LogFAQs > #897101718

Zeus posted...

Which is the other half of my issue, given that historically people could kinda understand each other and that language would itself be a lot simpler -- there was less need for artifice because fewer complex ideas needed to be expressed.

Yeah, but it's not necessarily that simple. Germans and Romans on the border of Rome could understand each other because the Germans usually learned enough Latin via trade to stumble through a conversation. In areas where two relatively equal nations meet and engage in trade, traders are usually forced to learn both languages and tend to develop a pidgin crossbreed hybrid of the two (which has happened in multiple places in the real world).

In Europe most people in the West can sort of intercommunicate (mainly because all of the Romance languages trace back to Latin anyway), but the converse of that is India, where most people had no idea what their neighbors were saying until English became the dominant overriding language (which is why it's still India's official language in spite of becoming independent from Britain 70 years ago - they pretty much NEED English to communicate with each other).

Generally speaking, in the real world, the majority of people could never communicate with anyone who lived more than a few hundred miles away for most of human history, not just because of different regions having entirely different languages, but even due to different dialects of the same language (fuck, I have enough trouble understanding some people from the South today, in spite of media and standardized education supposedly "normalizing" English for all American speakers). People who lived on the periphery of two cultures or who operated in both spheres would likely find ways to communicate, but the majority of people never moved more than a few miles from where they were born, and thus, never needed to learn any language other than their native tongue. Overall, there was almost always a need to find some means of linguistic compromise for trade or political interaction, whether that be multilingual interpreters or a deliberate recourse to "common" (whether that "common" be Chinese, or English, or French, or Latin, or Greek, or Aramaic, or Akkadian...).

But in fantasy (both in novels and especially fantasy games), there's an expectation that main characters are going to be rootless vagabond wanderers (which was rare as hell in real history), and will travel to all sorts of lands (where realistically, they wouldn't understand a single word anyone was saying). So it's far easier to just have everyone speak one common "trade tongue" or "religious tongue" or the like so you don't have to play out months of learning new languages every time they enter a new region, or cop-out and give them magical translating stones.

In the same vein, it's why even in sci-fi that doesn't have universal translators a la Star Trek, every alien race seems to speak English for some unexplained reason. And with a British accent if they're evil.


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