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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talinthas" data-source="post: 1191269" data-attributes="member: 10339">THANK YOU!!i'm glad someone finally agrees that common tounge is crap. Linguistics is my main hobby ( i speak 5 languages, and read 7 more), and also being of indian descent, i can tell you that the concept of a common language just coming out of nowhere is bunk.  The only way a common tounge exists at all is due to invasion.  In india, for instance, English is the common, because a large foreign power invaded all the minor linguistic groups and forced the same language on all of them.  Same with Arabic in north africa and the middle east, or latin during roman times. I play dragonlance, and have a hard time believing that 300 years after a cataclysm wiped out the major empire that ruled both in power and linguistically that a 'common' trade language would still exist.  Look at Europe.  All the latin based groups evolved into their own languages after the fall of the romans.  India is much the same, as is more or less every group post imperial fallout. In my campaign, half of the fun is trying to communicate.  My players come from an island that has been linguistically isolated for 300 years, and only now is coming to the rest of the main land.  Trying to understand how modern Khur came from the ancient istaran they speak is fun =) I also ran an adventure where the party went to an ogre city, armed with a book that translated goblin to ergot, while the party spoke solamnic. See, Solamnic to Ergot is like dutch to german, and goblin to ogre is like japanese to chinese.  Aka, a dutch person is in china trying to get by with a book that translates japanese kanji (borrowed directly from chinese, with a lot of similarity in raw meaning) into German, which is kinda close to dutch. My players had a hard time, but the linguist in me was jumping with glee =) Oh, and in my game, elves speak japanese, ogres hindi, etc etc.  A lot of my group converse in japanese, so the little marking on their chara sheet saying they speak elven is actually meaningful =)</blockquote>

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