Little Liber: Languages of the Old World

“Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the apocalypse, to my mind, is the loss of writing. Not the practice, but the written word itself. I always perused my vast collection of books, feeling somehow that I would find the time to read every tome I owned.

I suppose I was wrong.”

Little Liber: Languages of the Old World

Before I got into game design, I was a linguist. As you can imagine, language means a lot to me, which therefore means I have lots of thoughts on languages in the Warhammer setting, and in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4^th Edition. Today, I’m focusing on the rules side of things, and what I’d like to change to make it make more sense.

Language (Reikspiel) & Native Languages

Whilst I understand the mentality behind the lack of a Language (Reikspiel) Skill, I think it’s… a missed opportunity. It makes it very difficult to integrate Characters and sentient Creatures into the game as NPCs, or as Player Characters, who can’t speak Reikspiel. As such, I propose the following two changes:

• Adding Language (Reikspiel) to the Language Skill on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4^th Edition, page 124,
• And creating a new Optional Rule called ‘Native Language’.

Options: Native Language

Everyone in the Old World grew up around at least one language being spoken in the home — or whatever passed for a home — and as such developed an innate and native understanding of how to speak it. This understanding may not be the most refined, and speakers of any language continue to develop their language skills for their entire lives, but the basics become instinctual.

At Character Creation, each Character chooses a Native Language — the language most commonly spoken around them whilst growing up. Each Character automatically gains their Native Language as a Skill, with a free 10 Advances towards it.

The Read/Write Talent

To my mind, making Read/Write a Talent instead of a Skill as it was in 2^nd Edition, is a great change… however, the Talent retains one of my main gripes with the 2^nd Edition implementation. According to the rules as written, you either know how to write — every single language you know how to speak — or you don’t. For a setting that focuses so much attention on illiteracy (a theme I think is very much to Warhammer’s credit), this seems ludicrous.

Furthermore, we need to talk about scripts — the written forms of languages. Consider real-world languages: both Italian and English use the Latin alphabet, whilst Greek can be written with the Latin alphabet and the Greek alphatbet, etc. Not all languages are written with the same scripts, some languages share scripts between them, and other languages can be written with multiple scripts. 

So, I propose the following change to the Read/Write Talent:

Read/Write (Script)

Max: Intelligence Bonus

You are one of the rare literate individuals in the Old World. You are able to write a single script, which may cover one or more languages known. You can therefore read any piece of writing written in that script for a language you know.

Scripts of the Old World

Now that we have differentiated knowing a script from knowing a language, and how the two work together to enable someone to read and write, let’s determine which languages use which scripts! I’ll be basing this off the “Languages of the Old World” table on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4^th Edition, page 125, with some common sense thrown in, and real-world inspiration.

Each script comes with the languages that can be written with it. Ostensibly any language can be written with any script, if you have a good enough understanding of both, but the following are those with established rules and styles.

• Fæderrun — Albion (Albionese). An abugida, where consonant-vowel syllables are written as a single glyph, derived from a combination of Old One writings, and ancient Norsii runes recovered from bygone skirmishes and trades between the two peoples. Fæderrun is an alphabet that relies heavily on angular runes — not dissimilar from Klinkarhun — typically carved into wood using chisels.

• Gothic — Bretonnian (Breton), Classical, Estalian, Magick (Lingua Praestantia), Mootish, Reikspiel, Tilean, and Wastelander. Also technically used for Battle Tongue and Thieves’ Tongue*, though neither is a formal language, and both are seldom written. The Gothic script is an alphabet, first derived from an older ‘Remean’ script, used by the Remean Empire of ancient Tilea, and then adapted with the Klinkarhun script of Karak Ankor. The script became standardised across the Old World around the late 1000s, and has since replaced countless regional scripts. Gothic is typically written with ink on paper or parchment, using a quill or pen.

• Hotha — Nehekharan. An ancient heiroglyphic abjad, relying on ideographs and pictographs to stand in for both concepts — as in the thematic first glyph — and the pronunciation. Hotha is notoriously difficult to read, as it was so highly politicised, and bound tightly to the Nehekharan religion and belief, that so many unspoken rules and tricks were worked into writing the language. Furthermore, glyph direction changes often, and in many places, changes form within a word or phrase depending on the function it plays. However, many Necromancers believe that only by studying Hotha can true sorcery be performed.

