Wow, lots of stuff to try to respond to.
Michael Poe wrote:
At one time I had the idea that the basic, most commonly used translation spell, doesn't work for Elven. And that this was an intentional limitation, being that the spell was originally created by the elves themselves.
So the idea would have been that Ensigerum taught their people Elven because it was a language that they already knew, but very few people could understand and didn't work with basic translation spells making it very useful for codes, secret messages and such.
This makes sense, and is consistent with the family practice of private use of Dutch that Slamlander talked about. My wife's brother is married to a Russian, they and their kids are fluently bilingual, and the same thing happens in their family (which gets them some odd looks e.g. when they go to good old all-American baseball games). For that matter, when my kids were young, my wife and I would occasionally slip into German (she's fluent, I'm marginal) for brief discussions that we didn't want them to eavesdrop on. However, it only works because there is enough linguistic distance between English and German (not to mention Russian) that it really is "code" from the perspective of the listeners outside the circle. It's not clear to me that there is comparable distance between Spanish and Latin, and unlikely that there is such distance between Italian and Latin, in which case I wonder how well the analogous Ensigerum-speak would work.
Incidentally, to address some other quote that I can't find: I used Spanish rather than Italian as the Veracian/Farrelian analogy for a reason. It's all but impossible, when traveling (let alone living) in Italy, to avoid references back to Rome, and Italy is about the only place Italian is still spoken (well, that and on opera stages...). By comparison, Spanish is spoken so widely that there is no day-to-day exposure of most of its speakers to its Latin/Romance roots. Accordingly, I think the Veracia (let alone Farrel) analogy fits a bit better with Spanish, since there aren't many surviving signs of elven culture/influence left except maybe in the architecture.
Boss Out of Town wrote:I think there is an Anglo UFO cult somewhere that suspects the Navaho may be descended from aliens or Elves or dwarves or something. Whether the Navaho find that amusing or not, I don't recall.
On their home turf, the Navajo find
everything about the
biligaana amusing...
Imp-Chan wrote:It seems I recall something being mentioned at one point about how way long ago, the Elves had two languages. One was essentially like our Classical Latin, the other was essentially like our Japanese (which is funny, since the majority of the Tsuirakuan "Japanese" words borrowed for Errant Story's modern day setting are just the katakana pronunciations of English words).
Yes, that's the essence of the Poe notes in that Translation article.
Slamlander wrote:Actually, that's a very good point, Tsuirakuan should be more like Italian, being a divergent form of Elven, with maybe less divergence. There are two cases here; Either all modern human languages were derived from Elven (like French, Italian, Spanish)or, some weren't (German, Scandinavian, Russian, etc).
Poe: I'm thinking/suggesting that; As mindstalk suggested, Tsuirakuan is diverged Rinkai(French), and Farrel would be diverged Sanguen (German). Veracian, could be entirely a human language (Finnish) as would whatever they speak in the Northern Confederacy (Scandinavian). This might put some kinks in the translation spell though it is based on magic and, as such, has weird and indiscriminate kinks anyway.
I think Poe clarified that previously: Tsuirakuan is derived from the
Rinkai elven language, which elves don't use any more except for niches. So the Tsuirakuan:Japanese analogy still works. The Northern Confederacy point is interesting; surely not all humans got assimilated into the elven territories way back when, and linguistic influence from beyond the boundaries of the known Poe-verse would make sense. After all, we know that the continent extends north off the edge of the semi-canonical map, plus there are these mysterious "Anuban Colonies" out there somewhere that haven't appeared in the story yet...
