slow lives compared to e.g. dogs or cats and that's evident in our rate of learning. But our perception of time changes with age too; the older we get, the faster time seems to pass as we notice fewer and fewer things due to having seen it all before. Extrapolate that to 2000 years and well...time flies and few things indeed catch your attention enough to be worth remembering. Dragons are probably extraordinarily observant but still, there seems to be a tendency for life phases and thus the "speed" of life to be normalised between different lifeforms.

But yeah, the latter seems also quite appropriate. Though in my eyes, it's a juvenile Dragon indeed who cares about magical explosions. You'd think it's an old hat for an adult Dragon long ago. Perhaps youth slang in Draconic could be faster and less refined while the ancient dragons' vernacular would be speech of immense detail and precision.

P.S. Language is already capable of describing basically anything in reality. Don't need no stinkin' Draconic for that! (but you need a lot of time)

Well, language might need neologisms or new expressions for e.g. more precise splitting of spectrums like colours in certain context - in part because of how the brain is wired to notice differences based on what it expects (see e.g. Russians having multiple categories in what English traditionally refers to as the blue colours and being more tuned to telling them apart). It's hard to explain Japanese honorifics in a reasonable way in English for example; such considerations inevitably draw to the culture behind the language and thus you first have to explain the culture and its roots before the linguistic phenomenon truly makes sense. Yet its use is natural for those who were born to speak that language. Most languages have their strong points and weak points and things that are extremely vague and imprecise when expressed in other languages. Nivkh makes greater differences between the types of reindeer than any others and there are plenty of languages with only absolute, no relative concepts of direction which inevitably influence how they perceive space and indeed, what basic knowledge they need to operate linguistically.

[Elder_Basilisk]

Wrt celestial-- I also wonder who it is for. As far as I can tell in Pathfinder at least (I didn't go back to 3.5), all of the major celestial races that would be native speakers have truespeach as an ability and consequently can be understood by any being as though they were speaking with a tongues spell. So with that ability, what does it mean for something to be their language? I could see a few ways to go. 1. Celestial is truespeach and cannot be learned by any creature without the truespeach ability or magic. The tongues spell briefly lets a person speak celestial. 2. There is no celestial language per se. Whatever language celestials speak sounds like a celestial is speaking it and is somehow intelligible to anyone who hears it. Mortal attempts to transcribe celestial are a category error.

[Eldariel]

Wrt celestial-- I also wonder who it is for. As far as I can tell in Pathfinder at least (I didn't go back to 3.5), all of the major celestial races that would be native speakers have truespeach as an ability and consequently can be understood by any being as though they were speaking with a tongues spell. So with that ability, what does it mean for something to be their language? I could see a few ways to go. 1. Celestial is truespeach and cannot be learned by any creature without the truespeach ability or magic. The tongues spell briefly lets a person speak celestial. 2. There is no celestial language per se. Whatever language celestials speak sounds like a celestial is speaking it and is somehow intelligible to anyone who hears it. Mortal attempts to transcribe celestial are a category error.

That's an interesting view though I do believe AMF suppresses their Tongues and they still retain their ability to speak Celestial but without the omnicomprehendability. If we ignore that part though or just handwave it and make Tongues an innate part of Celestial, that could work. Yet, I feel that's more like Words of Creation than anything which should probably be distinct from Celestial lest the world be literally made of Celestial (which is another interesting way to take a cosmology, to be sure).

One alternative function for the language could also be, accepting the thesis that it lacks a form in and of itself, is that Celestial could also be their language of thought thus essentially defining what they can express in their true speech (going pretty deep into Linguistic Relativity here but for beings like Outsiders, that seems well-founded). Language is used for more than communication; it's hard to define and solve complex philosophical dilemma without terms and concepts for the thing you're thinking about. More generally, language defines the categories and the things you need to be immediately aware of. If a language solely uses cardinal directions to describe location (lacking words like "left, right, front, back, near, far, etc." - these languages do exist), speaker has to always be aware of the direction in which north, south, east and west (and the probable combination categories that would align with English northeast/northwest/southeast/southwest) lie. Thus a speaker of such language would have no tools to express deixis without using the cardinal direction categories for instance.

Thus, the traits of Celestial could in part influence the kinds of thoughts that are possible for a Celestial - much like Sauron could never think outside terms of power and was thus blindsided by the attempt to destroy the ring, so could Celestials have certain lack of capacity to understand morally deficient or non-good manner of thinking. This draws directly back to the metaphysical nature of these beings and Celestial being their "native language" and thus a key component of the structure of their mind.

[Nifft]

Wrt celestial-- I also wonder who it is for. As far as I can tell in Pathfinder at least (I didn't go back to 3.5), all of the major celestial races that would be native speakers have truespeach as an ability

Examples of Celestial speakers (who do not have Tongues as a constant racial effect) are trivially found:

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/lillend.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/couatl.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/genie.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/lammasu.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/titan.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/devil.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/nightHag.htm

This is from a few pages of Google searching; there are presumably more both inside and outside the SRD.

[Elder_Basilisk]

Interesting. That exposes some significant differences between Pathfinder and 3.5 in this subject. (In Pathfinder, Lillends are Azata and have truespeach.) However you are searching around the point that I was making which is specific to native speakers of celestial. Sure, night hags and various devil's are listed as speaking celestial but they're not the reason that there is a celestial language any more than, as a non-native speaker I am a reason either that there is a German language or that German is the way it is. Celestial is what it is because it suitable the needs of celestials, not to cater to night hags and various devils and genii (whose native tongues are presumably the elemental languages).

In the list you give Lamasu are the only example of a creature that could potentially be thought of as a native speaker of celestial (though not necessarily) that in the Pathfinder SRD doesn't have truespeach or telepathy (which is functionally similar in removing the need for the counterparty in communication to share a language in order to fully understand the communication). Then again, Lamasu are magical beasts rather than outsiders and are prime material natives as far as I can see. Couatls are clearly celestials but have telepathy in both editions. Titans may or may not be celestials (its not clear in 3.5; in Pathfinder, they are more like their Greek mythology origins and are an explicitly separate order of beings with members in all sorts of alignments and telepathy to boot).

In some cases, 3.5 may be different and truespeach less prevalent, but we're talking house rules here anyway and what changes would make sense and be flavorful and what the balance implications would be.

[Malimar]

Young Celestials, in settings where there is such a thing, don't have Tongues: as per Savage Species, Astral Deva, Ghaele, and Hound Archon only get Tongues at 4th level; Trumpet Archon gets it at 3rd.

But I'm not clear why even having permanent Tongues from the moment of your creation would imply not having any native language? There must be some language in which they think.

[Nifft]

Interesting. That exposes some significant differences between Pathfinder and 3.5 in this subject. (In Pathfinder, Lillends are Azata and have truespeach.) However you are searching around the point that I was making which is specific to native speakers of celestial. Sure, night hags and various devil's are listed as speaking celestial but they're not the reason that there is a celestial language any more than, as a non-native speaker I am a reason either that there is a German language or that German is the way it is. Celestial is what it is because it suitable the needs of celestials, not to cater to night hags and various devils and genii (whose native tongues are presumably the elemental languages).

In the list you give Lamasu are the only example of a creature that could potentially be thought of as a native speaker of celestial (though not necessarily) that in the Pathfinder SRD doesn't have truespeach or telepathy (which is functionally similar in removing the need for the counterparty in communication to share a language in order to fully understand the communication). Then again, Lamasu are magical beasts rather than outsiders and are prime material natives as far as I can see. Couatls are clearly celestials but have telepathy in both editions. Titans may or may not be celestials (its not clear in 3.5; in Pathfinder, they are more like their Greek mythology origins and are an explicitly separate order of beings with members in all sorts of alignments and telepathy to boot).

In some cases, 3.5 may be different and truespeach less prevalent, but we're talking house rules here anyway and what changes would make sense and be flavorful and what the balance implications would be.

I keep wincing at "truespeach", since "speach" isn't a word, but merely a misspelling of "speech". Is that really how Pathfinder spells its effect? I could maybe see Trues-peaches which grant the Celestial Court their longevity...


Anyway, the fact that Pathfinder has moved around some formerly indie Good Outsider critters isn't really a positive argument against the existence of Celestial as a language.

Couatls need to read & write, and they need a language before they can communicate telepathically with each other: Celestial serves both functions. Couatls are blatant examples of an upper-planar critter whose first and primary ("native") language is Celestial.

Lillends are a fine second example if you need more than one, but you don't. One counter-example is sufficient to harpoon an argument.

Every other Angel & Archon also needs a language before he or she can be a target for Telepathy, so yeah. Everybody must learn to speak Celestial before gaining the ability to ignore spoken languages. (Also, the whole reading / writing thing.)


I think Titans are not celestials in 3.5e, though "celestials" may be a rather fuzzy category. Titans aren't [Good] (test 1), and they're not native to any of the upper planes (test 2). AFAICT they're about as "celestial" as Slaadi.

[Fizban]

Problem: I wanted regional languages to matter. I wanted no such thing as Common. This removal has some unintended consequences.

It's worth remembering that there has never been a global lingua franca. At best continental; even in today's world, you'll probably need 20+ languages to get along in any random place.

It looks like everyone jumped over here about when I posted in the other thread, but I brought this up there: most DnD settings aren't bigger than a single continent anyway. I don't know how many languages you'd normally have over that area, but based on a comfortable number of standard PC races and a default of two languages (with no int bonus), I went with 8 standard languages, 2-3 of which will let you talk to almost anyone in power. That's enoughs that you can have the range of character from those who only know the elite languages to those who don't know any, while learning a new language is a definite upgrade (once you factor in other stuff like penalties for using the wrong language and such). There is no common, but if the regional languages are all race-based then there should be a humish- and humans get the same two starting languages (local+choice of regional) as everyone else in the area (so you can totally have a human raised far away from the "human lands" who doesn't know humish).

Dragons--or at least most dragons--are fast fliers with keen senses, hunter-killers with a love for magic explosions, so they should have a high-bandwith language. It can still be incredibly precise, but it'd carry an incredible amount of information per unit of time. This might result in information overload (n.b. not sensory overload, conceptual overload, occuring later in input processing) in creatures with lesser cognitive throughput.

You also have to remember that there are plenty of dragons and other creatures that canonically speak draconic which have significantly less "cognitive throughput," if you go by their mental stats (int 10 is common, all the way down to int 6). So if draconic is so hard to fathom that you need a massive int score, you'd have to at least roll back the idea that dragons are born fully fluent in draconic and make baby dragons speak draconic like babies.

[Eldariel]

It looks like everyone jumped over here about when I posted in the other thread, but I brought this up there: most DnD settings aren't bigger than a single continent anyway. I don't know how many languages you'd normally have over that area, but based on a comfortable number of standard PC races and a default of two languages (with no int bonus), I went with 8 standard languages, 2-3 of which will let you talk to almost anyone in power. That's enoughs that you can have the range of character from those who only know the elite languages to those who don't know any, while learning a new language is a definite upgrade (once you factor in other stuff like penalties for using the wrong language and such). There is no common, but if the regional languages are all race-based then there should be a humish- and humans get the same two starting languages (local+choice of regional) as everyone else in the area (so you can totally have a human raised far away from the "human lands" who doesn't know humish).

Well, it depends. Europe is the most linguistically poor inhabited continent in the world due to the historical dominance of empires and there are about ~200-odd languages spoken there, give or take depending on where you draw the line between a dialect and a language. Historically it's been commonplace that everyone is multilingual; there's the language of the local community, perhaps neighbouring community and the local lingua franca (small area), and perhaps the broader linguae francae for more mobile higher ranking society members such as intellectuals, nobles, and merchants. This is still the case in e.g. Africa where people often speak 3-4 languages with no regard for their intellect - it's natural acquisition in an appropriate linguistic environment. Most of those languages lack a written system entirely. Different languages are usually used in different domains (such as home, friends, lower education, politics, trade, rituals, religion, academia/science, etc.) thus creating stable multiglossia.

Thus, multilingualism should logically be a norm and there should be advantages to being able to use a language used in the community for the given task. People are much more likely to trade favourably with you if you know their "home" language and dialect for instance. This does not preclude using another language they know to this end, but it's less advantageous and the speech partner might be less fluent restricting what you can communicate.

You also have to remember that there are plenty of dragons and other creatures that canonically speak draconic which have significantly less "cognitive throughput," if you go by their mental stats (int 10 is common, all the way down to int 6). So if draconic is so hard to fathom that you need a massive int score, you'd have to at least roll back the idea that dragons are born fully fluent in draconic and make baby dragons speak draconic like babies.

Aye, but that's the same with many real world languages with incredibly deep lexicons. English is probably one of more familiar ones for most users of this forum: most people here are probably fluent in English but it's a language where "high language" has been used as a tool of power and control and thus e.g. in Academia, people have learnt "high" English in forms of concepts that are unfamiliar to the average population. This gives them a leg up in e.g. negotiations and debates where they can linguistically dominate the situation. Generally these terms have subtle nuances and they code things at a far more detailed level than the higher frequency lexemes. Draconic feels like it should be similar but only more so - thus everyone can learn draconic but knowledge and fluency does not entail true access to all the minutiae the language is capable of describing and thus is insufficient to understand the more advanced/elder users of the language or at least to discuss with them on equal terms. This would be far easier to codify under a system with defined degrees of fluency - Draconic could have a a few more of those, say 12, one per age category of a Dragon. Non-true dragon speakers would then be graded based on how they match up to true dragons intellectually and in age.

[Aniikinis]

I'm loving reading this discussion and I don't have much to say, but there was one thing that I felt I needed to point out, to avoid possible mistakes in the future.

I also enjoy Qualith, the Grell language...

Qualith is the language of the Illithids, not the Grell, but I think you might have carried that from your thought on the electrical side of the Grell language. That is unless you were talking about your own canon specifically and not the language as is used in other settings, in which case I'm sorry for the mix up.

