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Roleplay Languages Tree


Sander
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OH im so happy that silachians on here

 

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This is actually based as hell. Very nice.

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Harrenic and Jorenic should be moved out from under Flexio and be considered more as IRP classifications like Farfolk and Highlander. My interpretation has always been that these were how Canonists labelled and reconciled the myriad different human cultures and ethnicities through out the world rather than being concrete definitions and ancestry.

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Doing God’s work fr

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27 minutes ago, Arafel said:

Where's Adunian?


The people who gave me feedback didn’t think Adunians had their own language, nor did I find such.

4 hours ago, TaytoTot said:

I didn't know Reinmaren was it's own language? I simply believe that's just the word for people who live there not a language. Though, I totally could be wrong


I thought it was the same as Waldenian, but I read it being described as its own thing in a few places so I put it in for good measure.

5 hours ago, Samler said:

Beyond the dark elven amelgamation of Ancient Elven and Blah- What changes has there been to the elven language and which group uses this 'elvish'? 


So ‘Elvish’ would just be the standard Elven that is spoken today, while ‘Ancient Elven’ would be the same language 10 years ago or whatever. I know Ancient Elven has had various additions to the vocabulary as well as maybe some grammatical changes though of that I’m not so sure. So yeah, not wholly separate languages, moreso change over time and a change in how people name it (I’ve heard Elvish being used the past year or two, I think Ancient Elven has kinda fallen out of use.)

 

Again though, not a perfect chart, feel free to disagree.

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First of all, nice graphic! Can appreciate the time and work that went into this, and it's cool to see the various language families color-coded and clustered together based on influence. 

 

I do want to raise a point in that I think that having every language descend from Flexio is probably not the right way to go about connecting all the languages on LotC. I understand this chart might be meant to be viewed RPly, but even on those grounds, its pretty easily disputable in lieu of alternate theories, and I'd take this opportunity to give my OOC two cents if the goal is to craft even a Canonist RP language theory document that would still be more accurate to both the played game and Canonist histories.

 

While Flexio is the language that the original Aengudaemons (Aeriel + Iblees) spoke, and a holy language for humans, it wouldn't explain why Common is something that all the four races speak, even amongst themselves, and not just Flexio or even a Flexio-based language (Romance languages). 

 

From what I have understood and roleplayed, 'the first couple' and the progenitors of the Descendants all spoken Common, or an ancient variant of it, and through the various religious/magical influences that each Descendant race took, they then deviated from Common i.e during or after the battle with Iblees, Krug began to commune with the spirits, who taught him Old Blah, which lead to Blah as a hybrid Common-Old Blah dialect.

 

Languages beyond Common among the descendants of the Four Brothers thus emerge from mystical sources (Old Blah, Flexio, Ancient Elven, Dwed, Ancient Jorenic), while their respective in-game dialects are the consequences of trying to impose a mystical language unto Common and ending up with a pidgin language (blah, modern elven, dwarven accent, various highlander and heartlander pidgins and accents).

 

The same for Elves or Dwarves, as Malin and Urguan might've spoken Common with his brothers first, but after they fell apart, Malin cultivated the elven language of power and you have Urguan cultivating runes of power, and that began to forge new languages that later made distinct dialects of Common (Elven dialect, Dwarven accent).

 

Even Flexio among the humans is something that emerged because of Horen interacting with Aenguls as per his blessing of the Seven Skies, and getting the language from them, which was largely kept among a priestly class and never really the language of the people (barring I suppose the Auvergnat language tree, which does have some RP history in that regard.)

 

The current model has it so that the proto-language is Romance based when everyone functionally speaks a Germanic language on LotC with their various pidgins and dialects, and that leads to a big plothole as those languages are not related at all. Even insinuating that Ancient Elven and Auvergnat are just lingual cousins is pretty obtuse given an insurmountable gap in vocabulary and grammar.

 

There isn't really a meaningful history as to why or how such a radical shift happened, and in the grand scheme of things, it is pretty human-centric, even past the point of simple Canonist perspective, to push 'our' language as the originator, when Common was plenty good enough for Availer/early Aegis RP. 

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3 hours ago, Sander said:


So ‘Elvish’ would just be the standard Elven that is spoken today, while ‘Ancient Elven’ would be the same language 10 years ago or whatever. I know Ancient Elven has had various additions to the vocabulary as well as maybe some grammatical changes though of that I’m not so sure. So yeah, not wholly separate languages, moreso change over time and a change in how people name it (I’ve heard Elvish being used the past year or two, I think Ancient Elven has kinda fallen out of use.)

