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« on: October 22, 2003, 07:55:11 am »
The biggest and most successful fantasy world ever created, as we all know, is Tolkien\'s Middle Earth, but what most don\'t know is that he created the entire worlds and peoples to give himeself to use the languages he created first.
Now, most fantasy worlds will write elaborate histories and expositions of the cultures contained in them, they almost always completely ignore, or do a really half-assed job when it comes to languages. Most of the time you\'ll see random letters just jumbled up together with a few diacritics and apostrophes tossed in here and there to make them look \"foreign\".
Personally, I find this really corny and I would absolutely love to see a fantasy world with believable languages and scripts not just garbled, untterable names of places and people and a few pseudo-runic looking characters attached to magic glyphs and whatnot. What I would enjoy even more is a MMORPG where language makes a difference.
It seems very few notice that RPG stands for ROLE-PLAYING game (It\'s not MMOH\'n\'SG). I think it would be a great boost to, and encourage, role-playing to have some sort of language system included (and have the languages be somewhat realistic), as this would, at least to me, make the cultures, and the differences between them, much more alive.
You could have magical incantations being recited in a certain tongue by the player to cast a spell (instead of pushing a hotkey and clicking). Maybe a mage must read a spell of a scroll first, but would therefore need to know the corresponding language.
Also, different races could have different tongues, with there being a common or \"trade\" tongue. Players could select the language they know that they wish to speak in and only other characters who know it will understand it. To others it would appear either as gibberish or a message could come up saying \"so-and-so says something a strange tongue\".
Maybe there could be certain books with clues to solving puzzles that could only be read by a character who knows the language (the character, not the player). Hell, maybe they could even use the currently out of place \"Teacher\" profession as someone that can teach languages to people for a fee.
Now, this is really dreaming, but it would be great to see some role-players ACTUALLY speaking to each other in their character\'s native tongue when using the suggested language-selection feature. Or to see the books or scrolls written in a certain Yliakum language ACTUALLY written in that language.
Now, I know people will probably immediately say \"yeah this would be great, but it would take forever and/or be almost impossible to do\". First of all, you really don\'t need an entire language just the phonology and grammar and a basic vocabulary with a few common expressions, or just the words needed in whatever text will be used in-game.
Secondly, I\'m NOT saying that the devs themselves do all this. Seeing how many rpers write in the story section, I\'m sure they could find plenty of gamers willing to work a side project like this (Hell, I\'ll do it myself if they want). And I\'m sure once a language has been worked out enough plenty of players will be contributing texts (poems, maybe short stories or tales, songs, whatever) written in Yliakum tongues to be used in-game to really fill out the world. People write histories for the world, why not this? It\'s just as much a part of it. After all, this is going to be a free game for the players, so the players should help build it, even if it\'s just secondary aspects such as this.
I\'m sure there are PLENTY of other ways a language system could be implemented in-game enriching the world without becoming a mere hassle and judging from all the creative people I\'ve seen here I really don\'t think it would be all that hard to do. I\'ve just really wanted to play in a living, breathing world for a long time now and this game, being open to everyone and developed by gamers, seems to be the only one out there that has a shot of pulling that off.
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