Draconic, the dragon tongue, thu'um

Can a language be feared/worshipped by other lesser race?

It needs properties beyond normal language, aka it needs to be magical. EG Dovahzul actually warps the world when spoken by a master (and that many of the ancient users were actual dragons doesn't hurt) and the elven tongue from Eragon (I know, I know, but this idea was one of the goodish ones) was used to form spells and impossible to tell lies with.

Often, in demonology/old one stuff, speaking the name of the demon/horror brings a part of it into our world, meaning that their language has power beyond English.

In my current setting, magic is rather wild and dangerous, but the ancient elven language allows one levels of control over magic. If you use such a language, the speakers have to be dead/rare/really really powerful.

Does hearing it make bleed the ears of mortal men and split their fingernails to the white?

I cant wait for the dragongirl pics in yhis thread

I don't understand all of the hate for Eragon.

I think most of the hate comes from the fact that it's "mainstream". Sadly, Veeky Forums appears to be full of hipsters.

That's not to claim that it's high literature, but it's decent children's fantasy.

>it's decent
even by "children's fantasy" standards (which in ideal world should be HIGHER), it's unbearable trash. Yes, it was written by 15-years old, and for 15-years old it's okay, but in no way it's GOOD.

This is the problem. It was a decent book done by a 15 year old and good on him, but I literally had a librarian try to tell me it was the next Lord of the Rings. They pushed the book HARD as the second coming of literary nerd Christ and it basically turned out to be serviceable airline fare.

The idea of a LANGUAGE OF POWWWAAAAA is an idea I really like and I'm still disappointed to this day Skyrim didn't do more with it. It's an ancient idea, stretching back to the beginnings of human culture and appearing in the Upanishads. Om, the cosmic sound, representing infinite energy and power.

Sound is the translation of thought into actuality. Within our minds, all things as possible. Thus, when one has the proper words, the proper sounds, they can impart whatever reality they wish by communicating it to the universe. We are all Gods within the temporal space we share, piloting (or some might even say, imprisoned within) our meat golems.

In current Ryuutama-ish campaign the universe is a collaborative writing effort of dragons. Dragon language is used to build world, influence what's happening and, in more direct cases, pull off a miraculous coincidence. So, dragon language IS dragon magic and basically is a cosmic author's pen.

Current campaign is about players trying to untangle the world fucked up because its author threw a cosmic tantrum over everything not being perfect.

>the dragons are cosmic autists that hate it when the normies ruin their projects

REEEEEEE

>I think most of the hate comes from the fact that it's "mainstream".

Having read the series and formulated my own opinion about it without the help of the internet, I can tell you that it's really not the case.

The most positive I could say about Eragon is that it's a mediocre collection of fantasy clichés.

To my players: since you guys are definitely on Veeky Forums, if you know about "Nat 1 on Gravity", don't read further. Or read, i'm pretty sure it's obvious by now
This is exactly why to get your own world as a dragon you first need to travel others for some hundreds of years.

That particular dragon didn't want to wait, so he just stole the world-creating macguffin. It all went downhill from there.

The first book wasn' t bad, but the rest became progressively shitter.

It's the fact that he simply copied the plot from star wars, put it in a generic fantasy setting, and wasn't even able to write it in an interesting way.

it isn't a good book but popular

Check out Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea, it's a classic and there magic is basically about talking to things and knowing their names.

He wrote the obvious.
90% of it is just derivative stuff, found anywhere else.

Paolini wrote the first book on high-school and it shows in th plot, his writting and in the worldbuilding.

>Can a language be feared/worshipped by other lesser race?
If the speakers of the language are vile enough, eventually the language itself will be associated with those traits.

>eragon
It's just the magic system from Earthsea.

Yeah probably, fear is probably a lot easierthough.

>Be simple shit farming peasant
>Eating your daily ration of gruel
>Suddenly hear a noise outside
>"VROK UN DALGRAN REE"

You'd probably shit your pants in some capacity

Sure it can. Try singing death metal in the US midwest and see what happens.

Not sure how common it is, but in my campaign only dead languages are used in magic as they are immune to further semantic drift (clarity of meaning being important when warping reality). Some schools go so far as to forbid their chosen tongue being spoken outside of spells.

How do you deal with plasticity and multiple meanings?

Like in English, you can just insert a new word from another language whenever you want. Or imply different things with the same word.

Could someone screw mages just by setting up a language revival school?

The dragon tongue seems to be inherent to draconic nature. Dragonborn, dragon bloodline sorcerers, half-dragons, can understand and speak it with some draconic creatures being able to atleast understand it. The written form didn't exist until draconic worshippers formed the written language, and some of the earliest magical treatises are written in such an archaic language.

Historical example: Latin language. Peasantry didn't understand a word and had spasms of religious splendor every time they heard it
Yep

Thanks, now I am going to scare some goblin with dragon speech.

Presumably they'd pick a wording with little to no ambiguity, then rely on the language being dead to prevent drift in those word's meanings over time. If I were picking a language to recite magic in English wouldn't even be on the list, terrible bastard hodgepodge of words that it is.

>Could someone screw mages just by setting up a language revival school?
Doubtful. If you managed to shift meanings enough to be noticeable in a time frame short enough to matter, then you could make the argument that you haven't actually revived a language, you've just created a derivative or regional dialect.

With Discworld energy conservation rules