 

Again though, not a perfect chart, feel free to disagree.

Are we talking about the Ancient Elven used by those of Elvenesse, or Haelun'or? Can you give a link to this 'Elvish'?

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@SanderFirst of all great work, glad my nit-picking about Vel'luah, Ilzakarn, Old Blah and Hazmeză seeped through! :)

Whilst I don't think this chart has any place in roleplay (vast swathes of the information on here would have to be metagamed), as an OOC resource, things like this help keep our community's extensive lore and IC history alive and interesting.

 

I think what @Samlermeans to highlight to you is that this chart implies 'Elven' and 'Ancient Elven' are two different languages, or at the very least that one evolved out of the other and is now distinct enough to warrant its own box. This, as far as I'm aware, is an oversight.


To my knowledge there is no language called 'Elven'. Or, there was but it's now mostly extinct and is therefore referred to as 'Ancient' Elven. The two are not distinct from each other, as this chart interprets. 

 

Ancient Elven, which is a mostly dead language with just a few remaining words used by modern elves as greetings, place names etc though the vast majority of it is lost to history as explained in Sporadic's original post. There is no direct evolution nor successor language called simply 'Even'.

 

Spoiler

 

Beyond that there's Drow (Mori'quessir) which to my knowledge isn't actually derived from Elven at all, and I believe was developed in isolation with possible Fae(?) influence on account of their Nemiisae-centric religion and creation myth. Citation needed there, though. Looking at the Drow language right now though I don't think there's any loaned words or similar grammar rules to Elven.

 

Spoiler

Also, going deeper down the rabbit hole Mori'quessir aren't even technically elves.

 

nerd-emoji-nerd.gif

 

As far as I know Vel'luah (Dark Elven) is the only modern derivative of 'Elven' which is still widely spoken and treated as a whole, 'living' language. Though importantly it was built (and continues to grow) in combination with Old Blah and corruptions from Drow and Al'tarhn-Durngo, made even more distinct by its own alphabet and grammar rules which have resulted in the majority of its words being unique creations rather than loaned. The etymology of much of the language is also coded to dark elven history and wouldn't make much sense culturally for high elves nor wood elves to adopt en masse. 

 

It wouldn't, therefore, be appropriate to call it 'Elven', 'New Elven' or 'Modern Elven', and as far as I'm aware no other language past or present comes as close.

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

TL;DR you should probably get rid of 'Elven' and just have 'Ancient Elven' and Mor'Quessir should probably be separate from the main tree besides its influence on Vel'luah.

 

Also, a lot of these languages are based on real world ones which aren't very appropriate to describe as Latin (Flexio) derived/ influenced. Though that's more of a Euro-centric issue with LoTC's worldbuilding that you can't feasibly accommodate in this chart, not an attack on you. I appreciate you addressing that as the chart being made 'from a Canonist perspective', though would reiterate this chart serves best as an OOC tool and is not an appropriate IC resource. 


Great job otherwise!

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This is a very neat infographic @Sander!

 

If you'd be able to make one edit, more like simplification, you can merge the cells containing Spraekjom and Cinged together with a / symbol if you'd like. Spraekjom is the name of the language spoken by the Cinged[oz]!

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In regards to all the errors and suggested alterations; there were a lot of languages with a lot of lore - my research into how exactly these are all connected wasn't that deep, hence all your suggestions of course!

I do not intend to alter the tree any time soon, because figuring everything out would be a hassle, but I might do a revised and improved version in the future. So if you have suggestions for what should be changed and such, keep them coming and I might incorporate them into a future revised version!

(Also, good disclaimer that some people made here; careful about using this as irp knowledge considering that some of these languages aren't known by outsiders at all. You don't wanna get tripped up in metagaming accusations, so just use this to further your ooc understanding of things!)

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This looks great

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Doesn't make particular sense for Old Norlandic to descend from Jorenic? If anything, it is its own tree. Likely, you'd be better off having the tree start with common, than flexio, and have subsequent language groups descend into the much broader ones. Aka, Common -> Old Norlandic, Common -> Jorrenic(if it is even an actual language, and not just those who were around Jorren). Old Norlandic in particular functions similar to Flexio, it is a primarily religious language spoken only by the Keepers of the Red Faith. The idea of this tree is really cool, but I feel a lot of languages are quite disconnected from one another and never actually originated from something else.

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