Would a long living race, like the elves...

so you might not be able to simply ask a very very old elf for their knowledge

"Quipu" functioned as a form of record keeping.

Why get out of bed when you can magically teleport straight into your pants?

Why live a healthy life when a cleric and/or druid can just magically heal all your physical conditions?

Why exercise when the magical, mindless golems (and/or undead servants) do all the menial labor so the society has no use for physical prowess?

Why debate about politics when a 1000-year old, super-intelligent elder has objectively correct views and anyone who disagrees is measurably stupider and wrong?

Why philosophize about the meaning of life, the nature of truth, or what have you, when the cleric can literally ask the god(s), and truth-check the answers magically?

Magic. Not even once.

>Why get out of bed when you can magically teleport straight into your pants?
I wear robes so I don't have to wear pants.

Yes, because:
>legal contracts
>peace treaties
>long distance negotiations
>blueprints for architecture, forging, maps, etc.
>mentally stimulating your young to ensure proper development/make sure your kid isn't retarded (think elvish equivalent of Cat in the Hat)
>Wills and Inheritance to make sure your asshole bastard half brother who cucked you and your whore wife don't get any of the loot/throne after you die
>taxes/records of who owns what

Basically all the same reasons why any culture past the stone age would develop written language.

Egypt in it's prime had THREE written languages. The hieroglyphs in the pyramids we are all familiar with for religious/ceremonial purposes. A written language dedicated solely to legal matters, then the every day written language for the peasants.

Here's the thing that always bugs me about elves: Humans dying from old age is a very rare and celebrated condition, we usually die from things external to ourselves, things like illness, cancers, violent accident, and sheer stupidity.

If the entire human race woke up tomorrow and was immortal, aside from a lot of old folks homes being out of business because their patients now look in their late 30s again, you wouldn't even notice, because this didn't change the fact at all the 5 million people died of lung cancer from smoking, another 1 million died from liver cancer from drinking, several hundred thousand died from AIDS complications and a few million died from wars, car accidents, passionate murderous stabbings, and downright stupidity, like attempting to clean a loaded gun.

If we were immortal, you wouldn't notice, or care, because this would be twenty deaths less a year in your city. More people get drunk and wander onto the freeway in my city. on a yearly basis.

You would still need a written language, because your great great great great grandfather probably wouldn't still be around, he'd probably get sick and die at some point. The fact that Elrond is still around in LOTR is probably only due to the fact that he exercises Final destination level paranoia.

Wait, you mean three written full-fledged languages or just three writing systems (like modern Japanese... sort of... four if you include the increasingly popular Romaji)?

Living forever doesn't ensure perfect memory recall

At the very least two fully fledged separate written languages. Because the hieroglyphs in the pyramids are picture based. While the other two are letter based, like english, latin, etc.

I have no idea how closely or distantly related the legal language and the common language were though. They might technically still be the same language.

>>mentally stimulating your young to ensure proper development/make sure your kid isn't retarded (think elvish equivalent of Cat in the Hat)
Wouldn't memorizing historical traditions and stories be more intellectually stimulating? After all, memorizing the Illiad is a lot harder than simply reading it.

Why use magic to solve your problems when you can just die and never have to deal with anything?

Are you implying that you can't memorize something to the point that you can write the entire thing down from memory so perfectly that every comma, period, and quotation marks are identical to the original book, because if you don't your asshole father is going to take a willow switch to your ears?

Because humans like you will happily forget their obligations unless it's in writing with their signature on it.

Also because great^4 granddaddy might fall out of the tree someday, and when that happens you don't want to lose his knowledge. Or he might get senile and start spouting nonsense.

There is literally no such thing as 'dying of old age.'

You just get old enough that your body gets frail and your immune system can't keep up. Dying of 'old age' just means someone got old enough to be killed by infection or accident that wouldn't have killed them when they were younger.

Your great-great-great-great daddy invented writing because he was tired of answering stupid questions.

>great-great-great-great daddy for advise?
If you ask him in written form you don't need to hear how he kicked Dark Lord's army asses for the hundredth time to get your answer

Actually there is such a thing of dying of old age, it's just not how you imagine it. The human body weakens with age to the point where death is a certainty as a result of telomeres shortening with every cellular division. Put frankly, any single cell can only divide a certain number of times, and the cells it becomes can only divide one less than that.

Let's put the number at 100, for simplicity's sake. you have one cell that can divide one hundred times. Then two that can divide 99 times. Then four that can each divide 98 times. Then 8 that can each divide 97 times, etc..

The trouble comes when you realize that certain cells, like skin and liver cells, can divide a greater number of times, and faster, than cells in our brains and lungs. we weaken because those cells aren't being replaced fast enough, our structures are degrading, and given enough time and not a good enough maintenance job, the likelihood of failure as a result of something normally survivable becomes a certainty.