All that said, I've always been very interested in languages and am watching this thread intently.

[Malimar]

I'm loving reading this discussion and I don't have much to say, but there was one thing that I felt I needed to point out, to avoid possible mistakes in the future.



Qualith is the language of the Illithids, not the Grell, but I think you might have carried that from your thought on the electrical side of the Grell language. That is unless you were talking about your own canon specifically and not the language as is used in other settings, in which case I'm sorry for the mix up.

All that said, I've always been very interested in languages and am watching this thread intently.

That comma was meant to represent an "and", not a clarification. Qualith and the Grell language, which both have the feature that I went on to praise.

[Aniikinis]

That comma was meant to represent an "and", not a clarification. Qualith and the Grell language, which both have the feature that I went on to praise.

Ahh, sorry, I didn't quite grasp that apparently.

[Esquire]

Possibly relevant to Infernal grammatical concerns specifically:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/archi.../t-103065.html

[ExLibrisMortis]

You also have to remember that there are plenty of dragons and other creatures that canonically speak draconic which have significantly less "cognitive throughput," if you go by their mental stats (int 10 is common, all the way down to int 6). So if draconic is so hard to fathom that you need a massive int score, you'd have to at least roll back the idea that dragons are born fully fluent in draconic and make baby dragons speak draconic like babies.

Yeah, having high information density can be more a matter of speaking a lot (very quickly) than having any specific syntactic properties. I would expect that you can always scale back, from a casual tea-and-crumpets-discussing-the-weather level of information exchange (i.e. almost zero) to a newsreader (brisk and direct) to superhuman (flight of dragons aligning battle plans mid-dive).

(Human) Speech typically hits a balance between complexity (high information density) and redundancy (reliability). For example, most languages have lots of vowels and relatively few consonants, or the reverse; few have lots of both. Their phonemic systems could be more complex, but you'd have to fit more sounds into the same phonemic possibility space, which makes it harder to distinguish those sounds, which can hurt discretion under noisy conditions (wind, crowds, rushing water, music, what-have-you), which can cause total communication breakdown in important situations (storm, battle). On the other hand, reducing redundancy can speed up information exchange, so you can vary the amount as needed; that's one of the things people do when speaking very quickly. You don't actually produce sounds twice as fast when you're speaking twice as fast, you just leave bits out. We don't usually hear that, because we have a really solid audio processing unit that reconstructs the phonemes for us. In my experience, it's more obvious for your second language that people just "randomly" (not really, of course) leave bits out!

If you assume dragons strike the same balance (and they should), you can increase the maximum information throughput by widening the phonemic possibility space and increasing phoneme density (with commensurate increase in discretion). Dragons probably lack lips, so you'll need to adjust for that, and you might introduce some additional anatomical features while you're at it. For example, you can introduce a third formant into your vowel system, or a more subtly articulated tongue (which could encourage clicks, for example--clicks are pretty awesome), or do stuff to the voice box or even the lungs (humans don't really use their lungs in speech except to generate a steady air flow--not much fine manipulation there).

Well, it depends. Europe is the most linguistically poor inhabited continent in the world [...] Thus, multilingualism should logically be a norm [...]

I cannot stress this enough. It's very easy to think that languages are somehow national affairs, but mostly, they're not. Speakers--especially young speakers up to about thirty years old--continually do new things with language, and only reinforcement through social contact and the need to be understood drive standardization. If you don't regularly meet people from outside the village, your dialect/language may not be intelligible outside that village--more so if you speak a lingua franca, leading to H/L distinctions. There are still a lot of places with local languages; consequently, most languages you can distinguish are not recognized by law, or at least not national.

Similarly, it's very easy to think that people naturally grow up speaking one language, and must learn other languages in school, but that's not typical. Multilingualism is more common than monolingualism across the world, and languages are not primarily taught (think about it: did your parents sit you down in front of a slideshow and lecture about verb conjugation? I thought not).

Finally, it's very easy to think Europe's Indo-European languages, particularly the Germanic and Romance languages (that's English, Spanish, French, German, Latin, etcetera), are typical languages, but they are not. In many ways, both structurally and in terms of historical position, they are unusual.

[Fizban]

I'm pretty sure Europe's also the basis for a lot of fantasy stuff written by. . . Europeans or descendants of Europeans (Americans [Canadians? I feel like there's probably some big Canada based gaming companies]). If you only speak English and need some historical grounding for scale in your faux-medieval setting, you go to medieval Europe. Like I said in my other post, I know most of the rest of the world is multilingual, but DnD was written here and for the large portion of America that doesn't know four languages keeping track of two on your character (when they're actually important) and even a dozen over the campaign setting is quite a lot. If even Europe had/has 200 languages and you want that level of complexity in game, I expect you'd need a whole player group of linguists.