LogFAQs > #897047011

Zeus posted...

And, in general, I've always accepted "common" as a contrivance to help the reader and to make things easier for the author who might otherwise have to reinvent the wheel.

What you're describing is a "translation convention", though, which is sort of a different thing.

That's where we're expected to understand that, say, all of the hobbits in LotR aren't speaking "English", because English won't be invented for thousands of years. But the language they ARE speaking in is being translated into English for the English reader, in the same way that Tolkien translated Beowulf from Anglo-Saxon into English earlier in his career. When the book says that the hobbits walked for 5 miles, we implicitly know that THEY wouldn't consider the distance 5 miles, but would measure it in some unique scale of their own, but again, the author is translating concepts such as distance and time into our current frame of understanding as well, in the same way a translator localizes Japanese games into English by using more familiar terms and reworking idioms to make sense out of their originating culture.

"Common" on the other hand is more a contrivance to help the reader and to make things easier for the author by making it so that the characters can actually communicate with each other. Because it's utterly unlikely that hobbits who have lived their entire lives in the somewhat xenophobic shire would speak "Arnorian" (let alone Rohirrim, Gondorian, elvish, dwarvish, etc), they would effectively become completely unable to communicate with anyone the moment they step foot out of the Shire. Short of having Gandalf constantly translating every line of dialogue between characters or introducing some form of magic akin to the Babelfish in Hitchhiker's Guide, having a specific "universal" language that everyone can speak allows the story to happen without undo problems.

Thus, all of the major "good" characters (and even many orcs) speak common and can communicate, while we still see examples of various characters or cultures that DON'T speak common (such as most of the Druedain, the Men of the East and South that Sauron subverts, and so on). But they also retain their own native languages, so elves still speak elf, dwarves still speak dwarf, and so on.



Zeus posted...

Granted, it would be kinda neat to have a work of fiction where all of the narrative was in plain English but then every single bit of dialogue was in the author's created language. I imagine that would sell terribly, of course, but the novelty would be amusing.

If anyone was going to write that book, it would have been Tolkien. Considering he barely cared about the narrative and freely admitted that he mostly only invented Middle Earth and Arda in the first place to have a place where people would actually speak all of the functional languages he was creating. But even he realized that people would still need SOME way to communicate with each other across cultural lines.

On top of which, there've been at least a couple movies where all spoken dialogue is in an obscure language for which absolutely no subtitles are provided (Passion of the Christ is springing to mind).


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