Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Purple Yin 03-04-05, 02:16 PM	Ok, so once again, please bare with me on this- I put forward that either one of two things has happened during the history of eberron, which has not been documented: 1) There has been, at one point, massive cultural exchanged between the material plane, and one of the celestial planes (savarath or syrania). 2) The priests of the ancient religions of the humans adopted celestial as a holy language, and there has been leakage into the other languages. Where would I get an idea like this from? Well it dawned on me that modern common in eberron uses the exact same alphabet as modern English, and pronounces its words exactly like modern English, and probably uses syntax like English. I get this from the accessory Sharn: City of Towers on page 111, 138, 164, 13, 15… they’re all writing common exactly as English. Ok, so common is probably English… On page 133 of the ECS it says that the lesser classes of sarlona speak riedran, which is a mixture of old common and quori. From that description I can guess that old common is the root of common, from before the humans met the other races, and shared language, so the suspected cultural cross with the celestials probably occurred on ancient sarlona. Now the wizards book Libris Mortis isn’t part of any one campaign, so is applicable to even eberron, and wizards has told us that libris mortis is supposed to be celestial for the book of the dead, or something similar, so now celestial sounds an awful lot like latin, which we know is one of the main roots of modern English, both directly from the roman occupation, and indirectly, from when the Normans occupied England, and the English absorbed loads of French words. These French words originated from the Gauls, which originated from…tada! Latin. So seeming common is analogous to English, and celestial is analogous to latin, then old common had to have at least one root in celestial. Where do you think this root originated?
Cloud Divider 03-04-05, 02:57 PM	Ok, so once again, please bare with me on this- <snip> Where would I get an idea like this from? Well it dawned on me that modern common in eberron uses the exact same alphabet as modern English, and pronounces its words exactly like modern English, and probably uses syntax like English. I get this from the accessory Sharn: City of Towers on page 111, 138, 164, 13, 15… they’re all writing common exactly as English. Ok, so common is probably English… Do what you will In Your Eberron. In mine, English != Common, and Latin != Celestial. Why? Just because that's what you see in the books (like the ID papers drawing in the ECS), is English, doesn't mean that's actually the case. I consider that as being something rather more like "translation for convenience." For instance, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms miniseries that was produced in Japan had Japanese dialogue. Star Wars was in English, even though it took place "In a Galaxy Far, Far Away". The only major exception to this I can think of is the Passion of the Christ, which used appropriate dialogue (archaic hebrew? I never actually saw it), to the best understanding we have on that language sounding... If it wasn't translation for convenience, and that illo of a bunch of WF-haters holding up signs held up a sign that had a bunch of (to us) random squiggles aside from subtitles or context, they might as well be telling us "No More Late Fees!" in a protest against the Sharn Blockbuster illusion-orb rental place... Now the wizards book Libris Mortis isn’t part of any one campaign, so is applicable to even eberron, and wizards has told us that libris mortis is supposed to be celestial for the book of the dead, or something similar, so now celestial sounds an awful lot like latin, which we know is one of the main roots of modern English, both directly from the roman occupation, and indirectly, from when the Normans occupied England, and the English absorbed loads of French words. These French words originated from the Gauls, which originated from…tada! Latin. Generally, it was my understanding that modern English had more of a root in Germanic languages rather than the romantic (ie latin-derived). Hence why our diction is totally different, and why English has no verb conjugation (I go, they go, we go, vs. voy, vamos, and something else; it's been 15 years since I studied Spanish), and we don't do that goofy gender-and-number-matching adjectives thing (belle dame, or belles dames) that is common in the romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc)... Sure, there's loan words, but every language acquires those from interaction. I mean, bread is called "pan" in Japanese, because that's what the Portuguese called it; "job" is "arubaito" based on the German "Arbeit"... But I'm no linguist...but I actually did take a linguistics class in college once. So seeming common is analogous to English, and celestial is analogous to latin, then old common had to have at least one root in celestial. Where do you think this root originated? Uhm. I disagree. But hey, I like mental exercises. So let's postulate that there was celestial contact once. Could it have been the ancient Great Dragons? Sure, they speak draconic now but who is to say the Big Three didn't start out speaking something else? While in the creation myth, Eberron created the world (and the things on it), and Siberys created the skies and heavens, who is to say they did these things completely independently? Perhaps Eberron enlisted the aid of summoned entities (say, celestials...) to do the dirty work (analogous to an Artificer creating a Forge Wright homunculus), while he was busy being the earth sealing Khyber away. Why Celestials and not Fiends or Xoriat or whoever? Maybe Syrania or the other celestial plane were coterminous at the time, and they were the ones that got summoned. So the Syranian "angels" did the finer points of the creation of the world (ie making the trees, the animals, and so forth). Maybe when they created the sentient beings, they taught them Celestial (because that's the language the summoned spoke). So there's a possibility for you...
Vharuck 03-04-05, 02:58 PM	Sadly, I don't think that "Everything has a place in Eberron" applies to your theory. Eberron has languages that most campaigns do not, and transitioning languages and language structures of other campaigns is much like saying that the Greyhawk deities have a place in Eberron. Also, there is a fundamental flaw in your logic. Libris Mortis is but one phrase in the Celestial language. Attempting to a find a pattern with only one piece of data is literally impossible. It's like finding the function that contains the point (2,4). There infinitely many that apply. Might be y=2x, y=2^x, y=6-x, etc.
Lady Morn 03-04-05, 03:06 PM	Part of the problem with your hypothesis is the fact that English is categorized as a Germanic language, whereas languages decended from Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) are categorized as Romance languages. However, it's currently theorized that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are branches of a single, undiscovered language. Thus, the reason why the languages of Europe and India are collectively categorized as Indo-European languages owing to this common root. In game, I seriously doubt the inhabitants of Eberron are speaking any language we of Earth would understand. But being human, the range of sounds would be identical and the manner in which they process their surroundings could result in similar grammatical structures. You could make the argument that in Sarlona, there was at one point a root Sarlonian language and as populations migrated throughout the continent, each group developed a unique language for itself. When the Quori invaded, these diverse peoples were once again brought together, whether as slaves to the Quori, or as the refugees to Khorvaire. For those on Sarlona, the languages were blended together, along with elements of the Quori language, to create Riedran. Those on Khorvaire mingled culturally until Common, probably originating as a lingua franca for diplomacy and trade, eventually became the language of the land.