UncleChu/Language
Learning to Love Exalted Linguistics
Okay, folks, here’s my stab at Linguistics. As a bit of background, I am a firm believer in original rules, and only like to fix them when they’re obviously, hideously broken. I’m not much of a house-ruler. The second point is that one of my favorite creative exercises is justifying things that may not make sense outwardly… this ability/hobby allows me to enjoy the Matrix sequels when others reach for the puke-bucket, for example. Third background point: I’m no linguist, but I do a bit better than the average Yankee… excellent American-English, can get around just fine in Lithuanian, and have picked up a decent bit of Japanese in the seven months I’ve been living here (still rather piss-poor at it). My mom tells me how my great-grandfather spoke eleven languages, and a guy I knew in high school from the Czech Republic could get by on half a dozen languages easy. The 3 languages I know are from totally different origins, and I can tell you this: they’re all ridiculously difficult to learn if you’re not native (Japanese being the easiest).
My main point: languages in Creation have absolutely no reason to function in the same way languages here on Earth do.
Earth languages are hideously messy. After only two or three generations, the Lithuanian I speak is archaic and old-fashioned compared to new Lithuanian immigrants, whose language has been incredibly Polishized and Russkified. Talk to any Brit to bear instant witness to 300-500 years worth of slowed (thanks to increases in correspondence) language split (and ask them to cuss… its hilariously silly-sounding). Why does language fragment so readily?
The Bible tells us God got pissed and smashed our Babylonian tongue into a thousand pieces so we’d stop being so damned arrogant. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a milestone in cyberpunk literature, proposes us that we used to all communicate on a deep, fundamental level (which we’d call glossalia now) which then got ruined by the spreading of a kind of “memory virusâ€
