RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

Kilieit · **01-12-2017, 12:54 AM**

(01-12-2017, 12:41 AM)Caspar Wrote:
(01-11-2017, 10:38 PM)Kilieit Wrote: Some people take this to mean that Doman is a dialect variation on Eorzean, but that's not canon stated fact. My belief based on all the evidence (including stuff from the geography section) is that "Doman" is an ancient language all of its own (with its own rules and writing script), but most Domans also know a "trade language" that is aforementioned dialect of Eorzean.

Communication between Othard (the continent Doma is on) and the rest of the world started about 20 years ago, thanks to the advent of airship travel (for 2000+ years before then, there was a huge mountain range in the way). So that's when people would've started learning this language; it's likely your character would've too. If he's young enough, he might even have grown up speaking it in addition to Doman.
I agree with this interpretation on a basis of common sense, but for reference's sake do you think you could explain a bit of the reasoning here? It may be useful for myself or other RPers since this is a really inconsistent area of the lore, and translation convention is really dodgy in a multilingual game.

Sure thing - here's the two passages in question, pulled from this thread (where I went on a teeny tiny rant on page 2 about taking quotes out of context):

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I can definitely see why the first passage introduced confusion, but in context of the second passage... "developed with little influence from the West" and "spoke the same language as the West for 2000+ years" are mutually exclusive concepts.

Given the Encyclopaedia Eorzea is written from an Eorzean perspective (as it's designed to double as an in-universe document), I think the most logical interpretation is that the "common tongue of the Hyur" referred to in the first passage is in fact Eorzean, and therefore that Eorzean was adopted as a new but quickly ubiquitous in Doma in the last 20 years only.

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RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes