Editing Midnight RPG - Orcish Written Language (section)

== Andrew ==

Bill: you are remembering right. I thought I remembered something somewhere implying that Black Tongue was to Orcish what stripped-down-caveman-pig-latin would be to English, but I can't find it anywhere in the book, so I think I may have just made it up. I certainly don't see anything relating Black Tongue to Dark Speech other than the similarity of their names, unless Kevin made some sort of house-specific ruling on that. Absent any 'official' ruling on the topic, I'd go with Bill's theory, as it makes a lot more sense.

Adam: you are correct that Black Tongue, being the language designed for creatures too dumb to speak anything else, would not be the best choice politically. However, I'm envisioning the Black Tongue written variant as more of a 'bridge' language than anything else. If Black Tongue is as simple as I'm envisioning it (with all sentences and words being reducible to the same unchanging set of syllables), then it would be an excellent 'starter language' for creatures with no history of literacy. Once the orcs can read and write the Black Tongue's written variant, they are in a much better position to learn other written languages, and once they begin to pick up smatterings of other languages (as they invariably will, given the orcs' linguistic abilities), it becomes much more feasible to try and adapt the much-more-complex Orcish.