Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 1354203" data-attributes="member: 6929">Q1: What level do career soldiers come in at? Merchants or commoners? Or their own stage? I'm not sure what background such people had... they say if you want a longbowman, train his grandfather, indicating some sort of martial lineage.Q2: Personally, I'd do away with ECLing any culture. I'd find what makes that culture best - physical endurance and wild lore ranging across to broad education and abundant monetary resources as you ascend the social ladder. I certainly wouldn't be 'realistic' and demand that all commoners were shrunken, diseased waifs with a natural life expectency slightly longer than that of a distempered dog; the peasant types that go adventuring are likely to be the big, burly types who've survived the plague, ha ha me laddy etc. Aristocrats might have more weapons proficiency, but not be as tough.Q3: Regionalised language cannot be overstated. If you live in your farming valley, leaving every 6 months to sell sheep in the next valley, you don't need to share much language with people 10 miles down the road beyond words for 'sheep', 'coin' and 'cheating bleeper'. I think that's why 'dead' languages such as Latin stuck around so long - they were established, fixed quantities that had large provenance. Further afield, I don't really know - I suspect some variety of Arabic would be very influential in the Middle East and Africa, but India and Asia would probably be hodgepodges of dialects, with the possible exception of coastal China - which would still have dialects, just one language group would be dominant, much like Latin in the West. It's possible that Japan, with its strictly phonetic alphabet and predominant noble literacy, had a regulatory factor necessary to bind their language together, but I don't know.Regulatory factor, now that I mention it, is very important. A widespread empire is likely to regulate language towards its native tongue; widespread literacy and/or the printing press (thus mass-produced books) also regulate language. These things were in short supply in those days, especially in Europe. When they did become dominant... well, Shakespeare is still quite legible today, while go back a couple more centuries and blink confusedly. Printing is powerful.Q4: I'm no linguist. But I'm sure googling around for 'language families' or the 'history of languages' wouldn't hurt. Most of 'em'll probably go back to an Indian religious language, if I remember correctly, but break up a few thousand years ago...</blockquote>

Verification