Language

Animal: Animal languages are divided up by type, such as cat, dog, songbird, and so on. Different species speak each language slightly differently, but a snark can still understand a wynd. Access to learning animal languages is mostly limited to druids or gnomish teachers, but they are not particularly hard to pick up. OOCly, animal language translations are usually marked with ^these little doohickeys^.

Ancient Tongue: The Ancient Tongue is a language used long ago - think of it like Latin. ICly, the Ancient Tongue is its own language, dating back to the Realm Wars, and is mostly used by druids as part of their rituals. OOCly, it's really a code. Flip an english word backwards and change A to O; E to I; I to A; O to U; and U to E.

Commontongue: As its name implies, Commontongue, usually just referred to as Common, is the lingua franca of Calacia. It has no racial origin, though a few linguists theorize that it may have originated with humans (given their high population and free association with all other races, this would make sense.) OOCly, English is used for Common. Characters are assumed to be talking in Common unless otherwise indicated.

Demontongue: The racial language of demons, it is the official language of Chaos. It is spoken by all native Chaosian races (although many intelligent Chaosians also learn Common), and most Unitarian defectors pick up the language. The language also has a large vocabulary of words not used in common speech, but are components of bloodmagic.

The language itself has its own alphabetic script which consists of 33 characters: 24 normal Roman letters (excluding C and Q), 7 unique phonemes, an article-mark (romanized as k'), and an accent mark. Grammatically, the language is simple and sloppy--words are simply strung one after the other to convey ideas, with direct objects tied to verbs with the article-mark. Unlike English, verbs do not change with tense (i.e., is becomes was in past tense, were in plural past, etc) but simply have tense-modifying words attached with more article-marks. Demontongue is an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language. A phrase like "I killed some elves" might look like "I k'elf k'plural kill k'past."

OOCly, new demontongue words are most often derived by keyboard mashing--if it's ugly and hard to say, it's demontongue.

Gnomish: The gnome racial language. Smithies make some use of the written gnomish due to gnomes' well-documented and ancient smithing techniques, but it is spoken by very few non-gnomes. This language is fading out due to the gnomes' relatively small numbers.

Khori~nath: The language of the giant sea serpents is a sibilant one. Besides being spoken by the Khori~nath themselves, who are unable to speak other languages due to their vocal limitations, it is also understood and sometimes spoken by a good number of sailors and mers for the purpose of negotiating with pods. There is also a written form of this language using a variation of the mer script, which was used by mer historians in the time of the Realm Wars for recording the Khori~nath's extensive knowledge. Even for ones fluent in both mer and Khori~nath, tomes of Khori~nath script are difficult to translate, but contain many otherwise-lost secrets. Many mages use Khori~nath to transcribe their notes, as it is useful in keeping their own secrets. OOCly, Khori~nath vocabulary can be written with either Spanish or Portuguese.

Mer: The mer script and language are mainly used by mers within their own clans, under the water; mers in the cities tend to only speak Common. A good number of non-mer sailors pick up some mer to access their knowledge of the waters. Because of the semi-isolationist nature of many clans, particularly the deep-sea clans, this language has developed many dialects, to the point where it might be considered less one language and more a language family.

Old Merchant: An outdated and almost-dead language that is mostly used within tradition-bound merchant clans. It's thought to be an earlier form of Common. Some bards study it as a curiousity, to study linguistics and etomology, or for translating older scripts. OOCly, Old English is used for the old merchant language. The following are links to Modern > Old English dictionaries and translators. If these prove too confusing, you may also poke Kate/Scream for additional assistance via email or AIM (if you don't know those contacts, there's a reason).

Online Modern > OE dictionary 1

Online Modern > OE dictionary 2

Downloadable Modern > OE and OE > Modern dictionary (recommended)

HTML codes for OE characters (to avoid gibberish in SS posts online)

Telepathy: While not a language per se, it is a very common form of communication. Due to the effectiveness of widespread communication with a bondcreature, the joke has been made that bonds are Shadow Star's cell phones. When indicating bond telepathy, the most common use is [[brackets]] for bondcreature-to-anyone speech and {{curly brackets}} for bonded-to-bondcreature speech. It's not set in stone, though, and some players have other standard ways. Brackets are also commonly used for psy telepathy, while ~tildes~ are used for personal thoughts.

Wylraen: Jen gets to write something here because the Wyr are her bebbies. If she doesn't, then we get to make fun of her. :D