Samnell
Explorer
I've been trying to de-emphasize Common in my FR game and instead play up the various regional tongues. The game is set in Chessenta, so the language in question is Chessentan.
I want to keep Common around as a lingua franca, but I'm trying to make it a perennial second language. No one, or very few, are raised speaking it in the home. But it's simple and easy to pick up, if limited to mostly utilitarian expressions geared around trade. Literary traditions would be expressed in the local language, though Common might be the venue for first (and probably bad) translation.
So the way I've been modeling it is members of the aristocracy, travellers, merchants, and others who might be called on to frequently communicate with foreigners would learn Common as a matter of course. The same is not necessarily true for everyone else. Children, farmers, people living off trade routes or away from major cities, these people have less use for Common. They might still learn it, but they don't have a very strong motivation to do so.
I've been slowly phasing this in through NPCs for a while, which I'm sure is entertaining the player of my one current Chessentan-speaking PC. But now the party's derro rogue (who speaks very heavily accented Common, but can be quite articulate in dwarven and hasn't yet had a chance to show what he can do in his mother tongue) has sort of taken in a Chessentan foundling. They don't share a language in common, but Rokto (the derro) is trying to learn Chessentan from Eleon (the child).
Rokto's player is just a dear and he's done a considerable amount of work hashing out rough ideas of how derro works as a language, derro culture, and that stuff. Now he wants to learn Chessentan from a six year old, while at the same time teaching the boy derro.
I want to reciprocate his effort (and from what another player has said, this isn't the only guy who's thinking about picking up the local lingo) with a workable skeleton of Chessentan for them. I don't want to play Tolkien and work out the actual language since even I have too much of a life for that
but I want to give the language a distinctive stamp so the players could have an idea what Chessentan sounds like. "Hey, that's not a Chessentan name!" and that kind of thing.
The easy way would be to just make Chessentan the cryptogreek that usually pervades the area, but reading through Races of Faerun I discovered Chessentan is a Rauric language, descended from the slave argot of ancient Imaskar. It's in the same language family as Mulhorandi (Egyptian) and Untheric (Babylonian). It's not directly related to Common, or Common's major root language Chondathan.
So I want to maintain some of the Greek flavor in Chessentan to work with what I've already done to make the area slightly Greek-flavored, but I'd like to give the language a strongly semitic type of feel overall; more Egyptian or Aramaic in structure.
I originally saw Chessentan as straight-out Ancient Greek, but I want to add that nuance to make it a bit more unique. It's still a Greek culture, but the language running it could be more Semitic, if not to the same degree as I'd want for Untheric or Mulhorandi.
Whence my problem: I can probably fake enough of an Indo-European framework (native speaker of one, studied three others at various points within two different branches of the larger group and I know just a hair or two about the Slavic languages) but I know jack about Ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, or anything else that could actually help me out. Linguistics isn't my strong suit, despite a general interest in languages.
So I'm hunting for a good, introductory level and relatively non-technical webpage or FAQ or something that could help me do what I want to do. My Googling hasn't gotten me anywhere.
Anyone know anything like that?
I want to keep Common around as a lingua franca, but I'm trying to make it a perennial second language. No one, or very few, are raised speaking it in the home. But it's simple and easy to pick up, if limited to mostly utilitarian expressions geared around trade. Literary traditions would be expressed in the local language, though Common might be the venue for first (and probably bad) translation.
So the way I've been modeling it is members of the aristocracy, travellers, merchants, and others who might be called on to frequently communicate with foreigners would learn Common as a matter of course. The same is not necessarily true for everyone else. Children, farmers, people living off trade routes or away from major cities, these people have less use for Common. They might still learn it, but they don't have a very strong motivation to do so.
I've been slowly phasing this in through NPCs for a while, which I'm sure is entertaining the player of my one current Chessentan-speaking PC. But now the party's derro rogue (who speaks very heavily accented Common, but can be quite articulate in dwarven and hasn't yet had a chance to show what he can do in his mother tongue) has sort of taken in a Chessentan foundling. They don't share a language in common, but Rokto (the derro) is trying to learn Chessentan from Eleon (the child).
Rokto's player is just a dear and he's done a considerable amount of work hashing out rough ideas of how derro works as a language, derro culture, and that stuff. Now he wants to learn Chessentan from a six year old, while at the same time teaching the boy derro.
I want to reciprocate his effort (and from what another player has said, this isn't the only guy who's thinking about picking up the local lingo) with a workable skeleton of Chessentan for them. I don't want to play Tolkien and work out the actual language since even I have too much of a life for that
but I want to give the language a distinctive stamp so the players could have an idea what Chessentan sounds like. "Hey, that's not a Chessentan name!" and that kind of thing.The easy way would be to just make Chessentan the cryptogreek that usually pervades the area, but reading through Races of Faerun I discovered Chessentan is a Rauric language, descended from the slave argot of ancient Imaskar. It's in the same language family as Mulhorandi (Egyptian) and Untheric (Babylonian). It's not directly related to Common, or Common's major root language Chondathan.
So I want to maintain some of the Greek flavor in Chessentan to work with what I've already done to make the area slightly Greek-flavored, but I'd like to give the language a strongly semitic type of feel overall; more Egyptian or Aramaic in structure.
I originally saw Chessentan as straight-out Ancient Greek, but I want to add that nuance to make it a bit more unique. It's still a Greek culture, but the language running it could be more Semitic, if not to the same degree as I'd want for Untheric or Mulhorandi.
Whence my problem: I can probably fake enough of an Indo-European framework (native speaker of one, studied three others at various points within two different branches of the larger group and I know just a hair or two about the Slavic languages) but I know jack about Ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, or anything else that could actually help me out. Linguistics isn't my strong suit, despite a general interest in languages.
So I'm hunting for a good, introductory level and relatively non-technical webpage or FAQ or something that could help me do what I want to do. My Googling hasn't gotten me anywhere.
Anyone know anything like that?
