Languages and Arcane Mark

[cartejos]

Are there any languages that use one character words similar to Kanji? Six character limit for arcane Mark could be bypassed somewhat with a condensed written language

[sreservoir]

I don't think what languages are actually like is ever specified in particularly great detail, but you're going to have a bad time with spells like sending (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/sending.htm) if you think too hard about it...

[Duke of Urrel]

Are there any languages that use one character words similar to Kanji? Six character limit for arcane Mark could be bypassed somewhat with a condensed written language


I don't think what languages are actually like is ever specified in particularly great detail, but you're going to have a bad time with spells like sending (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/sending.htm) if you think too hard about it...

In my opinion, the Arcane Mark spell should be able to represent up to six discrete signs from any language in the multiverse. It should even be able to create personal signs that are absolutely unique, like fingerprints, so that they can be matched with their unique creators.

Even if the Arcane Mark spell could create only characters from real existing languages, there is still a great variety in what signs may represent in various languages. Some very complex signs, like pictograms, might represent one word each. Others might represent one syllable each. The Korean language, for example, has a syllabary in which each written sign represents one spoken syllable. Still other signs might represent discrete sounds, as alphabets usually do. As we know, some alphabets represent only consonants and no vowels, while others represent vowels as well as consonants.

This having been said, I don't think you will find many dungeon masters who will let you assume that a language exists that always allows you to compress more than six words into six characters. It's true that with contractions, you can sometimes compress several words into one syllable. The French sentence "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" contains nine words (que+est+ce+que+ce+est+que+ce+là) compressed into only five syllables. However, this expression is not typical, even for French, for two reasons. Firstly, it is a little repetitive and requires some finger-pointing if you want to make your meaning clear. Secondly, it consists almost solely of grammatical words, that is, pronouns and linking verbs. Nine words that have actual semantic content, rather than a merely grammatical or deictic (that is, referential or "pointing out") function, are not so easy to compress into fewer than nine syllables, even in French.

Moreover, more complex words tend to have more syllables. Even Chinese, which uses ideograms that might theoretically express one word per character, has a lot of compound nouns, just as English does. These nouns have more than one syllable each and often are written with two or more characters each. Indeed, I just looked up the Chinese word for "postal carrier" and discovered that it requires three Chinese characters to write, even though one variant of this compound noun in English ("mailman") has only two syllables.

When I am the dungeon master, I assume there exists a Language of Magic that is written as a syllabary like the Korean alphabet. This syllabary is vast and contains all syllables that it is possible to pronounce. Moreover, it is extremely precise (even more precise than Sanskrit), so that no two people speak it in exactly the same way and no two people write it in exactly the same way. This is the reason why nobody can learn to speak the entire Language of Magic fluently. Even if you are a highly advanced spellcaster, you can cast only a few spells in the Language of Magic. The more spells you can cast, the more likely you are to need to prepare them beforehand, with the help of either the gods or a very carefully written spellbook that represents the words of each magical incantation exactly as you pronounce it. This explains why you cannot simply understand words in the Language of Magic automatically as they are spoken. Instead, you must make a Spellcraft check to understand somebody else's spoken magic words, even if they are casting a spell that you yourself know how to cast.

But how many syllables per word should the Language of Magic have? When I'm the dungeon master, I assume that the Language of Magic has, on the average, the same number of syllables per word as English does. So if it's ever necessary to know how many syllables a phrase in the Language of Magic has, I simply assume that it has the same number of syllables as an English phrase would have. For example, the English sentence, "The Duke of Urrel is an insufferable pedant," has fourteen syllables in all, so I assume that this sentence, translated into the Language of Magic, must also have fourteen syllables and must be written as fourteen characters – that is, fourteen magic runes. So in order to inscribe this sentence in magic runes using the Arcane Mark spell, you would need to cast the spell three times.

Post-Script: There are also languages that include single words with LOTS of syllables. Consider the Hawaiian language, in which "humuhumunukunukuapua'a" (11 syllables) means "pig-snouted triggerfish" (6 syllables). If we wanted to average out the number of syllables per word in all the languages in the world, we might discover that the world average is actually higher rather than lower than the English average.