I had a wonderful idea on the bus today on the way to work, thinking about a particular and idiosyncratic type of RPG sorcery. I was inspired a bit by Ginger's House of Cards game and the idiosyncratic sorceries of the game's few magic wielders.
There is magic in words.
People have known about this, dimly, for thousands of years. Sorcerers using ancient tongues. John, in the Bible, referring to Yahweh as "The Word." There is a psychotic activity to naming things and using words to manipulate the symbols. The Muslim and Jewish traditions with their holy books and the power of the actual objects and the words they contain. The reverence many Christians have for the KJ bible.
There is magic in words. However, to best unlock that magic, one has to use languages that have power in their words, etheric energy in their symbols. Using those to write and cast spells will produce bigger, and perhaps different effects.
What makes a language powerful?
I. Age
The older a language is, the more power it has built up over time, thanks to the accumulation of energies over time. Thus, Esperanto has just about zero mana , because it was created quite recently. Sumerian, on the other hand, would have quite a lot.
II. Area of Use
The more widespread a language is or was, the more power it has built up over time, thanks to the accumulation of energies over a wide area. Latin is a perfect example of this, because it was used over a wide (and DIVERSE) area for a long time and has "soaked" up mana as a result. Hawaiian, for example, would not have much power based on Area of Use.
III. Texts
There is power in speech, and there is power in the written word. The more written texts there are of a language, the more power it has built up because the writing of the texts helps conserve and concentrate the language in a way that purely spoken languages lose some of their power. This works best when the texts are available and read--if a dead language has a million papyrus scrolls, unread and unknown, the language will have less power than if those scrolls were read and exposed to the noosphere.
So, yes, there is a power to English, based on that. On the other hand, there is ever less power in the languages that English is displacing as a result.
Since each language is a different way at looking at the word, a Linguomancer is always going to be interested in researching new and different languages, becoming more facile with them, in order to be able to perform more and different kinds of spell elements.
Posted by Jvstin at February 15, 2005 7:21 AM