Enevhar Aldarion
Hero
The way technological advances can happen so quickly, it is weird that the first spyglass did not happen until over 300 years after the first eyeglasses were invented in the 13th century.
Why, might I ask? I've always found Infravision and Ultravision both easy to explain and great differentiators between different types of night-sight.Should I bring up obsolesced D&D terms like Infravision and Ultravision? I was so glad when D&D dropped them.
Keep in mind the OED is only citing the first reference found in writing, which doesn't tell us how long spyglasses (by whatever name) had existed before someone wrote about them using that name.The way technological advances can happen so quickly, it is weird that the first spyglass did not happen until over 300 years after the first eyeglasses were invented in the 13th century.
Probably not quite true. Very early telescopes consisted of two glass spheres, one slightly larger than the other, with a piece of leather that could be rolled into a tube. They had probably been knocking about for quite some time before Galileo Galilei (a notorious self-publicist) took the credit for inventing it. Same with lots of innovations. They almost certainly existed before they were recorded. Remember that mass literacy was not a thing, so the people who actually could record things was somewhat limited. And, as any historian will tell you, the things that got recorded where the things the people who could write felt where important. So that means the common details that everyone took for granted are the things we know least about.The way technological advances can happen so quickly, it is weird that the first spyglass did not happen until over 300 years after the first eyeglasses were invented in the 13th century.
Much like the influence the Luther Bible had on the German language, a much stronger case can be made for the influence of the King James Bible on the English language.The whole English language.
The closest thing to a Common tongue was Latin. English was parochial, with lots of regional variations. You might credit Shakespeare for inventing "standard" English. I assume that is why the 1608 date (Renaissance rather than medieval) was picked out of the air.
Probably because, most of the time, the idea that there is a proper English dialect for made-up fantasy worlds is a bunch of hogwash, often the Brits projecting their contemporary dialects backwards in time as if that is how the English always sounded.I think it's not insignificant that the language used in the Willow and Critical Role TV series, and the upcoming D&D movie, is unashamedly modern American English, using phrases that would be anachronistic in 1980, never mind 1608.
The only show to attempt something other than that was TRoP, which went for mid-20th century upper class English English, with an Irish/Australian/northern English hybrid for the not-hobbits.
Sure. And printing generally. The everyone understands everyone else Common is a D&D nonsense. Unless you have a setting like Eberron with regular use of magical communication.Much like the influence the Luther Bible had on the German language, a much stronger case can be made for the influence of the King James Bible on the English language.