This time, there is a wonderful language themed post. It nicely plays with the fact that the same book in another language may not be the same book. I thought you might like it
Perhaps some of you will understand the Czech original too:https://www.facebook.com/PriznaniIlumin ... 9530719849
My translation (sorry if I am not as hillarious as the author):
The language and thinking are intertwined. After all, that is the reason why it had been forbidden to translate religious texts for such a long time. An example: You read you shall not leave a witch alive but you find out your Bible translation from Hebrew was misleading, and you find it out having already burnt thousands of poor women. And the majority of those girls with brooms were burnt unjustly, as you were supposed to burn only herbalists. Many more linguistic catches concern the magical books, where a word directly affects the reality. If you ever want to dabble in the occult translatology and at the same time want to save yourself a lot of trouble (which is practically the opposite of practicing magic, but let's leave this topic alone now), you may need to know:
1) The Necronomicon doesn't work in cyrillics. Nobody knows why, it simply doesn't. Reading it in the house letters is approximately as dangerous as reading Dunno on the Moon. There are kindergartens in Moscow, that have been reading it to kids before sleeping for the last ten years, and noone has ever been harmed.
2) Some languages have a limited amount of words for colours. For example certain amazonian tribes distinguish only light, dark, and red. Try to summon the King in Yellow or cast the Violet Spell on someone.
3) The structure of the administration newspeak is dangerously close to some of the prehuman languages, which highly emphasized the formal rules, but at the same time served to blur the reality. They had been made in such a manner to prevent demons from finding out they were being summoned until they were safely closed in the magical circle. The problem is that your briefing presentation of the agenda related to the long term realisation of the concept of your section, that sounds very close to Old Lemurian or High Enochian. Unlike you, their native speakers knew how to make sure Agnorak Souldrinker doesn't fill the coffee machine with their intestines at the end of the session.
4) The most efficient language for curse making ever was the original Ur-Germanic in prehistory. Cursing someone in Ur-Germanic was so easy, that it was happening even accidently and the excess magical energy had to dischage as distant thunder after a bit confrontational expression. A usual meeting of two warrios clad in pelts was going approximately this way:
Gnors the Screaming Blade: "Hello Skari Gray Wolf, how is your wacked family?" (A thunder, Skari's eye cracks, his wife gets covered with ulcers, his kids's arms fall off, and his ship crashes into a cliff)
Skari Gray Wolf: "Not bad, you half-wit." (horrible thundering, a bolt of lightning hits a nearby mountain, Grors' sword starts stuttering, his horse turns into pudding. Two days later, two ice giants arrive from the north and crush his village by sitting on it)
Odin himself is said to have hung on a tree and lost an eye just because someone wished him a nice day. As soon as he managed to climb down, he announced he had become wiser. He created a safer rune magic, coded by writing, and he reformed the language to make majority of Protogermanic words approximately four times longer and thus you'd have more time to hit anyone's face, should any suspicious lightning start during his speech. Modern German with its long and complicated words, and the verb at the end of the sentence, is just a logical outcome of this trend.
5) Some of the artificial languages are particularly suitable to spinning magic, others are complete sterile in this area. A particular case is Esperanto, in which every spell has the same and only outcome. Anytime you pronounce any spell in Esperanto, nothing happens except for disappearance of two more esperantists. Really, when was the last time you actually saw an esperantist?
6) The vocative in Czech is a remnant of protective taboo measures. No supernatural being noticed you were talking about it, unless you directly called it. It is curious that many other languages don't have this feature, and their speakers still having been devoured by crowds of screaming demons, Krakonoš, or Bloody Mary. But one is never too caucious.
7) There are lost languages, in which it is not possible to lie, and several astral dialects, in which you can speak only pure, absolute, and up to date truth. There are people who managed to learn them. When you ask them what is it like, they usually say something like: "I've wasted my life and want to poo ."
8) Some time ago, a group of linguists tried to reconstruct the first, original african prelanguage of the human kind. They found out its vocabulary actually makes up one whole story, the first narration in the human history. It was probably some kind of variation on the myth of the eternal return, which sounded: "Some time ago, a group of wise men decided to decipher our language. Then the sky burnt down, a worm drank the loop of eternity, and we woke up by the lake again."
