quote:Original post by ahw
The Latin they use in a LOT of writings (mostly english writings), is what you call pig latin
I''m quite sure you don''t mean pig latin. Pig latin is a ridiculous kind of made up langauge where you take english words, break them down into their components, change the order, and add meaningless prefixes and suffixes to them.
Latin is popular for these types of purposes, because it lends an aura of authenticity. I did a couple of years of Latin in university and loved it, although I was more interested in Medieval Latin and the school only offered classical.
For the purposes of a game, you might look at how this idea was used in the Ultimas for spellcasting. They came up with a bunch of Latinate roots for each spell component, and putting them together in combinations resulted in different spells. Also, Sacrifice used what sounded like Latin when spellcasting, although this was more for atmosphere and didn''t serve a practical purpose in the game.
Enough english words have Latin roots that you can play with a pseudo-Latin and get the same effect. People will generally know what you''re trying to get at.
Nec - death --> Necromancer
etc.
And a bit of trivia for you Latin buffs. To the medieval mind, the right side was better than the left, and left-handed people were of questionable repute. In medieval Latin, right is ''dexter'' (from which we get dexterity), and the left is ''sinister''.
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The sense of left side has totally dissapeared, while on the other hand, the word "left" itself has taken the double meaning of something either on the "left", or something "awkward", just like the word "sinister" had a double meaning in Latin.
