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The fantasy trope that everyone of a given species shares the same language always seemed a bit funny to me.
Co-author credit on this comic to my daughter, who came up with the concept. (She makes a lot of comics about dragons, but she's too young to share them publicly.)
Which Vault is she from?
Skyrim's Dovah is a very special kind of fantasy linguistics because it has the exact same grammatical construction as English and every word has the same number of syllables as its direct English translation.
Oh, also if two words in English rhyme, there's a decent chance their respective Dovah translations do too.
Why? Because thanks to those completely absurd facts the Dragonborn song "works" in both English and Dovah as a word-to-word translation.
Actually, it's called Dovahzuul. Dovah is the species, dovahzuul is the language.
For this reason, Dovah is typically considered an English βrelexβ rather than a conlang. Relex = Re-Lexicon.
Yes please
What does the Draconic one say?
o noble and mighty dragons, we beseekh you, grant us safe passage through your territory.
we are but humble adventurers on a quest that may yet bring hope to our troubled realm...
It's just a substitution cipher
https://www.dafont.com/dovahkiin.font?text=o+noble+and+mighty+dragons%2C+we+beseekh+you%2C+grant+us+safe+passage+through+your+territory&psize=xs
Hello, Dragons! Can we enter the cave if we promise to remove our boots? Also, do you happen to have any cookies?
... Oh.
I like this.
I love the elf's expression in the last panel
This leads me to the conclusion that chihuahuas can't communicate with huskies.
They can, they only know two words though, both offensive.
I now feel vindicated for splitting draconic and primordial into multiple additional dialects. Itβs hard to create language drift in long lived species, but far from impossible. Particularly over a million years, primordial time.
I'd more believe that dragons create new dialects out of pride ("This language construct is daft, I can do it better.") and scalism than natural language drift.
One thing I like doing in my games is removing common. I have each player a stack of note cards and they write each language they speak on a card. When anyone talks they have to hold up a card.
Always interesting when you have a party member that speaks no languages the rest of the group does.
I think pathfinder handled common well. It's the default language of the sociocultural zone in which the campaign takes place. In the north Atlantic of earth common is English, in China it's Mandarin, in South America it's Spanish. It's not necessarily everyone's first language, but it's the lingua franca. In universe this means that fantasy Mediterranean is speaking fantasy Latin as common while fantasy China's common is fantasy Chinese
I think it would also be cool for a setting to do something inspired by Plains Sign Language which evolved out of a trade sign language for people who didn't speak each others' languages or something inspired by Esperanto which was intended to be the global workers' second language so we could communicate with each other on similar footing.
My DM had a similar problem with Common, but instead of removing it entirely he basically nerfed it. The in-game explanation is that it's basically a cobbled-together system of hand signs and syllables that are supposed to be used to make trade possible between traveling merchants who don't speak each other's language; as a result, you can't really use it to express anything more complicated than "I want that" or "give me this." Rarely, he'll let us roll if we want to try to convey some important information via Common, but otherwise we're stuck behind a hard language barrier. It's made the game more interesting, not least because of the charades-esque mini game we get to play every now and then lol
You might tell your DM to look up Sabir, where the term Lingua Franca came from, the "Frankish tongue" which wasn't really from the Franks.
This is where the idea of a common language comes from. Sabir was a simplified pidgin mix of Mediterranean languages so traders could communicate. They still spoke fine but didn't conjugate verbs, used Me/you a lot without different forms (myself, I, yourself, them, they, etc).
Sabir was a Mediterranean lingua franca, then Latin for 1500 years throughout Europe. Now it's English. The idea of Common in D&D comes from Westron or "the Common tongue" in LotR which D&D was heavily inspired from, which was basically written by Tolkien so that his constructed languages had a reason to exist. He was a scholar of languages, and the idea of a common tongue comes from actual history. He wasn't just making it up. Something like that would likely exist in a Fantasy world with lots of trade.
Meanwhile over in North America there was a full sign language primarily used for communicating internationally.
As you say, people find ways to communicate and while polyglots are present everywhere, the people who can easily learn 10+ languages are too rare and valuable to be the entirety of the merchant classes. It's a lot easier for a large portion of the population to learn the regional language of international trade.
A lack of a common language of some form for a region indicates isolated societies with little trade or communication with each other. This is more akin to the lower classes of the early middle ages in Europe. Most fantasy settings use medieval aesthetics, but have extensive trade and war networks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
It has real historic roots though. A common tongue isn't unrealistic. They once used Sabir or "Frankish" where lingua franca came from, then Latin throughout Europe, now English as a global lingua franca.
If you want to do that in your games, and it works for you, go on with your bad self.
I prefer without a common language. Especially when 100% of the party speaks it.
I played in a GURPS campaign that took place in the real world. There was no restriction on languages, and even with that there were party members who had to use another member to communicate to other party members.
This is kind of a weird conversation to be having in English in a room of probably 50% non-native English speakers.
I do something similar too! In my dnd game I treat draconic as this ancient uber conservative language and lizard folks speak reptilic, a descendant of draconic. One of my PC knows draconic so I always describe reptilic to sound simplified and with weird accent to him. The party recently came across some troglodytes and I read that the language is related to draconic so when I played the troglodytes speaking I basically went caveman-speak for the PC that knows draconic haha.
As much as people think having "Common" as a language is weird, it literally has historical roots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
People have been using a Common language for millenia. Today, the global lingua franca is obviously English. For about 1500 years, the lingua franca of medieval Europe was Latin. And for a while in the Mediterranean it was Sabir, where Lingua Franca the term came from, which was a weird simplified Mediterranean mix of languages (no verb conjugation, etc).
Other areas with multiple languages have had their own Lingua Francas. It's a common thing to happen if you have big areas with multiple languages and lots of trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas
So it's really not weird to have a Common tongue in games. It came from LotR which came from history since Tolkien was a huge language nerd and wrote a world for his language to exist.
The de facto lingua franca is English, except things like "de facto" or "lingua franca".
As a polygot, this comic amuses me greatly.