• Klinkarhun — Khazalid. An alphabet of hard, bold lines, typically written using fine chisels on stone or metal, or heavy styluses on clay or ink and paper. Klinkarhun is also often bastardised by the Sigmarite Church to write holy texts, though these often stray so comically far from true Klinkarhun that many Dwarfs a) cannot read it, and b) refuse to read it. Most embarrassingly, some Sigmarites have Klinkarhun tattooed on their bodies, often conveying drastically different messages than they intended. It is worth noting that Dwarf Runes — that is, magical runes — are not written in Klinkarhun, and are an entirely different script. However, these runes can’t be ‘read’ so much as understood, requiring Lore (Runes).
• Another script exists within Klinkarhun called Aldrhun, which is both the origin of Klinkarhun, and used alongside it. Aldrhun is a logographic script that abstractly represents whole words. Aldrhun's useage is waning, though often it is used alongside Klinkarhun — some words, specifically archaic or words requiring respect, such as the Gods, names, or important concepts are written in Aldrhun, whilst other words are written in Klinarhun. It is entirely possible to write all Khazalid words in Klinkarhun, but it might be considered uncouth, rude, or ignorant to do so for some words.

[Author's note: Think of this like Japanese, where both hiragana and kanji are used. Kanji can be written out with hiragana... but it's considered childish to do so. Kanji is required to 'properly' write Japanese. You might want to represent this in your games with an additional Read/Write (Aldrhun) Talent, counting its lack as a negative to social influence rules if you're attempting to impress or influence through written Khazalid.]

• Kyslevic — Gospodarinyi, Ungol. Kyslevic is a curious script, in that is was specifically designed by a council of Kislevite scholars in 1819 IC. The script was an attempt to standardise the various regional scripts being used — including ancient Ungol scripts, Gothic, and traditional Gospodarinyi scripts hailing from the ancient Scythian peoples over the Worlds Edge Mountains. In truth, the scholars thought it made them ‘look bad’, especially considering the closeness of their native scripts to those used in Dark Tongue glyphs. Kyslevic was a compromise — using Gothic as a base, and adapting the shapes and forms to include Gospodarinyi and Ungol elements. It was hoped that this new alphabet would encourage national unity between the tribes, but instead merely allowed them to understand each other’s insults more readily…

• Neshhe — Arabyan (Neheshkh). An abjad, derrived from Hotha, and heavily standardised across Araby, it is none-the-less segmented in its use. Various forms of Neshhe exist, though all the glyphs remain the same, which change their usages depending on the context — whether religious, personal, prose, artistic, etc. The study of Neshhe calligraphy is said to be a life's work, and one of the most noble of pursuits in many Arabyan cultures.

• Rök — Norse. Rök is an alphabet ‘scavenged’ from Klinkarhun recovered from early wars fought between the Norsii and the Dwarfs. Given a lack of actual tutelage, the script was adopted and entirely bastardised — symbols weren’t matched to equivalent sounds, but merely used for whichever seemed right to individual vitki and wise-folk, and very little standardisation was developed. Even now, Rök lacks consistency, and is barely used outside of religious purposes.

• Tartaen — Elthárin, Magick (Lingua Praestantia), High Magick (Anoqeyån). Tartaen is a highly ideographic language, relying not just on the glyph, but its context, size, closeness to other glyphs, and all manner of other factors, to determine its meaning. One Tartaen rune can represent a syllable, a word, a sentence, or in some extreme cases, an entire poem, book, or ideology. High Elf scholars spend decades debating over the specific meanings of each Tartaen rune, making the script almost impossible to be mutually agreed upon. However, the concepts are known well enough between individual runes that a written language is able to be used… though the exact reading of a passage may vary wildly from person to person. Tartaen is said to be the closest script to that used by the Old Ones.

*Thieves’ Tongue may also be crudely written using Secret Signs (Thief).

That's All, Folks!

That's all for today! Happy reading and writing, everyone! And stay safe out there.