Talk:List of Languages

We didn't have any trouble with Ssel'it when Jones was speaking it before, so I put the apostrophe back in. It sounds like a pretty good way to handle the variants, so I'm pro-that table.-slitherrr (talk)

We must resist the urge to define and chart everything. Frankly, any history from Catpeople times or before is totally unreliable, anyway. The Catpeople, much like classical Confucian historians, record with their biases on their sleeves. The down-caste races don't have much of a historical record until the Second Dynasty. The Catpeople time ended with Alexandria, more or less. So while the Mainland has anywhere from good to fragmentary records of the Age of Demigods, the outlands only have the histories written by catpeople about catpeople. Oral myths written down in the Second Dynasty would be the only window into that time period. The First War period occupies a similar position in the Alexandrian histories, but is not mentioned at all in catperson lore. -gm

Ambiguity is okay, especially in places meant to be ambiguous. In any event, the people of the outlands have been there since basically forever, they didn't migrate from or through the Underdark. If anything, the most of the Underdark races that are not Eldrich Horrors and the sort are the descendants of banished outlanders. If anything, Undercommon is influenced by outlander languages. But, probably not. Really, I think it's just a trade pidgin of like drow and underdwarf and i dunno probably abeolth or something. The written language of the outlands, however, is almost certainly influenced by the catperson language. The catpeople wrote by using their claws to make stroke-marks in clay. The language, of course, was iconic and not phonetic, so shoving cat-person script on regional languages was the most common solution when the humans and others needed to learn to write on the fly.-gm

It doesn't really matter, but apparently the real pastiche breakdown: -gm

• Wa, a cold and mountainous kingdom in the south. (Fake Japan)
• Po, a small but wealthy kingdom situated along the eastern central coast, where two great rivers outlet into the sea and are connected by a great canal. (Fake Coastal/Southern China)
• Zha, a small and remote kingdom commanding the central highland plateau. Once a land of pleasant mountain valleys, since the Raising of the Range it is rugged and difficult country. (Fake Tibet)
• Lang, a tropical kingdom in the far north, dominated by jungles, with a long coastal lowland and a steamy mountainous interior. (Fake Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam)
• San, the youngest kingdom, a breakaway of Po. Although larger than Po, it is landlocked and more mountainous so far less wealthy and populated than Po. (Fake Inland/North China)