On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Damien Sullivan wrote: #Also, how long have Dragaerans been literate? Or had printing presses? (They #do have those, right?) Do we really know what the long-term effect of #universal literary on language change is, especially with a phonetic alphabet, Not much effect. People -- and this should cover D'ans as well as our species -- learn their mother tongue by ear, not by eye. The main course of language development is oral, not through reading. Spanish has a pretty "phonetic" spelling, which has not at all slowed the divergence of dialects and the evolution of phonetic misspellings of words. # #Combine that with the general mental glacialness of Dragaeran society -- they #do everything else slow, I'd have to assume their language didn't change at #human rates, even without other factors. I'd be willing to assume that their languages change at the same rate *per generation* as ours. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel