prokopetz:

prokopetz:

laughlikesomethingbroken:

prokopetz:

turstrigo:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: one of those fantasy settings where elves and dragons and whatnot have ridiculously long and complicated names, except instead of “hello, my name is [thirty-seven syllables with way too many apostrophes]”, it’s “hello, my name is [four-minute guitar solo]”.

(Of course, that’s just when the dragon in question is speaking a human tongue. In native draconic, the whole sentence would be like that: a series of polyphonic growls that just happen to resemble overdriven guitar riffs. In this milieu, the genre of music we’d recognise as “heavy metal” is actually draconic poetry performed by human musicians, with the human vocalist providing a loose translation. According to dragons, human instrumentalists’ “pronunciation” is typically quite poor, with a few notable exceptions.

The native languages of elves, meanwhile, are similarly musical, perhaps in emulation of dragons themselves; though their tones lack the bone-rattling harmonics of draconic speech, they rely on changes of pitch too rapid for the human vocal apparatus to emulate. For a human, your best bet at producing elvish speech is usually an acoustic guitar, though when portability isn’t an issue, a piano may be more flexible. Efforts to replicate the elvish tongue via accordion have typically not been warmly received.)

Wait, what about harps tho?

Certain ill-informed stereotypes notwithstanding, harps are actually a traditionally dwarvish instrument, not an elvish one; attempting to communicate in elvish using a dwarvish instrument would be something of a faux pas.

(Dwarves are not, themselves, tonal communicators. Rather, the primary difficulty humans face in speaking dwarvish tongues lies in that much of their speech is below the range of human hearing. This is believed to be an environmental adaptation; speech in the range that humans are accustomed to quickly becomes muffled and confused by echoes in cramped stone tunnels, but subsonics carry clearly for great distances. Indeed, the popular image of dwarves being prone to muttering or grumbling to themselves stems from their habit of taking advantage of the fact that the bulk of their speech is inaudible to humans to converse in front of them without being “overheard”.)

what about flutes? 

Also, I disagree. In order to have your sound travel well underground, it needs to be deep. Dwarves use bass.

Dwarves are big on harps because dwarves are into chamber music.

*ducks*

(As for the remarks in the notes about what instruments other fantasy species would “speak” with, well, as I’m picturing it, they wouldn’t. The whole notion of being able to speak via musical instruments depends on a very particular set of assumptions: i.e., that the language family in question is structured so that pitch and emphasis are the primary semantic units, while articulated phonemes are either inessential for conveying meaning, or else wholly absent. Having one or two species that this is true for is a neat idea; uncritically applying it to every species is taking a neat idea and beating it to death with a stick.

I think it’s more interesting if each species has a completely different language barrier; so, for example, while elves are pure tonal communicators, dwarves use articulated phonemes just like we do, but their voices are too deep for us to hear properly, as outlined above, and halflings… oh, maybe let’s run with the fact that extremely good manual dexterity is one of their traditional shticks and propose that their languages depend much more heavily on hand gestures than ours do – to the extent that if you can only hear a halfling, you’re getting less than half of what they’re saying!)

Further to the last bit: halfling spoken languages have lots of filler words that basically mean “refer to what my hands are doing” – much like when a modern English speaker says “like so” while gesturing to indicate the shape or size of a described object, but with a great deal more descriptive nuance. The upshot is that, to someone who doesn’t pay attention to the gestures or can’t follow them, halflings speech is indecipherably vague.

(And yes, this does mean that it’s nearly impossible to eavesdrop on two halflings having a private conversation, because the overhead component will typically boil down to “you know, the thing with the stuff”.)