D&D General Which D&D Words and Things are Post 1608?

[MNblockhead]

The idea that everyone is speaking a trade language/second language makes a lot more logical sense, but this should make conversations stilted and largely without idiom. Which rather runs against the "fun" aspect of D&D.

Not really my experience. Most D&D settings I've experienced are pretty much like FR. Exandria for example. Or Spelljammer, Krynn or Greyhawk. They are all quite extensive, and most don't have the communication/transport networks of Eberron.

It would probably make more sense to invoke universal translators, babel fish or Tardis telepathic circuits.

Or gods. If Dwarf have innate stoneworking skills, that fact that peoples are given certain languages by their creators are not that much more of a stretch.

 

[Cadence]

So, by that argument, we should also not have gravity in the game, since it wasn't discovered in 1608.

I mean, have you seen the falling damage, some of the gliding rules, and how carrying capacity works? ;-)

 

[Azzy]

So, by that argument, we should also not have gravity in the game, since it wasn't discovered in 1608.

Try harder next time.

 

[Tonguez]

Funnily enough the word Ranger as associated with being mounted is very close:

ranger (n.)​

late 14c. (early 14c. in surnames), "gamekeeper, sworn officer of a forest whose work is to walk through it and protect it," agent noun from range (v.). Attested from 1590s in the general sense of "a rover, a wanderer;" from 1660s in the sense of "man (often mounted) who polices an area." The elite U.S. combat unit is so called from 1942 (organized 1941).

You know I’ve never associated the ranger with being mounted. ‘To range’ is to wander, generally by hiking on foot.
I always thought of the mounted ranger as an American thing, but even the Lone Ranger was more about silver bullets than specifically being mounted - Walker, Texas Ranger didnt help change that perception either

 

[Faolyn]

So, by that argument, we should also not have gravity in the game, since it wasn't discovered in 1608.

Gravity was named then. It wasn't invented then.

 

[Mannahnin]

I'm pretty sure that "libram" was invented by Gygax.

"Libram" is just the accusative form of the Latin word libra. It is likely that it was meant to be a derivation of the Latin word liber, which means "book." (The accusative form of liber is librum, which might have been transmuted into "libram" because -um is not a common ending in English words.) Technically, liber also means "free, freedom," but the two etymologies are unrelated, like how "wind" (the thing that blows) and "wind" (the verb for coiling one object around another) are spelled the same but have completely different origins.

Libram was a scale or balance, or a term of measurement in latin. It's use to refer to it as a book was, as you say, a coined term by Gygax - never in use in latin. The word may have (wrongly) appeared in some thesaurus Gygax plainly used throughout OD&D and AD&D in his witing style.

Gygax seems to have consumed a massive amount of pulp fiction and 19th century medieval romances as a youth. I think it's equally likely that he accumulated his vocabulary and neologisms from Appendix N and such.

Celebrim is on the track. Gygax got it from Jack Vance. It appears several times in his stories, first in Turjan of Miir, from The Dying Earth (1950).

Various quotes at the link below. As far as I can tell, Vance coined it.

Libram

sci.lang.narkive.com

 

[RealAlHazred]

Various quotes at the link below. As far as I can tell, Vance coined it.

That makes a huge amount of sense, actually. I feel like Vance coined new words for at least 50% of his short stories and books.

 

[Hussar]

You know I’ve never associated the ranger with being mounted. ‘To range’ is to wander, generally by hiking on foot.
I always thought of the mounted ranger as an American thing, but even the Lone Ranger was more about silver bullets than specifically being mounted - Walker, Texas Ranger didnt help change that perception either

To be fair though, D&D certainly started out that way. A Ranger could only own as much as the character and the character's horse could carry, for example.

 

[Lanefan]

Gravity was named then. It wasn't invented then.

Perhaps, but as gravity wasn't named (and thus wasn't a concrete concept) at the time that would tend to invalidate the various magics and spells that deal directly with it, Reverse Gravity being the most obvious.

 

[Faolyn]

Perhaps, but as gravity wasn't named (and thus wasn't a concrete concept) at the time that would tend to invalidate the various magics and spells that deal directly with it, Reverse Gravity being the most obvious.

What makes you think gravity wouldn't be named much earlier in a D&D setting?

After all, there are tons of creatures with genius-level intellects in D&D, creatures who have traveled the planes and thus been able to compare different levels of gravity, and creatures with scientific minds.

Plus, of course, Common isn't English, which means that reverse gravity wouldn't actually be called that in-game. It's just called that to make it simple for the players and DMs to understand.