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On a topic raised earlier, there was a PFS adventure set in Absalom with a lot of Varisian speaking fey, so there is some precedent to the bestiary creature "Common" not actually being Common.
This can cause problems with some parties, in practice it was handled by the GM stating this in advance end encouraging someone to pick Seoni.
I give a 'language point' each level. Language rules are tricky, but complex tongues may require a musical instrument, an intelligence of x, etc. To speak Elvish requires but a 10 Int, writing 11 int.
We've been running without a 'common' language for 35 years. Yes, we have all manner of things go haywire and it adds to the story. The party all speak Elvish, though several can't read it. It has the value of being a standard for a long lived race that do not go for slang. In game, Elven greetings are good diplomacy.
A character that can't communicate will not be allowed in. How could they?
I was thinking the other day while prepping for my next AP session, it's amazing that almost everyone intelligent humanoid speaks Common. What would happen if I were to remove this language from the game? Force everyone to start only with their regional or racial language? How much work would be involved?
In my 20+ year old homebrew there is no common spoken language. If a group of nations is united in a kingdom or empire, then most people speak the lingua franca to at least some degree, but leave those borders and the chances of that language being the most widely spoken are pretty slim.
We currently play in a different part of the world than my campaigns originally began in, and there was a common language there, called "Traders' Tongue", a simple sign language that allowed people from different regions to convey simple messages, mostly for commerce. It had evolved from an old language of secret signs used by a slave uprising centuries before called "Traitors' Tongue". But in my current campaign, outside what was once the Dari Empire, there only common languages are the ones spoken by the people of their own nations, and those with high numbers of language slots.
I just noticed my post got "favorited" by Endzeitgeist. Feeling pretty good about that.
In the lands of the West, the lore of multiversal travellers was that certain languages were found across the universes. If you spoke Elvish, Draconic and Latin; you could pretty much always find someone you could speak with.
It is said that the evil Sect of Rp'Ga tried to impose a multiversal Babel effect that only their adherents could avoid, with limited success. A new secret society is perhaps attempting the same thing.
Silly Fluff aside, with Planar tongues, Race Tongues and the like, and of course, magic, language barriers are interesting easily surmountable obstacles.
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^I want to see something like a Simpsons Episode in which, after landing on an alien planet, Homer says something like "If movies and television have not lied to me, all of the aliens always know perfect English" -- and then he says something to them, and they all not only look puzzled, but start talking in perfect Spanish . . . .
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In my experience --- and Hollywood's, as well -- the idea that everyone speaks the same language is a violation of realism that makes the game much, much more fun. (To put things in perspective, only ten non-English films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture; none have won. Only seven actors have won Best Actor, Best Actress, or Best Supporting for "foreign"-language performances [and four of them were in movies where the dialogue was primarily in English, even if that particular character was speaking something different, e.g. Robert de Niro in The Godfather, Part II].)
And, really, it just turns into a skill point tax, just like the Oracle curse. Everyone spends a single skill point and now the entire party (implausibly) communicates in Ignan. Even if you totally groove on realism, everyone in a region will speak the same language -- and everyone with which typical adventuring party deals (e.g., anyone with enough money to hire adventurers, anyone with valuable goods to sell, et cetera) will speak some sort of common trade language. And now we're back to everyone-speaks-Common except that you had a few really uncomfortable and un-fun sessions at first level, and no one's getting any Academy Awards for Best Roleplayer for those sessions.
Just make sure your players share a language and know and all is fine. Just makes linguistics more valuable. I removed common from my game no regrets.
I mean, unless the players play stupid I guess. In my game none of them spoke orc, and they faced a lot of them. Was it an issue? No, not really. The occasional orc knew human, they could hand sign basic instructions and questions to defeated orcs, and really for the most part they just fought with no talk required. Eventually some of them learned orcish which helped gathering information. In other words, it rewarded skill monkeys. Now had they decided to go live in elven lands without speaking elf, it'd have been problematic... but that'd have been sue to their own stupidity.
GP,
It often isn't so much the players playing stupid as it is the whole optimization thing. Every point you put into linguistics has to come from somewhere else. I personally like the flavor of an adventurer learning many languages, but many don't. This is just one of those Know Your Table situations.
I was thinking the other day while prepping for my next AP session, it's amazing that almost everyone intelligent humanoid speaks Common. What would happen if I were to remove this language from the game? Force everyone to start only with their regional or racial language? How much work would be involved?
