do you thee and thou and whence?

[Sixchan]

Usually no. However, Glaswegian slang has various things left over from the days of old english and old scots, so things like "ye" often creep in.

Accents are a different matter altogether. Being British anyway, british accents are no problem (especially dwarves, because every dwarf is Scottish). And other european accents are fairly easy. Except German. I can't do german as anything other than absurdly overdone. So instead, I just speak with a kind of strange russian accent and add in various words in German.

 

[Ferret]

Oh, be thee quiet, mine art of language is hither to me yet yonder for though.

Yeah I'm english. I may use the occasional old english term but not at the gamming table. Oh and whats wrong with "HUZZAH!"

 

[Mouseferatu]

(especially dwarves, because every dwarf is Scottish).

You noticed that too, huh?

 

[Aaron L]

We speak in modern English, but use different levels of formality for different languages.

 

[heimdall]

We talk in game like we do out of game. We even use the typical infantry hand signals (closed fist held up to stop the formation, etc.) to set up a situation when we're aware of an enemy and they don't know we're there. I don't want to imagine how silly we'd sound if we tried to use archaic language. We'd probably be falling all over ourselves laughing after about five minutes. Accents are a different matter. For whatever reason, the DM tries to make every gnome NPC sound like he's from North Dakota.

 

[Agback]

(especially dwarves, because every dwarf is Scottish).

Of course! How and when did you discover this sublime truth?

Regards,


Agback

 

[Sixchan]

Of course! How and when did you discover this sublime truth?

Regards,


Agback

I dunno. It just hit me today. I can't believe I never realised it before!

 

[Agback]

G'day

I have only once played a Seventeenth-Century Englishman, and a that in a campaign where our characters all spoke French. In short, I've never played a character or run a campaign in which Archaic Modern English would be appropriate.

And if (as someone already pointed out) we're implicitly translating from Early Middle English, Late Old English, Latina Rustica, Mediaeval French, and a swag of fantasy languages, why not translate into our natural speech rather than an affected one? After all, our characters aren't affecting archaisms any more than they are speaking Elizabethan English.

I did once play in a Pendragon adventure set in the Sixth Century but "told for a 14th Century notional audience". The others all 'whither'ed and 'ycelpt', and some of them had a fair flow of ornate verbosity in that style. But I couldn't keep it up, and besides, to me they sounded more like the satirical speeches in A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur than Mallory's La Morte D'Arthur.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Agback]

I dunno. It just hit me today. I can't believe I never realised it before!

It hit me in 1983, and I published a little article on it, discussing the identity of the Sassenachs, in the magazine of the RP club I was in then (UNSWRPA). And in '85 I wrote a 'CityBook' for Flying Buffalo that focussed on a bunch of Dwarvish enterprises and that revealed this truth. But (perhaps sadly, though I'm sure I would not have got rich writing RPG materials) for one reason and another, though accepted by two publishers it never made it into print.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Henry]

We use modern English and slang, although when I play a character, I try to do one thing differently:

I do not use contractions. You would be surprised at how this affects the attention of the other players. Acting as if I cannot and will not contract a phrase seems to add a slightly different air then when you're like using all these different modern terms and stuff at the table.