Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Arbiter of Wyrms" data-source="post: 3017743" data-attributes="member: 18021">I'm voting English.If one is willing to accept the (silly) notion that there is only one English, and it is mutally intelligilbe to all of its speakers, then English is clearly the closest real-world analog to Common we have.&nbsp; There are more speakers of Chinese than there are of all of the Englishes combined, but hey, there are <s>probably</s> almost undoubtably more speakers of Mandarin alone than there are English.There are propably more speakers of Goblin, Orc, or even Undercommon than there are Common speakers in my campaign, but that doesn't make them Common (I mean no comparison between speakers of Mandarin or any other Chinese language and the often-wicked speakers of the three above-mentioned languages).More people around the world are willing to claim proficiency and to do business in a language they refer to as &quot;English&quot; than any other language.&nbsp; Furthermore, these speakers are distributed over a greater geographical area than the speakers of any other language.English is used as the [irony]lingua franca[/irony] in the U.S., most of Canada, The British Isles, India, and Australia.&nbsp; It is the new &quot;official&quot; language of the EU, and is a common second-language or foriegn language throughout much of Latin-America and Africa.For world-building purposes, I use more than one &quot;Common&quot; for different parts of my campaign world.&nbsp; Mandio, Sat, Elven, and Goblin all provide coverage over large swathes of my campaign, and one would be hard pressed to find a too many settlements were no one speaks any of these languages.&nbsp; Draconic and Gnomish are scholarly languages spoken throughout my campaign and Abyssal, Infernal, and Celestial are the languages of doctrine, also overlapping the big four.&nbsp; A party capable of speaking these nine languages can speak to almost anyone in my campaign on just about any subject.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Arbiter of Wyrms, post: 3017743, member: 18021"] I'm voting English. If one is willing to accept the (silly) notion that there is only one English, and it is mutally intelligilbe to all of its speakers, then English is clearly the closest real-world analog to Common we have. There are more speakers of Chinese than there are of all of the Englishes combined, but hey, there are [S]probably[/S] almost undoubtably more speakers of Mandarin alone than there are English. There are propably more speakers of Goblin, Orc, or even Undercommon than there are Common speakers in my campaign, but that doesn't make them Common (I mean no comparison between speakers of Mandarin or any other Chinese language and the often-wicked speakers of the three above-mentioned languages). More people around the world are willing to claim proficiency and to do business in a language they refer to as "English" than any other language. Furthermore, these speakers are distributed over a greater geographical area than the speakers of any other language. English is used as the [irony]lingua franca[/irony] in the U.S., most of Canada, The British Isles, India, and Australia. It is the new "official" language of the EU, and is a common second-language or foriegn language throughout much of Latin-America and Africa. For world-building purposes, I use more than one "Common" for different parts of my campaign world. Mandio, Sat, Elven, and Goblin all provide coverage over large swathes of my campaign, and one would be hard pressed to find a too many settlements were no one speaks any of these languages. Draconic and Gnomish are scholarly languages spoken throughout my campaign and Abyssal, Infernal, and Celestial are the languages of doctrine, also overlapping the big four. A party capable of speaking these nine languages can speak to almost anyone in my campaign on just about any subject. [/QUOTE]

Verification