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Non-smart smart move
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Pardon my wall of text:
I'm blowing smoke on this topic based on dnd terms. Common tongue is English because more people speak that already. Whatever people do to it after, they do to it after, but English as a starting point removes the need for more people to learn Esperanto or whatever other language wants to be "common."
In the fantasy I've created in my head/my hot take: it would be easier if people shifted to English as common, and had "secondary" languages based on their location.
(In the real world, even sign language isn't universal. Certain languages like German apparently also do better for certain things like written law. I realize it's silly to expect our species to choose a common language based on numbers alone. I think more people speak English specifically because English speaking countries hold more sway on international economics/warfare (for now), and other countries have responded in kind.)
In my setting I use Esperanto as an ancient common tongue and English as a modern one. That's because it's ridiculously easy to construct false etymologies to explain various features of the English language if you use Esperanto as a base.
Esperanto words also have somewhat guessable meanings if you know your Latin and Greek roots, even though the text is not comprehensible generally. So players can have hints at the meaning of a text without knowing what it really says.
When I need to obscure the meaning more, I mix up the words in a sentence. Because Esperanto has an accusative case, you can mix up the sentence order without loss of meaning. But it makes the sentence harder to read and obscures the relationship between the words.
Also, it sounds like an incomprehensible but distinctly European language when spoken. Players tell me it sounds like Spanish.