ivanaskye:

thequantumwritings:

saguusa:

thequantumwritings:

Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.

The existence of English itself is because this exact thing happened. That’s why English can easily meld words from other languages into their own and why it’s such a stupidly hard language to learn for non native speakers. It’s why we use German, Greek, Latin and Celtic roots and syntaxes together without realizing it.

So I completely agree with this, common would be an even larger mess than what we speak now because it would be a combination of the main human language, Elven, Orcish ,Dwarven words and syntaxes mixed together. The written language would be even worse because there would be Orcish consonants used in place of Elvish sounds because the letters are easier and faster to write, letters in places they don’t belong because of some old Dwarven writing habit three centuries ago that’s just become the norm. Short hand a long hand versions of the language because fuck why not. The dropping of the informal tense because most of the language is spoken in a formal setting anyway.

It would be a lot of fun to work that out, but also a ton of work and world building. You could write an entire book on just this subject.

congratulations you are literally the first person in almost 44 thousand notes to compare this concept to english and not be INCREDIBLY boring about it

Note here, as someone with a linguistics BA: imperialism is not actually the only way for a language to spread surprisingly far! For a real world example, you only have to look at Proto-Indo-European, a language that managed to spread so far that its descendants are as far dispersed geographically as Hindi, English, Farsi, and Greek.

The original speakers of that language don’t appear to have been imperialists… but instead, the trade superpowers of their time.

They were among the first to domesticate horses, and also figured out wheels and carts pretty early on, and so they could travel *massively* longer distances than pretty much any of their contemporaries, and if that meant bringing Siberian firs to northern India or anotolia or even close to China (they’ve long died out, but there are records of ancient Indo-European languages in like, *mongolia*)—then, well, you have a certain amount of cultural dominance, even if you’re not doing a lot of marrying into these other societies, or colonizing them, or any of that. You’re still become an *important language for everyone else to speak*.

And so they uh… did, I guess? I’m sure the politics around choosing to adopt it at the time we’re fascinating, but most of these languages weren’t written, soooo, we’ll never know exactly how it went down.

But anyway, that could absolutely be an origin point for Common.

And heck, even if humans only speak it, it might not have initially been a human language! Almost all European languages today are Indo-European, but the initial speakers of Proto-Indo-European were from the western steppe—that’s way off in southern Russia, pretty far from places like Scandinavia and England.

So you could even interpret humans as having been comparatively “weak” to an encroaching trade language, and therefore only speaking it >_o

(**side Tolkien note: Tolkien’s Common actually doesn’t work as OP decries. Not all humans speak it (eg the rohirrim), some but not all non-humans speak it (many elves do not), and some humans even speak non-human languages (eg the higher echelons of Gondorian society speak Sindarin as a first language))