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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Khayman" data-source="post: 1865995" data-attributes="member: 17051">I was speaking from a human standpoint. It depends on how much one wishes to anthropomorphize fiends and celestials.Text is a different matter than spoken language. Agreed, logographic and hieroglyphic systems are more divorced from phonetics. A literary example of a corrupting glyph would be the Yellow Sign (for all you Hastur worshippers out there). But could a book-trained archaeologist be intelligible to an ancient Egyptian listener? I wouldn't be, but maybe that's just a result of my graduate program...Again, from a human standpoint, learning a verbal language is easier if one actually speaks it as part of the process of learning. Not impossible, just easier. Now, celestials might be a whole different ball of wax and may be created with an innate undestanding of evil. Or not. Again, depends on the campaign. I played in one campaign where spoken Abyssal caused pain to celestial listeners. I've also played in one where archons cursed in Abyssal just as much as did the primes. And my tiefling PC and his litter-mates were born knowing Abyssal as a sort of 'twin language'.My view of lower planar languages is courtesy of Planescape, in that they serve as trade languages when (a) it needs to be recorded, and (b) telepathy is impossible or just plain dangerous. The Dark Speech from BoVD (like Lingua Praestantia from WFRP) serves nicely as a primal language of evil right down to its corrupting influence. If you don't like Dark Speech, use Abyssal/Infernal/whatever in its stead --- just bear in mind that it might be risky to include corruptingly evil tongues on the list of bonus languages available to good clerics.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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