The degradation of names

[markem]

When you draw a map - do you (or really it's more like "have you") ever degraded names?

A long time ago I played in a D&D game where the DM somewhere - somehow - got hold of a book about how English had changed over the years. The book was really interesting in that it took modern words and then degraded them back to what they would be in the various centuries. So it started with the 1900s, then 1800s, and so forth. Then the DM (may he rot in Thergod's seven hells!) actually applied it to scrolls and other books we would find. It didn't last long because we couldn't figure anything out - but a good example I (kind-of) remember is:

1900 => Word
1800 => Werd (I think it was "e")
1700 => Wyrd (I think it was "y")
1500 => Wy(some funky letter)rd

[waldronate]

Search for "The Great Vowel Shift" and "predictable phonological change".

I was reading one of those semi-news blogrolls a while back and there was a blurb about a research group that had produced a paper backed by a piece of software that can age a spoken language with fairly high accuracy. As always, I take such claims with a truckload of salt.

It's amusing how many glyphs have outright disappeared in the last few hundred years, like thorn and long s. The long s is particularly interesting because it was still in popular use at the founding of the United States and was used in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (meaning that what you read of these documents in text reprints these days is literally not what the framers wrote).

http://xkcd.com/1012/

[Mark Oliva]

I used it in a campaign once. I did not make the degradation so difficult that it was undecipherable, but it was difficult. The players in that campaign enjoyed trying to figure it out. How well degradation will work out at play time depends upon the kind of group you have. PCs who like to unravel mysteries may love it. Hack-and-slashers probably will hate it.

[Azélor]

Yes I did but in an erratic way only, it was not following specific rules. Better than that is to translate form English to old English using dictionaries.

There are other ways to degrade names such as translation errors: Nankin for Nanjing, Pékin for Beijing, Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata
The speaker will chose a pronunciation more familiar to him. Or maybe he could not understand the natives accent.

[waldronate]

Or maybe he could not understand the natives accent.

http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Mount_Oolskunrahod

[ChickPea]

This may be slightly off-topic, and if so I apologise, but there's an absolutely fantastic podcast about this subject (the language evolution, not the mapping!) It's called The History of English and goes into great detail about the origins of English and how it's evolved over the last few millennia. Just thought I'd mention it if anyone wants to do a little research:

http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

They're a fantastic listen and very informative.

[Falconius]

Hebrew doesn't have vowels in its letters, and the way a word is said and or arranged differentiates its meaning and tense and subject and all sorts of things. So one way to do it would be to drop the vowels entirely and play with it that way. So "word" would be "wrd" and then you can put vowels in different places so like Wrad etc. and you can also add letters as suffixes or prefixes or midllefixes (?) so 'wrd' can be 'hwrd' or with vowels 'hawred' (in Hebrew "ha" = "the"), it's pretty easy to end up far away from the original like that. The other thing to do is mash words together like German seems to do, you end up with big confusing words that are actually smaller words put together, or so it seems to me who knows next to nothing about German.

Personally I love it. I'd be super stoked to be playing a game where that much thought went into the culture and language of a module, even if I never picked up on it. It adds depth that you don't have to add in the spur of the moment and gives things context and history. If your players take skills like archaeology or arcane knowledge or things of that nature it can now mean more than a die roll. Instead of the interaction, "Do I know esoteric stuff about this? (Roll) Yes you know all the esoteric stuff about this." You can have "Do I know esoteric stuff about this? (Roll) Yes, you know that the name derives from 'word', and the function of this place was to yadda yadda yadda and the history was etc and so forth."

[Mark Oliva]

Better than that is to translate form English to old English using dictionaries.

Right. In some places in one of our adventures, NPCs speak in sneaky degradations that take a term that the English-speaking players of the PCs have learned in modern Icelandic. But then they run into a NPC who's has been around for unnatural ages who says the term in old Icelandic. For instance, one of the highly powerful undead in our adventure has a fortress called, in English, the Eagle's Nest. The PCs and their players know this feared fortress as Virki Arnarhreiður (Eagle's Nest Fortress), which is modern Icelandic. However, the ancient undead duke (hertogi) who dwells there and the inscription above the entrance says, Virki Ernirheiðr, which comes from old Icelandic. This is an example of a degradtion that is relatively easy to figure out.

[markem]

Really very interesting - all of it. Words change all of the time. I forget what they are called - but what about combined letters? Like Aesop was originally written with the 'A' and 'e' put together. I'm not even sure there is a font (like dwarven, elvish, etc...) that can handle such lettering although I have seen it in fonts such as Times Roman. Are there fonts out there that do Olde English? Or some other language's older versions?

[Azélor]

Really very interesting - all of it. Words change all of the time. I forget what they are called - but what about combined letters? Like Aesop was originally written with the 'A' and 'e' put together. I'm not even sure there is a font (like dwarven, elvish, etc...) that can handle such lettering although I have seen it in fonts such as Times Roman. Are there fonts out there that do Olde English? Or some other language's older versions?

We still use æ in French and also œ but I've never seen æ in capital letters. And the letter Æ seems to work with a lot of fonts.