It's not much work, but all that happens is you've instated a skill tax for players to all spent 1 skill point on linguistics and everyone agrees on a common language to learn.
I know this might seem like fun to you as a GM, but it's just frustrating to players if they don't speak the same language.
Besides in real life people, especially those who travel learn some of the most common trade and business languages. For the world, the de facto language has become English. Common (Taldane) is pretty much that for Golarion.
If you want to give your players a harder time, make places they go not speak Common and have to deal with that. But making it so that players can't talk to one another at the start of have to spend a skill point to do is just bad in my opinion.
The development of English into Earth's equivalent of Common is quite recent -- although the seeds of this developed before the 20th century, it didn't really get into full force until World War II. Arguably, Taldor at its height had a similar amount of influence over Avistan and other parts of the Inner Sea region, although given how long ago that was, one might expect substantial linguistic divergence in the areas that it used to influence. On the other hand, most things in Golarion seem to evolve at a glacial pace, so maybe things are about right as described.
Its true that only recently did English become the defacto shared language. However, before that French was la lingua Franca, and Latin before that.
The concept of a common language for interacting with those outside your country has existed, pretty much for all of recorded history.
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Its true that only recently did English become the defacto shared language. However, before that French was la lingua Franca, and Latin before that.The development of English into Earth's equivalent of Common is quite recent -- although the seeds of this developed before the 20th century, it didn't really get into full force until World War II. Arguably, Taldor at its height had a similar amount of influence over Avistan and other parts of the Inner Sea region, although given how long ago that was, one might expect substantial linguistic divergence in the areas that it used to influence. On the other hand, most things in Golarion seem to evolve at a glacial pace, so maybe things are about right as described.
... in Europe.
In the Middle East and Northern Africa, Arabic has served as a shared language since the spread of Islam in the 8th century. In eastern Asia, Classical Chinese has served as a shared language since time immemorial. Swahili (Kiswahili) is a trade language all up and down the East Coast of Africa, and Chinook Jargon was a trade language in the pre-Columbian cultures from California to the Yukon Territories, and Quechua was spoken across South America from Colombia through Peru to Argentina.
The concept of a common language for interacting with those outside your country has existed, pretty much for all of recorded history.
Pretty much this. When you look at history, the absence of a "common" language is actually less realistic than its presence.
Every point you put into linguistics has to come from somewhere else.
Thankfully, you don't need to put a single point into linguistics to learn languages, you can just spend a few days to learn a new language before the campaign officially starts.
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I think not having a language called 'Common' is a wonderful idea for adding depth of flavour to a campaign. Orfamay Quest's observation that throughout the real-world there have always been shared languages amongst trading regions is well made. Also as others have pointed out, the game mechanics and 'at the table fun' assume that there is a common language; making speaking another tongue a distinguishing feature of some encounters.
In your campaign world, work out what areas the shared trading languages cover and give your players the local one as a bonus language. If you are likely to have the group moving across regions then you may want to grant them an extra bonus language so that they can choose which other language they are likely to speak without languages being a skill-tax.
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I think not having a language called 'Common' is a wonderful idea for adding depth of flavour to a campaign.
<shrug>. So call it "Taldane" (which it is, for almost all of the published adventures). Or if you're running in a homebrew world, call it "Pifflesnrt." And don't be surprised when everyone at your table calls it "Common" anyway.
Orfamay,
Just because you have no interest in the flavor of a named language rather than "Common", or any other bit of background, doesn't mean everyone at Hugo's table agrees with you. A bit presumptive, dismissive, and most likely, wrong. People do tend to find tables with like interests.
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Orfamay,
Just because you have no interest in the flavor of a named language rather than "Common", or any other bit of background, doesn't mean everyone at Hugo's table agrees with you. A bit presumptive, dismissive, and most likely, wrong. People do tend to find tables with like interests.
People also tend to quietly suffer under decisions they find annoying for the sake of having a table to play at.
Its true that only recently did English become the defacto shared language. However, before that French was la lingua Franca, and Latin before that.The development of English into Earth's equivalent of Common is quite recent -- although the seeds of this developed before the 20th century, it didn't really get into full force until World War II. Arguably, Taldor at its height had a similar amount of influence over Avistan and other parts of the Inner Sea region, although given how long ago that was, one might expect substantial linguistic divergence in the areas that it used to influence. On the other hand, most things in Golarion seem to evolve at a glacial pace, so maybe things are about right as described.
