This post is a response to Xaosseed's post Your great-grand-elf's elvish: long lives slowing language change (RPG Blog Carnival) . I suggest reading that first in its entirety, before I dig into it. My goal here is to have a deeper discussion, not just to rain Xaosseed's linguistic parade. This lede hooked me: The RPG Blog Carnival prompt from Beneath Foreign Planets of WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics sparked some other thoughts for me - on the stability of language when there are very long-lived organisms around. Xaosseed shared the hypothesis of the post: The core thought here is that you can find thousand year old elves, dragons and giants around - presumably still speaking the same language with the same accent as when they learned their languages in their your - so accents and languages would change much more slowly in such settings than in our own world. Xaosseed then set up the setting's premise with respect to linguis...
Thoughts on tabletop RPGs, and ideas for making play better at the table.