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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2203393" data-attributes="member: 4937">My opinion is that while linguistic devices are interesting, they get in the way of gameplay if over used.I employ the following devices to get around the problem:1) Originally all the intelligent races spoke the same language (called Primal).2) All languages - whether existing or forgotten - are derived from Primal in some way.3) Hense, all languages default to one another.   In this fashion, Decipher Script lets you work out the general meaning of even a language you've never seen before.   Comprehend Languages works according to a similar principal, sense it would be impossible for a mere 1st level spell to allow translation of a truly alien tongue.  4) Primal is itself descended from a language called Elder Primal.   Elder Primal is the language of the gods, the langauge that magic is written in, and the langauge that the creator god used to cause the universe to come into being.  Your True Name is your name in Elder Primal.5) Most races have been around long enough and have spread out over enough parts of the world that there languages have diverged into three or four large language groups, and each of these groups has over the past few thousand years evolved.6) The language of each race which is closest to Primal is called the Ancient tongue.  Generally there is only one ancient tongue per race.  If you know the modern version of the tongue, then you might be able to work out something of the Ancient tongue, but you'd have to be pretty smart and fairly expert in the language and linguistics in general.  7) The transition languages between Ancient and the modern tongue are called Archaic.  Generally speaking, there are several Archaic tongues per race, each tied to one large successful empire which spread that tongue widely.   Many of these Ancient languages persist as legal, scholarly, artistic, and court languages.  In some cases - like Archaic Elvish - there are still communities that speak the language.8) For each race, there are 1-4 modern versions of the language, which are distributed over such a wide region (usually continent wide) that generally speaking, if you know the modern version of a particular racial language, you can speak with anyone you meet as if it was a 'common' tongue.   Essentially, the modern versions of a racial language would not be much more different than say Italian and French or similar language groups in the real world, so that if you can speak one you could probably with difficulty communicate to someone else if you had a peice of paper and enough time to work things out.9) For each modern tongue, there are a variaty of dialects, but these are no more different than Swiss German and High German, for example.   Therefore, with some minor difficulties, the dialects can be ignored.9) Outsiders (and presumably Abberations, though I haven't thought about it) know truly alien tongues.  You can't use comprehend languages to read Auran, Celestial, Infernal or any of the 'secret' languages of outsiders, and using decipher script on them is very difficult.I would very much like to keep the total number of languages in my campaign around 30, and certainly below 50.At some point, I'm going to have to work this all out in detail and come up with some rules for how skillful you are in a particular language.   I'd like to extend language skills out to at least 4 or 5 ranks to obtain full fluency (and maybe further than that for lexicography and etomology), with the assumption that you started with 4 or 5 ranks in your native tongue, and maybe bonus 'language points' equal to your starting int bonus.   If I did this, I'd probably make languages a class skill for everyone, and give bards extra points every level to spend on languages.   Anyway, something I've always wanted to do but never worked the details out for.</blockquote>

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