... in Europe.
In the Middle East and Northern Africa, Arabic has served as a shared language since the spread of Islam in the 8th century. In eastern Asia, Classical Chinese has served as a shared language since time immemorial. Swahili (Kiswahili) is a trade language all up and down the East Coast of Africa, and Chinook Jargon was a trade language in the pre-Columbian cultures from California to the Yukon Territories, and Quechua was spoken across South America from Colombia through Peru to Argentina.
Indeed. But this relates to how Tian Xi speaks Tien and the Inner Sea speaks Taldane (Common).
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Orfamay,
Just because you have no interest in the flavor of a named language rather than "Common", or any other bit of background, doesn't mean everyone at Hugo's table agrees with you. A bit presumptive, dismissive, and most likely, wrong. People do tend to find tables with like interests.
I think you misunderstand his point.
Common is Taldance, but it doesn't really matter what you call it. You can come up with any elaborate backstory you want for it.
But at the end of the day its still the common trade language.
I think the problem is that or some reason people have this perception that communication was difficult or impossible. But it simply wasn't the case, common languages were found after encountering a new group and difficulty in communicating really only existed during initial contact.
Countries that have been around one another for decades would have a common language.
Claxon,
I actually do agree that the languages of powerful countries and empires will tend to become very commonly spoken in their areas of influence. Any area that profits from travelers will have people who speak that common tongue, often many prevalent languages. Taldane is commonly spoken as a second language in Varisia, but that doesn't mean every shopkeeper and farmer speaks it.
I disagreed with the idea that no one cares about the backstory, and that no one finds working around languages interesting. The backstory or Fluff that so annoys some people is the reason some people buy Paizo products. Now, I will freely admit that these forums are heavily weighted against that, but Paizo is wise enough to balance their products for both interests. Pity some of our posters are unable or unwilling to recognize this. It is anyone's right not to care, but it is a dick move to belittle someone who does.
EDIT
I should add that your post here wasn't belittling, and was well reasoned.
I know my party likes the removal of common, they felt it made cultures feel more real rather than every creature in existence including the planes automatically can speak a shared language.
You're going into extremes here.
Each table and each story is different so generalizing is not good here.
Removing common can be a great idea in some campaigns to add flavor and making foreign languages more exotic.
Having common allows to bypass language barriers and makes interaction at foreign places easier.
Both arguments are valid and, when done right, work well in the right table/campaign. It all depends on what the players like best and what theGM is trying to achieve with the decission.
In my old campaign, there were country where 'common' speakers were not that common, due to the countries being culturally self centered and the common tongue being the archaic form of a language group from a definite area... get out of that area, and only the cultured and professional traders or people who are regularly dealing with folk from that area will know it.
I have no idea how people have the idea that the real world has and had several equivalents of the Common tongue. Every single human, elf, dwarf, orc, and countless other humanoids and monsters knows common. 100% of their race's individuals are bilingual if not trilingual or more. What country on Earth has ever had 100% bilingualism? Even oficially multiilingual countries like Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland don't have anywhere near 100% bilibgualism. Lingua francas like Latin, French, and English weren't called as such because everybody spoke it, but only because a large number of the elite did.
I frankly fail to see how removal of Common is a per table thing. Just make sure the players pick a common tongue, it's not that hard. If for whatever reason it is, give everyone a bonus language, then there's zero reason for the party to have trouble communicating. Then if they don't have enough things to do in places that speak that common tongue, that's the GM's failure. It's not hard to run locally based campaigns.
I don't consider it a skill tax at all, because it is easy for the players to avoid it mattering by sticking to familiar lands. But it does reward those who do learn many languages, because frankly, I can count the numbers of times I've seen players use a tongue other than Common themselves with my hands in my decades of playing. It's only purpose when Common exists is eavesdropping...
I have no idea how people have the idea that the real world has and had several equivalents of the Common tongue. Every single human, elf, dwarf, orc, and countless other humanoids and monsters knows common. 100% of their race's individuals are bilingual if not trilingual or more. What country on Earth has ever had 100% bilingualism? Even oficially multiilingual countries like Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland don't have anywhere near 100% bilibgualism. Lingua francas like Latin, French, and English weren't called as such because everybody spoke it, but only because a large number of the elite did.
