I love this idea. It made me re-subscribe to the Patreon. The idea of different languages having different effects is fantastic, and the words themselves are pretty comprehensive and cover most spell situations.
I like this article, but it's pretty fluffy. I'm still holding my breath for Ranger Wickett to write "Elements of Magic" for 5E.
Same here! So badly! I've posted about that a couple of times, but EoM for 5e would be the biggest deal for me and my whole gaming group.
I like the ideas proposed in this system, but it's a little difficult to wrap my head around—not for what you
can do, but for what you
can't do. They give examples of casting a spell using 3 words vs 5 words, and I can see how that would work, but it's hard to understand what the difference between those spells would be, or how to adjudicate the power level.
How would you go about fitting this system into a resource-management system. Surely not spell slots. My group abandoned spell slots a while back and we currently use the spell points variant in the DMG, which helps a lot. A skill/roll-based magic system would be a fun way to utilize this word-based system too, although because of 5e's bounded accuracy there's only so much you can do with that. +1 in 5e represents much much more than +1 in 3e.
The pdf is a bit too light to start using in a game any time soon, but it offers a really tantalizing look into something that could be grown into an amazing spell system. Or if EoM 5e is in the works (last I heard it wasn't), I would love to see it utilize languages in this way. I'd love to see some charts and tables with effects and complications caused by the various words of power and based on the language used to cast. And I'd love to see some ideas for how to adjudicate power level vs spell cost (# of words required, what resources are expended).