What language is the Common of our world?

[Barak]

Aboleth and achaierai aren't in the RAW? You realize that stands for "Rules As Written," right? You seem to be using RAW in a way I'm not familiar with.

Do you mean PC races? Is that what you meant to say? That's a bit different from "all races."

Clarity of expression mirrors clarity of thought.



So... You're saying the dominant culture speaks Common. But you concede that you can find examples of "races" that do not speak Common if you search outside the dominant culture.

I'd say my argument is standing pretty well.

I don't mean the dominant cultures, more the ones with actual societies on the Prime. Let's look at the examples.

1-Aboleth. Aboleth speak their own language and Undercommon.

This is probably (in my opinion) the best of the four you stated. Of course, they -do- speak Undercommon, and considering they live deeper underground than even the drow..

2-Achaierai speak Infernal.

They don't live on the Prime.

3-Allips don't communicate intelligently at all.

I fail to see how that even counts as not speaking common if they don't speak -any- language.

4-Angels speak Celestial, Infernal, and Abyssal-- but they have the tongues ability.

Not on the Prime, and as you stated, they have tongues anyway.

The point is that every member of every single humanoid race (yeah I know, I hadn't said humanoid before. But, really, no animals speak english, either, and I doubt abberations in our world speak it either) speaks common. Or do orcs only speak orc? Now I'm not sure. See the assertion is that english is the common of our world. Not every human, far from it, speak english. Of course, we don't have elves/dwarves/whatever in our world, but we do have more cultures than the average Campaign World has for humans, so it's fair I think to include the dwarves and elves and what not.. But they all speak common! To find races that have languages and a culture but do not speak common, I -think- (Not so sure anymore that all races actually do) you have to go with outerplanar races, or weird abberations from the far plane.. I doubt that in the "real" world, they speak english in all the outer planes and unexplored planets.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I don't mean the dominant cultures, more the ones with actual societies on the Prime. Let's look at the examples.

1-Aboleth. Aboleth speak their own language and Undercommon.

This is probably (in my opinion) the best of the four you stated. Of course, they -do- speak Undercommon, and considering they live deeper underground than even the drow..

2-Achaierai speak Infernal.

They don't live on the Prime.

3-Allips don't communicate intelligently at all.

I fail to see how that even counts as not speaking common if they don't speak -any- language.

4-Angels speak Celestial, Infernal, and Abyssal-- but they have the tongues ability.

Not on the Prime, and as you stated, they have tongues anyway.

I was just going down the list of monsters alphabetically. And inclusively.

The point is that every member of every single humanoid race speaks common.

Clarity of thought, clarity of expression: Are you including Monstrous Humanoids? Giants? Why or why not?

Look, it's very simple. The Humanoids ARE the dominant culture.

You're basically saying, "Every race that counts speaks Common."

Well, huh.

That you choose not to "include" Giants or Monstrous Humanoids is no different from folks in this thread "not including" the remote, uneducated, and quite frankly irrelevant non-English speakers of Earth.

To find races that have languages and a culture but do not speak common, I -think- (Not so sure anymore that all races actually do) you have to go with outerplanar races, or weird abberations from the far plane..

Well, you're wrong. I tried to show you that you were wrong by simply listing the first 4 creatures out of the SRD.

Here's a few that might be more to your liking. Just perusing the "mostly human" monsters:

Centaurs (Sylvan and Elven)
Deep Dwarves (Dwarven and Goblin)
Duergar (Dwarven and Undercommon)
Ettin (pidgin Goblin/Giant/Orc)
Hill Giants (Giant)
Gnoll (Gnoll)
Kobolds (Draconic)
Lizardfolk (Draconic)
Locathah (Aquan)
Minotaur (Giant)
Ogre (Giant)
Orc (Orc, possibly Goblin and Giant)
Troglodye (Draconic)
Troll (Giant)

Some pretty "heavy hitters" in there, as far as Humanoids go.

 

[Barak]

Nah you're right. I sorta came to that conclusion myself during my last post, when I realized that orcs didn't speak common (wasn't too sure, actually). But yeah, I do count pretty much all those you listed in that post. Well maybe not trolls, since they're more monsters than a race with a culture.

Crap, I should have known just with kobolds, since I even own Races of the Dragon.

I -still- say that english is not as widespread as common by a wide-margin, but it's not quite as bad as I previously thought. Point Wulf!

 

[Simm]

I voted Latin because my world has 2 primary languages: the noble one in which all politics, art and philosophy are created, and the vulgar one which people actually speak.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Nah you're right. I sorta came to that conclusion myself during my last post, when I realized that orcs didn't speak common (wasn't too sure, actually). But yeah, I do count pretty much all those you listed in that post. Well maybe not trolls, since they're more monsters than a race with a culture.

Well, they have their own gods...

I -still- say that english is not as widespread as common by a wide-margin, but it's not quite as bad as I previously thought. Point Wulf!

Another thing that I think is a big factor is that fantasy worlds are a lot more "tight" geographically than Earth. Lots of big pangaean continents with, perhaps, some unexplored territory on the fringes of the map.

So if I were going to look for an Earth-equivalent of Common, I think it would be only fair to confine the search to relatively homogenous land masses.