And every single orc has 7 Int, and every single dog has 6 Cha.
Indeed, that's a pretty weak counter-argument. With alternate racial traits, languages is one pf the most fixed stat for humanoids and monsters in general. Common is rarely given as a bonus int language, it's almost always racial.
PF isn't as bad as 3.5 in this regards, where underground creatures ridiculously had undercommon AND common, but I would much rather common be taken away completely and a human language be added.
Claxon,
I actually do agree that the languages of powerful countries and empires will tend to become very commonly spoken in their areas of influence. Any area that profits from travelers will have people who speak that common tongue, often many prevalent languages. Taldane is commonly spoken as a second language in Varisia, but that doesn't mean every shopkeeper and farmer speaks it.I disagreed with the idea that no one cares about the backstory, and that no one finds working around languages interesting. The backstory or Fluff that so annoys some people is the reason some people buy Paizo products. Now, I will freely admit that these forums are heavily weighted against that, but Paizo is wise enough to balance their products for both interests. Pity some of our posters are unable or unwilling to recognize this. It is anyone's right not to care, but it is a dick move to belittle someone who does.
EDIT
I should add that your post here wasn't belittling, and was well reasoned.
I will agree that not everyone will speak common (as a setting sort of thing) but anyone of importance (plot reasons!) probably should. So maybe the randoms commoners on the street only speak their native Shoanti language, but the shopkeeper down the street speaks enough common to do business with you. Though you might not get any stimulating conversation.
I do have 2 points to add:
1) I think part of the problem is the perception of Americans on language. This board is primarily composed of Americans (I think) and Pathfinder is aimed at English speaking people primarily (because it is an American company). A majority of Americans speak only one language, and the concept of knowing other languages proficiently isn't especially common. If you go to Europe, its incredibly common for people to know at least 2 languages proficiently. I think this sort of perception from Americans is the big reason they think it's unreasonable that their is a common language among countries, because the idea of knowing a language other than your mother tongue is very odd to us.
2) I don't think anyone ever said no one cares about the backstory of how the language came to be, it's just that for the purposes of this discussion about whether or not their should be a common language its backstory doesn't matter. There are various stories as to why English, French, Latin, Greek, Russian have all been the lingua franca in different regions at different times.
The truth is that there is a reason for common (Taldane) in Golarion. Taldor use to be a massive empire that encompassed most of the inner sea (the standard setting of Golarion). And did so for decades before having setbacks that caused it to lose territory. But during that time Taldane culture and language spread across the continent. So the game already establishes a reason, a good reason for their to be a common language.
As a player, if you're not going to have at least regional languages that are common I'm going to need a pretty damn good reason. Imagine the UK which contains Welsh, Irish, and English speakers. All speak English, even if that isn't their native language. Even when you go across the channel into France or Germany, English is still pretty commonly spoken. At least well enough that you can find someone to help you.
I think ultimately part of the problem is that some people want "realism" in their fantasy game, and others of us just want to adventure and explore. And having language difficulties isn't fun for that second group because it delays our ability to get to the adventure. And once you have a little gold and UMD, Comprehend Language/Tongues can fix the problem.
Honestly, in a world full of magic does it really make sense that people wouldn't find methods to easily communicate?
Indeed, that's a pretty weak counter-argument. With alternate racial traits, languages is one pf the most fixed stat for humanoids and monsters in general. Common is rarely given as a bonus int language, it's almost always racial.
PF isn't as bad as 3.5 in this regards, where underground creatures ridiculously had undercommon AND common, but I would much rather common be taken away completely and a human language be added.
You do know that there are 10 or more different human languages in Golarion, and common is one of them (Taldane) right?
Careful Claxon, there may be countries where multilingualism is the norm, but in France, to name a place I'm deeply familiar with, while everybody is supposed to be schooled in at least one or two foreign languages, actual proficiency is rare, and worse, pidgin ability is mistaken for proficiency.... of Course, in Northern countries like The Netherlands and Scandinavian full proficiency in English (and in several Norse variants) is the norm. Southern countries, like France, Italy, Spain and Greece, are much more monolingual, with proficiency in useful foreign languages practiced, but limited to the strictly utilitarian level.
I guess the various languages are listed in setting specific books
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I think ultimately part of the problem is that some people want "realism" in their fantasy game, and others of us just want to adventure and explore.
