How well developed are the languages in nae?

[Nemt]

A few words in game languages are thrown around pretty often, but how thorough are the vocabularies and grammatic conventions for the game languages actually?

[Gamemaster]

More than you'd expect, I think. There are at least twenty or thirty languages with vocabulary lists, alphabets, and grammar notes. The vast majority of this information has never been published or mentioned in the game. Details are added as needed so they are becoming more developed as the game goes on. Zekresh is, of course, the most developed so far.

We have a simple, yet very effective system for using a computer to organize this information so that we can keep track of all the languages.

Also, the languages are developed with close attention to how much they should or should not resemble each other based on their historic connections and other factors such as what linguists call "loan words" that are adopted from one language into another.

An example of a loan word is the word "haven". This word means "town" in many languages. Other languages use derivatives of this word. The "Paven" in "Angenmar Paven" means "town" in Verronese. ("Angenmar Paven" means "Sea Town" or literally "Deep Water Town". There are linguistic clues to various interesting bits of history in that name, by the way.)

Some tribes did not have towns prior to contact with other tribes and therefore had no word for "town". Naturally, they adopted the word "haven" or a derivative of it from people who used that word for "town." I'm not going to say which tribes borrowed that word from which others. That's a mystery that remains for anyone who wants to study the linguistics of the game. Some tribes use that word because their languages are related. Others just borrowed that one word and a few others.

(By the way, the Zekresh word for "town" is "kromostek" and the Zekresh word for city is "serat".)

This is an example of something that we have done gigantic amounts of work on that tends to remain behind the scenes but could be discovered by a player who took an interest in it. For example, we have more than one map that shows the locations and relationships between all the language families in the world and how they came to be in the geographic locations they are in. This is connected to prehistoric events, climate zones (for which we have yet another map) etc.

There are many similar topics where we've done lots of background work and there is much that a player could discover. For example, if a player undertook a serious study of any of these topics, the gamemasters already have a large amount of data to draw from that has already been prepared before the game began and was added to along the way: anthropology, history, prehistory, geology, paleontology, archeology, botany, zoology, ecology, astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, economics, architecture and of course linguistics. If you had the technology to study genetics, that would reveal interesting things as well.

[Nemt]

I figured you guys would've done a lot of work on it, I know much goes on behind the scenes.

Thanks.