lu_ming's page

Great job, it all went swimmingly. Thanks a lot! :D

Hello? Anyone there? :)

Hello,

I tried purchasing the digital versions of several of your books today. However, when the moment came to complete the purchase, instead of seeing the usual confirmation page and receiving the e-mail, the website redirected me to the shopping cart.
Believing it to be a bug, I tried placing the order again, only to discover the previous purchase had already withdrawn the funds from my card. None of the merchandise is in my downloads page. On my orders page, the order is described as "pending".
Upon further investigation, I believe the store to have mistakenly placed the order as a gift, even though I had disabled gift options before purchasing, as my order page describes the order as "purchased for unnamed person". I'd like to know how to correct this mistake.

:D

Hey where's my PDF? :(

Here you go.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h66t34k93bem8qo/Golarion%20System.ubox

I did build the Golarion system in Universe Sandbox! Quite a while ago, in fact.

If you need a conlanger to invent a language for the setting, you know who to call... *whistles nonchalantly*

I have a theory which has been churning in the back of my mind for some time, and that is that Aroden actually chose to die in order to give humans free will.
Think about it: the main effect of Aroden's death is that prophecies stopped working, and now the future cannot be reliably predicted, so maybe before the Age of Lost Omens humans were wholly controlled by fate, and their lives were predetermined from birth to death; Aroden, being the god of humankind, sacrificed himself knowing that his death would free humans from the shackles of prophecy and give them power over their own destinies. Or maybe he saw a prophecy that would have spelled certain doom for Golarion and he killed himself to stop it.

Hey no probs! Anytime. XD

Yes I understand perfectly that from a gameplay perspective having so many languages would be quite a hurdle. XD
The list I made is for purely "theoretical" purposes. Thanks for the appreciation, though. :)

As I said, since we don't have any samples of the languages themselves, there's no "correct" interpretation, so yours is just as good as anybody's. :)
Personally, I don't like drawing parallels between the languages of Earth and those of Golarion, as I think they're completely different, and my "family tree", so to speak, doesn't match well with that of Earth languages. Therefore, it's inevitable that some languages that are not closely related in real life end up being so in Golarion. However, your list is very good.
Here's the list of what I think the features of each language in the Inner Sea are like, so you can have an idea of what I had in mind:

Taldane (spoken in Taldor, Absalom, Lastwall and, unofficially, in the rest of the region) = elegant and refined, like Victorian English, but at the same time concise and practical, like today's English.
Chelish (spoken in Cheliax, Isger and Sargava) = a beautiful language, very good for song, poetry and rhetoric, much like French or Italian. Isger and Sargava have their own dialects.
Andoren = very concise language, with many quirky sayings; not as formal ad Taldane or Chelish. Like modern Italian.
Galtan = a "fiery" language, very passionate. Like Spanish or French.
Molthuni and Nirmathi = very similar to Chelish, but with enough differences to be a separate language. They're the same language, only with two different names, depending on the side of the war you're on.
Varisian = another passionate language, full of innuendo and subtlety but also more vulgar than most (especially in the mouths of the Sczarni).
Ustalav = a slow, phlegmatic language, like today's Polish or Russian.
Drumish = a language almost as subtle as Varisian, whose family it belongs to, but not quite as exuberant.
Skald = a language both harsh and poetic, like Old Norse.
Irriseni = Irriseni and Skald split only comparatively recently, so they're still very similar, but not enough to warrant intelligibility between them. The language of the jadwiga is totally alien and doesn't fit in any Golarion language family.
Hallit = a throaty, harsh language, poor in rhetorical embellishments but very direct.
Mendevian = somewhat long-winded language, but otherwise unremarkable.
Numerian = throaty like all Iobarian languages. It's the language with the most "modern" lexicon.
Brevic = another harsh language, but more "sophisticated" than the other languages in the Hallit-Iobarian family.
Razmirani = similar to Brevic.
Avistani Elven = beautiful to hear, but somewhat complicated in grammar.
Five Kings Dwarven = full of complex consonant clusters, but beautiful in its own way.
Alkenstari = difficult to pronounce like most Dwarven languages.
Orcish = harsh and unsophisticated language, poor in vocabulary. Some linguists want to link it with the Goblinoid language family, but for now it remains isolated.
Shadowtongue = strangely beautiful language, probably because of the influence of Infernal.
Draconic (spoken in Hermea) = a very complex, difficult language which nonetheless affords a great deal of elegance.
Qadiran Keleshite = beautiful language, useful for both poetry and prose. In the courts they use Classical Keleshite, which is the official language of the Empire.
Katapeshi Keleshite = very direct, very no-nonsense language.
Osiriani = beautiful and rich language. It's the official language of all the courts of northern Garund.
Thuvian = more a motley collection of dialects than one language.
Rahadoumi = complex language, but one of the best for philosophical dissertation. It is spoken in Rahadoum and on Mediogalti.
Nexian = very complex language, but the best for talking about magic.
Gebbite = somewhat conservative language, retaining many archaic forms, and heavily influenced by Necril.
Jalmeri = beautiful in sound, complicated in grammar, it's still less complicated that most other Vudrani languages.
Polyglot languages are hundreds and I can't go in detail about all of them. Some are tonal, others have rare sounds like clicks.
Shoanti languages are famous for their strange sounds (ejectives mostly), and complicated grammar.