 

[Barak]

Well, in the grand scheme of thing, including trolls or not doesn't really change much, given the sheer numbers of other races I agree "count".

The "problem" (it's not really a huge problem to me at all, and I wouldn't bother arguing the point if it wasn't just fun to do) I have is more that so many (see, I don't say everybody anymore!) speaks common, even if it's not their first language. Dwarves and elves, for example, have dwarven and elven, yet they still all speak common.

Of course, that doesn't have to be true. It's easy to decide that those dwarven miners who work deep deep in the Holds and have never seen a non-dwarf, much less interacted with one, only speaks dwarven. And, really, it doesn't matter, and I must say that 99% of the time, the fact that the system has them all speak common simplifies matters and make the game more fun, which is cool. It also has the advantage of making it more of a plot point if they meet someone that -doesn't- speak common, anyway.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

From what I have heard about which languages are most spoken around the world. I was suprised to find it is German (with English second). So I would have to vote for German.

Kann nicht sein.

Seems I have hit the perfect combination.

Considering there's more than twice as many Mandarin chinese speakers than english speakers, I find it a bit hard to vote for English as the "Common of our world"./QUOTE]

You go to china and can get around speaking Mandarin. You come to Germany, you won't get two meters. You go to Egypt, same thing. English is the closest to Common because you can go everywhere and have a pretty good chance to make yourself understood using English. "Chinese" gives you a near 100% chance to be understood in China, and a couple other countries maybe. But in the rest of the world, you'll be hard-pressed.

 

[Banshee16]

Well, mostly because the average person is lazy to a certain degree... Also, I mean "easy" in terms of "easy to effect a linguistic changeover". In times of abrupt changes in what the dominent language was across cultures, there usually was either a large scale event that caused a language to decline, a large organization in place to preserve a language or to impose a new one, etc... In the absense of such heavily influencing factors, the "status quo" will reign and slowly shift to meet the slower, more organic influences of cultural evolution. This is why I wouldn't predict an abrupt dropping of English in favour of another totally different language. That would require large scale events comparable to the Roman Empire's influence in getting Latin to be so popular "a little while ago"...

Hey, I'm not predicting it will happen quickly. I think it will happen though. Look at some other analogies. We've gone (in Canada at least) from an economy in which someone could go into a job right out of High School and progress up the chain through on-the-job training etc., back in the 50's, to a highly specialized economy requiring advanced post-secondary education for even some entry positions.....and in many cases, a bachelor's is no longer enough, and you in fact need Masters and PhD's. That's a significant change in a span of less time than the average person lives.

I don't think anyone's going to come to your door and say "learn Chinese now"....but I do think we're seeing the beginning of the process, when excellent positions and opportunities are becoming available to those people who can communicate in that language. Imagine it starts becoming more and more a skill the employers want out of their employees, and more and more people start taking lessons in Chinese, until eventually, though it's not "required", it's something a major portion of the population is doing.

I'm thinking "long-term", like 2064....not 2008.

It's unlikely I'd be around to see it, though my grandchildren might look back and wonder how we ever got along without knowing how to speak Chinese, just as I'm sure 15-20 year olds wonder how those older than them got along without the Internet

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

Kann nicht sein.

Seems I have hit the perfect combination.

Considering there's more than twice as many Mandarin chinese speakers than english speakers, I find it a bit hard to vote for English as the "Common of our world"./QUOTE]

You go to china and can get around speaking Mandarin. You come to Germany, you won't get two meters. You go to Egypt, same thing. English is the closest to Common because you can go everywhere and have a pretty good chance to make yourself understood using English. "Chinese" gives you a near 100% chance to be understood in China, and a couple other countries maybe. But in the rest of the world, you'll be hard-pressed.

I suspect the only reason for that, currently, is because of the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Saxon nations, *at this point in time*. Fifty years ago, French was much more widespread than it is now. Fifty years ago, the U.S. was not the powerhouse that it is now. In fact, beyond 150 years ago, English wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is now....and Britain's dominance of the world ended with the first and second world wars. There are growing indicators that in the 21st century there will be a shift of cultural dominance away from the current power players towards the east. As that happens, I think the popularity of the English language will decline, and the importance of other languages will increase.

Another poster made an interesting point about the Chinese not wanting other people to speak their languages. That's a valid point. But I think that there will be immense pressure on western education systems and businesspeople to adapt, and learn the cultural mores and languages of the dominant powers of the future. There are significant differences, but trying to pursue business, while not understanding those mores, or the language(s) would put us at a severe disadvantage. I've noticed even simple gaffes that caused big problems, even in my own job, when we were dealing with clients from Japan, as an example....simply because we weren't familiar with particular things, like having a female employee meet the manager our client sent, to start a meeting, because apparently that's a show of disrespect...even though she was the project leader on our side. And then not being able to understand what your three clients are saying sitting across the table from you, as they're internally discussing something brought up during the meeting, in their own language, for instance. From a business perspective, as a supplier, we were negotiating from a position of weakness as a result, which never would have happened if we were all speaking the same language. And I'm sure that this example isn't the only similar one....

Now take that example, and add in 20 years or so, when the Chinese market is a vital source of clients for companies competing in an ever-tightening marketplace, and it wouldn't make sense *not* to learn the language. And in time, that might become the norm.

Banshee