"Planars got a lot of words for 'ethereal'" (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months RPG Blog Carnival comes from Beneath Foreign Planets with the prompt WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics.

I have shied away from using language too heavily in world-building because I have not had much luck getting people to follow up on cues tied to language - the base assumption being that names, words, places and the like are the outputs of generic fantasyland slush and not actually backed by anything meaningful and thus not worth digging deeply into.

However, if I was to weave language into a setting more deeply a thread I would follow is the effect of connection to gods and to the planes. These provide a common seeding, almost a stabilising effect across settings - particularly with some groups (elves in particular) having extra-planar populations like eladrin and shadar-kai.

The current implied D&D setting has a lot of planar interaction - if I take a look at the players that pass across my open tables we have a lot of tieflings, genasi, aasimar and the operating assumption most people have coming to table is that these things are unremarkably common.

One would assume this understanding of 'the planes are out there' would lead to a much more finer grained to say 'of planar origin' with the classic 'Irish have a lot of words for rain' higher fidelity around more common aspects.

One line to take would be that this make planar things unworthy of comment, so ordinary as to not need specific words. The other line to take would be that familiarity would be enough that common folk about your setting would have at least passing familiarity with planar effects.

A couple of ways that this could manifest:

Strand one - words, perhaps loanwords, exist in common parlance to allow a higher level of descriptive accuracy than we currently have. Not 'near ethereal and deep ethereal' but specific words that map to how thin the veil is in places, things there that won't harm you, things that might, and so on.

Strand two - languages from the planes carry threads of their origin plane with them - see Exotic Languages in Dungeons and Dragons among many examples for things like 'a contract uttered in infernal cannot be broken', 'one cannot lie in Celestial', 'Abyssal inflames passions for good or ill.'

Strand three - words to reflect inhuman perceptions - darkvision, infravision, telepathy, empathy, tremorsense - and gradations of the things perceived with all those senses. Magic and shades of magic. Planar terrain in all its wild and varied manifestations.

In a gaming sense, this could lead towards a neat little dictionary of these words that would allow you to pitch clues and invoke atmosphere to make the world come alive.

Grabbing the first thing I found on 'Eskimo words for snow' to get a sense of gradations within word classes then bodging together a prefix driven bad first draft we would be looking for something like this, but better.

		Ethereal	Feywild	Shadowfell
Happening	prefix	Ethereal	Fey	Shadowed
. element	Al	Al-Ethereal	Al-Fey	Al-Shadowed
. negligible element	Bra	Bra-Ethereal	Bra-Fey	Bra-Shadowed
. persisting element	Clu	Clu-Ethereal	Clu-Fey	Clu-Shadowed
. drifting element	Din	Din-Ethereal	Din-Fey	Din-Shadowed
. clinging element	Erg	Erg-Ethereal	Erg-Fey	Erg-Shadowed
. risky happening	Flo	Flo-Ethereal	Flo-Fey	Flo-Shadowed
. dangerous happening	Gli	Gli-Ethereal	Gli-Fey	Gli-Shadowed
Happened
. lying element	Hor	Hor-Ethereal	Hor-Fey	Hor-Shadowed
. enveloping element	Ink	Ink-Ethereal	Ink-Fey	Ink-Shadowed
. resisting element	Jel	Jel-Ethereal	Jel-Fey	Jel-Shadowed
. fresh element in safe form	Kwo	Kwo-Ethereal	Kwo-Fey	Kwo-Shadowed
. fresh element in hazardous form	Lar	Lar-Ethereal	Lar-Fey	Lar-Shadowed
Formations
. presence	Min	Min-Ethereal	Min-Fey	Min-Shadowed
. long-standing presence	Nup	Nup-Ethereal	Nup-Fey	Nup-Shadowed
. hazardous presence	Ool	Ool-Ethereal	Ool-Fey	Ool-Shadowed

In parting, Benign Brown Beast rounds up a lot of previous thoughts on this, also for this carnival, but a very worthy 'lit review' of the blogosphere.