Here it is, sorry for the long post. There are dozens of other languages spoken in the Inner Sea Region.
Hope this helped.

The proto-language of the Thassilo-Varisian and Cheliax-Taldane languages is indeed Ancient Azlanti. Shadowtongue is a wholly artificial creation of the Umbral Court, from what I understand, hence my classification. The other families that didn't make it on the list are the Aklo family (which is spoken in the Darklands and includes Svirfneblin and Necril among others), the Ghol-Gan family, whose last representatives are modern Cyclops and Giant and the various Halfling languages, which are derived from human ones. Undercommon is a Sovyriani language, and Druidic counts as artificial. Other representatives of the Azlanti family include Jistka (which is the direct predecessor of Taldane and Chelish)and Thassilonian.
There's also the Sylvan family, which includes Gnome.
Hope this gives you a good starting point. ;)

Though how do I know what groups to categorize these languages in? Most of them seem to have multiple influences and such.

Both my mothertongues, Italian and English, have heavy influences from other languages, the one from Arabic and Germanic, the other from French and Norse. No language is wholly of one family. The difficulty is deciding which family is predominant: in Italian's case, Romance, and in English, Germanic. As for Golarion, I suppose it's all a matter of personal preference and guesswork, since we don't have any actual samples of the languages themselves.

Hot damn, that's a varied and interesting interpretation of it. It will certainly help fill in on those parts I tried to work on.

Glad I could help! If you need clarification, ask anything you want. ;)

I'm a student of linguistics and a conlanger, so I've actually given this topic some thought. Here's what I came up with: I've divided the Inner Sea languages in various families, depending on the history of the nation. That in a whole continent only half a dozen languages are spoken is totally unrealistic, so I've given most nations their own language (e.g. Celiax has Chelish, Brevoy has Brevic etc.).
Here's a map showing the distribution of the families (sorry but I suck at photoshop).
And here's the key for reading it:
Black = Cheliax-Taldane
Red = Thassilo-Varisian
Blue = Skaldic
Yellow = Hallit-Iobarian
Green = Isolated/Artificial
Light Blue = Dwarven
Pink = Sovyriani
Grey = None/Various
Dark Green = Casmaronic
Datrk Blue = Garundi
Orange = Polyglot
Violet = Vudrani
There's another family which is not shown on this map: Shoanti, whose 20+ languages are spoken on the Storval Plateau.
Cheliax-Taldane and Thassilo-Varisian are actually part of a single family of languages called Azlanti.

Yeah unfortunately I know that. :(

You know what would be real cool? If you could zoom in on the map and see a detailed map of every nation (like the ones in the World Guide) and even maps of the single cities (for those that have one, like Magnimar, Absalom, Westcrown etc.)