Vervain/RealmTransition

Transitions

I'm an Archaeologist by trade, which means I'm interested in history, which means I'm interested in history in Exalted. This means a number of things for the way my games are run, but in this case it has to do with my views on the way cultures and languages develop.

I ran into problems, recently, in Rathess. Of course, Rathess wasn't abandoned totally during the Old Realm, although its population was severely depleted: the last humans left when the contagion struck. Which meant that I needed (on the spot, in fact) to come up with some flash rulings on the nature of the Shogunate. I don't know much about the Shogunate, which complicated matters, but I essentially needed to explain:

• The language of the Shogunate.

The Shogunate came from the bloody remnants of the Old Realm, and was reformed into the New Realm. As I see it, from a history-of-languages point of view, this means there should be a degree of continuity of language through all these three (this sparked interest in my mind in the 'erm, does that make High Realm related to Old Realm in a very-distant sort of way?). Bearing in mind that, while languages can be invented, they generally aren't. They evolve. So the language of the Shogunate, I decided, began as Old Realm but drifted away from it, so that at the beginning of the Shogunate texts can be understood if the character trying to do the understanding speaks Old Realm. As the Shogunate era progresses, the language can still be understood, but becomes more and more like an obscure dialect (ie, requires a linguistics check of ever-higher difficulty to understand).

This more or less led on to thoughts about how High Realm (which was what I decided to carry the continuity through with, rather than Low Realm, due to the fact that the classes doing most of the writing were probably the higher ones) was a distant off-shoot of Old Realm, and how languages in the early New Realm probably have about the same relationship to current High Realm as middle or old english does to modern english (middle or old depending on how far back you go), which is to say: they're intelligible to some degree, but to really understand them you probably need to spend a lot of time figuring them out. This would leave Old Realm as the equivalent of Latin, which the newer languages have their roots in but are not, ultimately, closely enough linked for knowlege of one to grant understanding of the other. Ahem, I'm sure you were so interested by that little tidbit of theorizing.

I haven't read the Aspect books thoroughly yet, though looking through it seems evident that there's quite a bit of information on the Shogunate to be had from them. I'll save comment on culture until I've done some more thorough reading, and may have to revise my views on language if anything comes up from said reading.

Please do comment and tell me if you think I'm talking bull or if I have even a vaguely valid handle on the way to handle the Shogunate era.