Re: OT: Quick Intro

Staving Andreas Johansson:

>He actually had a few more Elvish languages, like Telerin and Silvan Elvish.
>But I suspect that the Lord of the Rings, with it's plentiful references to
>Elvish speech and Dwarvish inscriptions, has, thru' not too attentive
>readers, helped establish the pattern in many Fantasy worlds of each
>non-human race having just one language. I've, in RPGs, seen rather amusing
>examples of this, where Dwarfs speak Dwarf, Minotaurs speak Minotaur and
>Halflings speak Halfling, while the humans, in addition to being the only
>race that doesn't get a capital letter, for some reason don't speak Human.
>And they _never_ bother to explain this irregular state of affairs.
The fantasy world on which Khangathyagon and its many and varied
descendants are spoken doesn't have any non-human races as such. I find I
can create all the diversity I need with one sentient species, so I stick
to humans. I very often use languages to create important features of
cultures, on the assumption that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the wrong
way round - a distinctive feature of a culture will create a corresponding
change in a language, so given a language change, I can deduce the cultural
feature that gave rise to it.

Pete Bleackley