n7axw wrote:When Nimue woke up, she found that language on Safehold had drifted from the TF norm to an extent that she had to work on mastering what was normal on Safehold --presumably in Charis-- in order to fit in. It is true that the COGA was a common thread as it schuffled clergy and attracted pilgrims, preventing the language from drifting so far apart as to make people of differing communities from being mutually unintelligible, it would also be true that the details of life and culture in each community would differ to an extent that someone visiting that community would require a certain amount of updating to be fully conversant about what was going on around him. That would include vocabulary, syntax, cliches, slang and so on. The cross fertilization that we have noted wouldn't overcome that.
Don
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Right. The argument's just between people who take the common start, movement of people (Church teachers, traders, pilgrims), common written sources, and absence of competing linguistic influences as sufficient to keep drift from getting beyond differing dialects, versus those who think that that's implausible and drift would have made for mutually unintelligible languages. (I suppose a third position is that you'd have "ring species" languages: everyone's mutually intelligible to their near neighbors but by the time you cross Haven, the Harchongese/Trellheimers and Siddarmark/Tarot/Fallosians are not mutually intelligible. I don't think anyone has staked out that position yet though.)
Anyone - I don't think anyone is supposing that not even differing dialects and accents would emerge, and you seem only to be denying that claim.