Character designing

[AkhutaiAngura]

Hm. So. A few questions I'm having, as I'm sitting here thinking about the 2.0 version of Kaln. I, saddly, lost access to my 1.0 version, and thusly he'll be starting from scratch. But, all that aside..

 

Things I haven't been able to find answers to, thus far. Are there racial languages? Like.. Would it be feasible to assume the Elezen might have their own languages and dialect, compared to the Rhogadyns, and kittens and so on? Or has everything been standardized into a 'Common' language, with varrying accents?

 

Is it feasible to have a character that grew up in the wilderness, alone? An example being a DW wandering through some of the deeper cave systems, or a Wildwood wondering lost through the woods.. Or, is that improbably due to a general urbanization of the land? I guess what I'm asking on this one, is how.... Big is Eorzea, really? 

 

Now, for the concept.

 

Back in WoW, I had a Draenei I -loved- to play. He was born on ARgus, some 20ishthousand years before the current expansion. Kept in varying states of cryostasis and such on the trip to Draenor, and then to Azeroth.. Blah blah, we don't need a WoW history lesson here. Long story short, in all of his years of life, he had almost -no- contact with other sentient beings, untill somewhere in the last 5000ish years of his life, outside of elementals. As such, he spoke a very broken version of common, and even his own racial language was broken. He had no concept of possession, would never use words like 'yours' or 'mine'. He didn't use simple words (Conjunctions?) like is/are/am very often, either. When he did, they were usually used incorrectly. 

 

I'm wondering if a similar concept, adapted to ARR, would work for an Elezen here.. But, as I asked. Not sure how feasible it is.

 

I can give examples of the speech if needed, but I think the gist is there.

[Xenedra]

It's confirmed that the races DO have their own languages, but they're more like old languages. Roegadyn still use their language for names and the lore forum has a dictionary up for it. Elezen have a sort of french based language that they haven't mentioned much about. It's mentioned that before moving to Eorzea, Miqo'te had a different language, but I think that's really all there was to that, too. I'd try picking around the naming conventions posts in the lore forums for more specifics, as I'm just going off memory. Here's a link!

 

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/forums/491-Lore

 

I'd say it's possible for someone to have grown up mostly alone, especially in the twelveswood, though maybe not without ANY human contact. I think an adapted concept like the one you mentioned would be totally possible as long as you're cool with people thinking of your character as a wild, possibly crazy man. But that might be the point, no? : P

[Ildur]

Considering that Eorzea is 'exactly' the size it is despicted in the game shuts down a lot of potential roleplay. We can assume Eorzea is actually much, much bigger, but the game has to 'scale it down' for gameplay purposes: nobody would like spending three real life days travelling from one city to the other by foot. So there's plenty of 'free' space for small meaningless towns and random unruled wilderness.

 

Now, if by 'growing up' you mean literally, growing up from a little boy to an adult, I'd say that person wouldn't have any kind of spoken language at all and, what's more, he would a lot of problems fitting back into society. He would be very animalistic. I guess you could compare him to Tarzan.

 

However, if you meant that he used to have human contact before but that at some point he was left to 'live secluded for a long, long time', then it's plausible if he was in a very, very obscure location or if he chose to avoid human contact.

In that case, him having no concept of 'yours' or 'mine' can make sense or it can make no sense depending on the place. If there were predators or other people (whom he avoided) that tried to steal his food and were very territorial, then he'd have a VERY distinct and primitive concept of 'mine': he'd be very violent when other people put their hands on his things. Ironically, he would probably see stealing as another means of survival, so even if he has a very strict concept of 'mine', he would have, perhaps, little respect for what is 'yours'. Or maybe he would respect it a lot, identifying himself with other human beings and not daring touch anything that 'belongs' to others.

[FreelanceWizard]

Incoming lore references.

 

The devs have stated that the Roegadyn definitely had a racial language, though it's dead ("generations of disuse") and lives on only in names (dev post, Roegadyn naming conventions). Miqo'te had a language once as well, back in the fifth umbral era when they came to Eorzea, but it no longer appears to be in use other than in names (dev post, Miqo'te naming conventions).

 

We also had a thread about this not too long ago where it was discussed and lore references grabbed. The long and short of it is that the lore seems to indicate that while roegadyn and miqo'te definitely had racial languages and others might have, they're dead now and live on only in names. Beyond that, every (player character) race speaks Eorzean. Could you be from somewhere so isolated that you've just started learning the language? Sure: the world's larger than what we see in game, and a lot of it is indeed wilderness -- probably more so post-Calamity. We also know that elezen have a longer lifespan than hyur (main site, elezen racial info), so as Ildur points out, you could have stepped away from the world for a while.

 

From a psycholinguistic perspective, it'd be tricky to be someone who grew up with no linguistic exposure. The few known case studies of this lend credence to the "magic years" for learning languages; if someone's not exposed to language during that time, they're largely rendered incapable of using it later. There's also some indications that not acquiring this skill also causes significant issues with intellect, though there's a big confound there in that our typical tests of intelligence are heavily tied to linguistic competence.

 

Buuut there's also the Final Fantasy exemplar of the "wild boy," Gau (FFVI), that you can use.