It's also a simple misunderstanding of realism. For a lot of people, the real world fails their internal verisimilitude test -- that is, what is real doesn't fit with what feels real to them.
The classic example of this is the idea that, pre-Columbus, Europeans thought the world was flat. This is simply untrue. The Early Modern Europeans not only knew that the world was round, but they even knew how large it was -- and they knew that Columbus couldn't sail for 30,000 km across the ocean to get to China.
But there are others. Look at G.K. Chesterton, in the short story "The Curse of the Golden Cross," which I won't spoil because Chesterton's a pretty good mystery writer. Another example is the idea that there were no old people in the ancient world (or the Middle Ages), [See Growing Old in the Middle Ages by Shahar for a discussion] because life expectancy was only 35 (or whatever number gets cited)..... but, of course, what brought life expectancy down were early-childhood deaths; if you made it to age 10, you were likely to live into your 60s or 70s, just like today.
(Adamson has a nice line in "Wellness Guides for Seniors in the Middle Ages": Mentioning to non-medievalists that one's research interests is investigating regimens for old people in the Middle Ages invariably draws the following baffled reaction, "but I thought there were no old people in the Middle Ages. Wasn't the life expectancy much lower then, and weren't these folks all dead before the age of forty?")
Having a common language is, in fact, realistic; every culture above a certain amount of financial sophistication achieves it. And, as you point out, everyone who needs to deal with "outsiders" (which includes anyone who hopes to sell beer to one of them) will be familiar enough with it at least to sell the beer.
As I wrote on another thread: "I'm no longer surprised when I go to Antwerp and see a Japanese customer talking about a meal with a Dutch waitress, and they're both using English. Four hundred years ago, it would have been an English customer talking to a Flemish innkeeper, and they would have been speaking French, but the principle remains the same."
You do know that there are 10 or more different human languages in Golarion, and common is one of them (Taldane) right?The CRB doesn't even mention their existence, even in the description for Linguistics. Names would be setting-specific, but it could easily say that different regions use different languages.
Thats because it's all setting specific material, which isn't included in the CRB (or only as much as was absolutely necessary).
Inner Sea Primer and other books provide the other information you need about the countries and languages they speak. You will note that the CRB is also devoid of any real information about the countries of Golarion or any real setting information at all.
It's also a simple misunderstanding of realism. For a lot of people, the real world fails their internal verisimilitude test -- that is, what is real doesn't fit with what feels real to them.
That was why "realism" was in quotes.
Just to be clear, the CRB does not reference specific Golarian languages because it is setting nuetral to the best of Paizo's ability. Common is setting nuetral. In Golarian, in the Inner Sea campaign area, Common is Taldane. In the Mwangi Expanse Common is Polyglot, in the Eastern Lands, Common is Tien, and so on and so forth.
As to monolingual in the States, admitted. When my coworkers found that I was fluent in Spanish, and conversant in French and German and pidgin in Korean, Vietnamese and a couple of others, they treated it like magic.
If you insist that speaking Common is universal, you aren't at my table. I am sure this will leave you crushed :).
Orfamy, The world is flat argument is bogus. Every seafaring culture since at least the Greeks knew better. (Sails dip below the horizon. Not everyone is willfully stupid.) The famous Catholic flat earth maps were Allegorical. The religious controversy was Geocentrism vs Heliocentrism. Yes there are always fringe crazies who will believe flat earth, hollow earth and any number of romantic ideas, but they aren't the norm.
It's also a simple misunderstanding of realism. For a lot of people, the real world fails their internal verisimilitude test -- that is, what is real doesn't fit with what feels real to them.That was why "realism" was in quotes.
I just wanted to amplify that, with examples.
One of my favorite games, as I've mentioned before, is Ars Magica (which I believe our beloved Lisa Stevens was instrumental in creating). The basic idea behind ArM is that is is set in the real world, and specifically in the real world as the medieval Europeans believed it to be.... which is different both from the real world as we understand it today, but also a lot different from the world as most of us envision the Middle Ages.
Shrug. Reality is unrealistic, because we want the world to make sense in our heads, but reality doesn't actually care.
Claxon, I sure hope that wasn't a reference to me, because I'm neither american nor unilingual. English isn't my maternal language, and other than French I also have also have limited capacities in two other languages.
What I find absurd isn't that many, if not most characters are multilingual, it's that 100% of many races are perfectly fluent in a single shared foreign language. Why woukd they even maintain racial languages? You don't see much Gaelic in Scotland today...
I don't really care for Golarion as I don't play it. I'm talking core rulebook material.
I live in an officially bilingual country, as there are many. If you only speak English, in many cases you can find people to help you. But even if it's one of the oficial languages, you'd have to be pretty naive if you think it will suffice in your dealings with everyone. English is taught in school from a very early age... yet a large part of the population isn't proficient at all in it. Are you seriously believing that every single serf in the game was given the teaching required to perfectly master a foreign language? Because Common as per the rulebooks isn't simply a mere lingua franca, it's a whole other beast. Even in the Roman Empire all did not speak Latin...
Orfamy, The world is flat argument is bogus.
No, it's not.
Every seafaring culture since at least the Greeks knew better.
Yes. But not everyone today knows that "every seafaring culture since at least the Greeks knew better."
Basically, the Medieval Europeans weren't nearly as stupid as we, the Moderns, like to believe they were. Similarly, the Medieval Europeans were smart enough to see the advantage of a common language for trade, and anyone who did any trade was smart enough to learn that language.
.... which is to say, not having "common" is, in fact, completely unrealistic, just as having a seafaring culture that didn't realize that the Earth was round would be unrealistic.
What I find absurd isn't that many, if not most characters are multilingual, it's that 100% of many races are perfectly fluent in a single shared foreign language.
The Pathfinder ruleset does not support degrees of fluency. It sounds like your complaint is with that, not with the existence of shared trade languages.
Actually, Linguistics rolls, Charisma/Intelligence rolls, etc are all used to emulate sub-fluent communication. Knowledge of similar/related languages can potentially reduce DCs to below 10, which will let you get by. If you have sold down those useless INT and CHA stats to 7, you have no one but yourself to blame for not being able to find out where the bathrooms are, so you just have to follow your nose.
I don't want the game to emulate fluency levels...
Funny you bring up the flat earth. Of course you'd expect the sailors and avademics to know the world was spherical. But the masses? The Flat Earth Society is still a thing you know...
GP, yes I have friends in the Flat Earth Society. They love the Romance of it, they know it is not objectively true, and set a big store by Subjective vs Objective Reality. Rolling off the edge of the world is a cool if ridiculous concept. Only children, madmen or romantics ever actually fought over it. We are not really much smarter than our forbears. Painting our forbears as credulous simpletons is usually more about rationalizing our own failures.
Not wanting to emulate fluency levels is perfectly OK, it is a matter of taste.
Trying to show that you are Right is pointless and, ultimately, impossible.
Speaking 2 mother languages and having different grades of knowledge of 2 foreign languages I see the 100% proficiency thing as something hard to believe.
I'm only 100% proficient in Spanish. When speaking Galician I still have to think some concepts that don't inmediately translate in my mind. When Speaking English, even though I've studied it for years and I try to practice a lot, I still have a hard time to find the proper words and to remember how to pronounce them. My French is definitely the worse, I can only say a few words with a lot of effort. And I studied it for two years.
My Witch learned about 10 languages in a month! Her character sheet reflects that her Intelligence humbles mine, but I don't want to think I'm such a hard learner!
Even if it's probably a good thing to allow characters to communicate more easily, it's undoubtfully unrealistic. Faking an accent or deliberately speaking wrong can seem fun for a time to roleplay a partial proficiency in a language,but I found it to be a pain in the ass in the long term (specially if you are the face of the group and have to make Diplomacy rolls, believe me, my arguments usually seem more convincing when I'm not writing in English xD), so I finally end getting unrealistic and roleplaying perfect proficiency.
I don't believe there IS 100% proficient in any language. Between fancy words specific to certain professions... or older words not in common use... to new words being created all the time, everyone I've ever known has had a situation of 'Wait... what? What does that mean??'
40 years straight of speaking only English and I still google a word now and again.
I must aggree on that. 100% proficiency is an exaggeration and I shouldn't have said it like that.
Now I'm tempted to blame my lack of proficiency with English for my mistake. Just for fun.
Medieval people were not cretins, but to hold them to our own standards is absurd. Almost every country on Earth now has mandatory education from early childhood until adulthood. This is recent, and mostly a 20th century thing.
