Re: OT: Quick Intro

From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
Subject: Re: Quick Intro


> I wonder to what extent this preference for having a Common Tongue is due
to
> Tolkienian influence; it's certainly convenient from a pragmatic view to
> have a lingua franca represented by English (or Sinhalese or whatever
> language the thing is written in), but there's little reason it need be
> called "Common", is there?
It sounded pretty dumb to me for it to be called "Common", but then one day
I suddenly realized that calling a language "Common" had been done before,
with Koine.  Still, it would have been more fun to call it "Common" in
another language.  All of the language names in my world come from one of
the following roots:

- "language"
- "the people" > adjective
- geographic adjective
- ethnic adjective

But the vast majority come from one of the first two.  Actually, now that
I'm thinking about it, a few languages that spun off as specialty dialects
at first have different names.  There's a trade pidgin that is now a creole
and is called by a word that once meant "trade", and there's another
language called essentially "king-speak", as that was the elite language
that the conquerors used, so when common people started speaking it, they
called it "speaking the way the king speaks".  But other than that, I
generally call languages simply "language", just as I generally call ethnic
groups "people".