The final element in the original trifecta, a language list for the Barony. All elements of the minimal setting document are now complete, and I plan to stitch it together and publish it later today.
MUNDANE LANGUAGES
Common
Assume that everyone speaks Common, which in the Barony is a trading language - a mix of the formal patrician language of the old kings, various regional vernaculars, and, importantly, many, many loan words from the language spoken in the White City (enough that Common is understood there). This language was formally adopted by the state about a hundred years ago, and there are city and regional accents that anyone from the region will distinguish.
The Language of the Kings
This is the old patrician language that was spoken by the nobility in the region of the Barony about three hundred years ago, before the string of disasters that destroyed the old kingship. It is sometimes spoken as a curiosity by academics, and it is periodically fashionable with the nobility to cycle old terms back into normal conversation. This would be about as pretentious as someone trying to use Latin or Old English phrases at a party - probably fun for about ten minutes, very quickly boorish. The official position in the Barony is that The Language of the Kings is a relic of a barbaric and culturally suicidal regime that deserved what happened to it. The Baroness in particular is known to loathe people speaking it in her presence.
The Hunting Languages
These are a series of shrill whistles use by the gangs of the capital to communicate short (like three or four word) phrases back and forth in code. Every gang has its own language, although they are all built on similar grammars and have a core set of 'words' in common.
Thanks to M. John Harrison for these, they were entirely too cool not to lift. Everyone should read Viriconium.
Imperial
This is the language that is spoken in the White City. If you speak Common you will pick up about one third of what is being said, but the language has complicated grammar and is densely allusive, and native speakers will tell you that what you really get (because you're being so literal about it) is only about one tenth of what is intended. The image culture of the White City is complex and recursive, and Imperial has evolved in communication with it. There are also Imperial war languages that are spoken by the soldiers (and by the Courtesans). These are brutally stripped back and sentences are generally only three or four words long. They are infamously impossible to parse for civilians, and units and kill teams often invent their own grammatical and vocabulary quirks. In the White City, the speech of people who have served in the military is stereotyped as nearly comically laconic and direct, much to the amusement of regular citizens, whose speech is famously florid, pedantic, and imagist.
EXOTIC LANGUAGES
Pattern Languages
The 'languages' spoken by the entities. It is not possible to speak a pattern language without years of study, or without a degree of intuitive facility. They are words and grammars but they are also images, and without the ability to hold images in your mind you will not be able to make yourself understood. In some ways sense-making is ekphrastic, which can be deeply counterintuitive. You might describe your anger in reference to an image which you must also describe in fine enough detail that the other can also hold the image in mind. Images can also be layered atop one another, and the relations between them can be described in terms of opacity, transparency, or reflection. All of this is done linguistically, and it is enormously complicated. It generally takes years for someone without a knack for how it works to pick up even the simplest phrases and inflections.
Adding to the difficulty, most entities will speak their own pattern language, which will be totally unique and dependant on a series of images and postures invented by that entity to describe their sense of the world. The students of the academy generally learn one or two of the relatively stable 'meta languages' (listed below), which give a good grounding in the concepts needed to develop the possibility of deep communication and understanding with an intelligent entity. Entities are enormously predisposed to like and trust someone who learns how to talk with them on a their level - who puts time into understanding the images that they have developed to express themselves, and the relations between these.
It is one of the foundational rules of the academy that pattern languages must never be developed for communication between two humans. Even more so, the academic must never attempt to communicate with themselves using a pattern language, or develop a pattern language of their own in isolation.
Enochian
The pattern metalanguage spoken by angels, demons, and all undead and soulless bodies. All entities who claim to be from the future speak Enochian. Most academics speak it as well, it is considered the 'introductory' pattern language, and is usually presented as the easiest to deal with as the images that it makes use of are fixed, legible, and relatively intuitive. God and its angels are famous for maintaining that Enochian is what all other pattern languages turn into in the future. Demons think this is hilarious and joke about it often.
The Language of the Stars
This is the metalanguage of the one hundred or so bodiless entities who claim to be stars in the sky. It is also spoken by the beings of the upper air who are descended from them, and by entities who claim kinship with the moon. It is another of the 'introductory' languages, although considered a pretty serious step up from Enochian because of the abstract quality of the images that it develops. It is known to introduce a certain coldness and lack of care and emotion in those who speak it often.
The Language of the Artists
This is a strange pattern language spoken between humans. Academics like to say that it is not really a pattern language, and the artists that speak it don't care enough to contradict them. It was developed naively, out of necessity, so that artists could talk about what they were making. It is famous for its conceptual flexibility, and is stereotyped as asserting that any two arbitrary things can be shown to be both like and unlike one another.
The First Language of God
This is not really a pattern language, and no one speaks it or knows that it exists. It was taught to the dragons that they might speak the Word during their crusade against chaos at the beginning of things. Anyone that hears you speak this will understand you. Angels and demons will flee from you, First Humans will obey you. A human body speaking it will burn like a torch under the strain. Literally translated, the First Language refers to itself as something like 'all language' or 'the concept of language'.
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