Without being stupid, these people were without a doubt ignorant. How can you know the system is heliocentric or what the diameter of Earth is unless you were either told or are very very well versed in yhe relevant fields and took all the time required to deduce it?
English is cited as a modern example of a "Common" language. It's a modern lingua franca, but these have nothing to do with the scale Common is used at by core rulebooks. You do all realize that 88% of Earth's population has no meaningful fluency of English, right? If you'd travel but a little out of the major tourist hubs this should be painfully obvious to all... Even in major tourist locations finding people who don't speak English is an easy task.
How can you make the argument that 100% of members of a large number of races spanning many nations in a context without modern education systems is historically correct when only 12% of people speak English in the modern world despite it being taught in school in most countries?
Common is a plague that has always undermined languages in DnD, by making this aspect of the game worlds almost utterly moot and devoid of any use. I don't care for emulating the difficulties of learning languages or proficiency levels, I just loathe that nearly all languages in the game are made useless by having 1 language unite pretty much everyone. This disincentivizes high int and linguistics investments, and makes, well, talking way too easy. Difficulties of communication were a large source of friction and conflict and removing this greatly reduces social challenge possibilities. Language is one way to make social characters shine and be useful, taking this away from them by the addition of a common language is a ridiculous Tolkien relic. Thankfully PF largely improved over 3.5 in this regards, but the complete removal of Common is something I am happy to have done at my table and strongly believe should be a part of the core rulebooks.
I'd say the language simplicity is a side-effect of spending several thousand years in Renaissance Stasis.
I'd say the language simplicity is a side-effect of spending several thousand years in Renaissance Stasis.
The existence of long-lived races also helps.
Shakespeare was born in 1564. He would be 453 years old today, which is not even close to the expected lifetime of a Pathfinder elf. That's right, if we lived in the Pathfinder universe, there would presumably be elves (and even gnomes) around today who were personal friends with Shakespeare and who had grown up speaking Elizabethan English. This, in turn, means that the English language today would be a lot closer to Elizabethan than it actually is, because we would still need to be speaking, reading, writing, and listening to a version of English that was easily intelligible to those people. And, of course, when Shakespeare was born, he would have been writing plays that had to be understandable to elves born before the Norman conquest, which meant that his language would be much closer to Chaucer and even Beowulf than it actually was in the real world.
This, in turn, makes the development of a common language much easier. It would also make the development of a common language more likely, except -- ill-informed opinions on this thread notwithstanding -- there's a very strong ceiling effect here, and it's hard to make something more likely than 100%.
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Several thousand years of Stasis is an odd assumption. Countries and Empires rose and fell. The idea that History is static is about as likely as it being linear. Long lived races would smooth things out, but none of them are all that into sharing, especially with the upstart races. Gnomes might be more involved with the short-lived races, but that would hardly be conducive to stability.
A worldwide common tongue on Golarian is unlikely. No country or race has had worldwide dominance since the Aboleth, if then. The existance of several common tongues, as Paizo has specifically identified as existing is reasonable, and actually likely.
If you want to play it differently at your tables, it's your preference.
I'd say the language simplicity is a side-effect of spending several thousand years in Renaissance Stasis.The existence of long-lived races also helps.
Shakespeare was born in 1564. He would be 453 years old today, which is not even close to the expected lifetime of a Pathfinder elf. That's right, if we lived in the Pathfinder universe, there would presumably be elves (and even gnomes) around today who were personal friends with Shakespeare and who had grown up speaking Elizabethan English. This, in turn, means that the English language today would be a lot closer to Elizabethan than it actually is, because we would still need to be speaking, reading, writing, and listening to a version of English that was easily intelligible to those people. And, of course, when Shakespeare was born, he would have been writing plays that had to be understandable to elves born before the Norman conquest, which meant that his language would be much closer to Chaucer and even Beowulf than it actually was in the real world.
This, in turn, makes the development of a common language much easier. It would also make the development of a common language more likely, except -- ill-informed opinions on this thread notwithstanding -- there's a very strong ceiling effect here, and it's hard to make something more likely than 100%.
Empirical evidence does not support your theory. The English language has changed sufficiently in the last 40 years that some news interviews require subtitles because some of the language structures spoken by some millennials is almost impossible to understand by the baby boomers.
It is more likely that the long-lived Chaucer era Elves would not understand Shakespearean English unless their own dialect evolved.