Torvald, quit being a salty little bitch and give me the 3 oxen and 1 magically water proof cloak we agreed on. You can piss into the wind all you want about history, but we wrote up an agreement you put your name to it. Now pay up, it's starting to rain.

incidentally, the scientific community is pretty sure that it's about 25 that we begin to produce less cells than we need to maintain the body indefinitely. if you're over 25, your internal maintenance crew is probably slacking off, and you're slowly marching towards death. Cheerful, eh?

Is it me or is it only mammals decay as they get older? As far I am aware, most species just keep getting bigger and bigger until they die of exhaustation, their hearts cant keep up with the increase in size or can keep their own weight.

Except when cellular reproduction slows down so much that your body simply falls apart without new cells to replace old ones you do die of old age.

Would you let Marci teach you magic?

Yes, but this has nothing to do with this interesting thread.

Yes. Because it's beautiful.

OTOH there is some evidence that the brain isn't fully mature until the late 20s to mid 30s

How much shit would you have forgotten over your lifetime if it wasn't written down? Imagine if that lifetime was multiplied by 10, or 100

>tfw traveling through elven lands
>tfw all the signs are in elven because their kings wanted to make a point during the war
>tfw elves make their signs like 10 words long because apparently they can all read a million words a second
>tfw all the pictures are way too elaborate to easily see
>might as well nail my common-to-elven dictionary to my horse
Being a traveler is suffering

Just like Wales.

>All the signs are in elven
>Nobody actually speaks elven
>The elves gets butthurt when someone suggests taking down the signs nobody can read anyway

Fish and reptiles keep growing but break down like everything else. Lobsters are immortal until something eats them

They would unless you also give them perfect and endless memory and probably telepathy that allows people to communicate information to multiple others simultaneously.

Do phones and teleconferencing eliminate the need to record information in real life?

Simple pure memorization isn't really considered "good" or stimulating education, in part because of our ever increasing access to information. It's a waste of time and effort to perfectly memorize a bunch of specialized minutiae that you can look up when you actually need them. It's all about critical thinking and the ability to work with whatever information and concepts you need to.
You can memorize and repeat all the words of the Illiad without actually learning from the content.
Memorization/repetition is like literally the lowest level of education and intellectual stimulation.

Stop giving me ideas

>Wow, these humans and dwarves have figured out a way for someone to learn about things independently without having to go across the country looking for some old geezer whos an expert on the subject, distracting him for hours or even days
>we should get in on that

>Why get out of bed when you can magically teleport anything you need to do to your bed
fixed

This. In fact, this is accounted for even in shitty settings like D&D. Elven "Trance" or 'Reverie' is defrag/memory editing mode, where elves consciously or subconsciously sort their thoughts and memories in order to commit the things they wish to remember and forget the things they don't. If something is regarded as unimportant, it's discarded.

>A written language dedicated solely to legal matters, then the every day written language for the peasants.

Kind of like the modern era really. We still use latin as the language of science and the legal profession

>distracting him for hours or even days
lmao caring about hours or days? the fuck are you, a mayfly?

>mfw elves get away with being lazy shithead neets because they use magic to keep themselves clean, skinny, and good looking
>mfw elves never get shit for never getting out of bed because their bed is an entire fucking tree and human scum think "treehouses" are romantic and cool

Elves are shit, and you all a shit for liking them.

>Memorization/repetition is like literally the lowest level of education and intellectual stimulation.
And just reading isn't. Reading isn't inherently more stimulating than being told but at least if you have to personally memorize the stories and knowledge of your people you have to do some work.

t. Dorf

Writting is a representation of language, it helps to organize thoughts, and also to see ideas. How do you think those worms cast magic in the first place?

They would, if only as a way to write down music at first.

>Simple pure memorization isn't really considered "good" or stimulating education, in part because of our ever increasing access to information. It's a waste of time and effort to perfectly memorize a bunch of specialized minutiae that you can look up when you actually need them. It's all about critical thinking and the ability to work with whatever information and concepts you need to.
>You can memorize and repeat all the words of the Illiad without actually learning from the content.
>Memorization/repetition is like literally the lowest level of education and intellectual stimulation.

Aristotle hated writing precisely because of this. He felt it made scholars LAZY, because instead of memorizing things properly, they could just read shit written down on tablets

If you think about it, latin-lettered languages have 2 to 3 systems as well. We have capital letters, small letters and numbers. Optionally we also have block letters and cursive.

>Why send letters when you can use magic to teleconference instead?

Becuase Im busy and don't want to talk to you every time you have a retarded question

Reading ITSELF isn't mentally stimulating. But being able to read a whole brand new book on a regular basis is.

Having your multiplication facts memorized doesn't mean shit if you never graduate from highschool.

I didn't say I thought he was right, it's just always amused me one of the fathers of science and philosophy hated writing for the same reasons modern teachers hate the internet, tablets, and wikipedia

Yes, I can see your point. That is amusing.

If I remember correctly they can remember mosth of their lives.
Wasn't this was the 'Reverie', that sleep-like meditation they had was for? To Remember.

I laughed at this post. Thanks user.