Alicornutopia

lintamande wrote: inventing a new word for something will pull from the same well as the word it's synonymous with until it acquires its own distinct shades of meaning (this makes inventing new spoken words a sort of time-bomb and highly frowned upon).

Ooh, so the scientific revolution in this world (or professionalization, or anything else that leads to jargon, or the equivalent of switching from Latin to the vernacular) is going to be *fun*. Shakespeare as the greatest terrorist of all time!

(Would also like to hear your thoughts on my first post re printing presses and reading aloud, if you have any)

All this is making me think of Counterfeit Monkey. Magic system differs in the details but has a lot of the same broad implications, including e.g. conlangs as the way to utopia. The kabbalistic manipulation in Unsong also has some similarities.

If you instantiate a god on purpose how hard would it be to determine its specific characteristics?

Does this setting’s Abrahamic god speak the language of the hikers, Hebrew, all Earth languages, every language ever except Aramaic, or what?

Also, you should at least learn about the concept of Elcenian Draconic because this setting needs a Mial.

I've read enough sandboxen to know how Draconic works but can't think how to figure out Draconic/Speaker magic interactions, maybe all dragons are omnipotent. This setting does not come /standard/ with an Abrahamic god, that was a separate story, but in that story it would have the traits the creator expected it to have.

If you were very careful with phrasing you could instantiate a god with precisely desired characteristics, but there's a lot that could pretty easily go wrong and you only get one shot (since once sapient, the god can speak itself, and interfere with further alterations.)

lintamande wrote:since once sapient, the god can speak itself

I note that this can be read as “can itself speak” or more like “‘I hereby declare that I exist’”.

Hereby hereby hereby.

Hereby.

I AM THAT I AM was always the best God line, really.

I saw something (translation note 47 here) saying that the Yahweh literally means “he is”. I don’t know anything more about it than in that note which I am almost certain I partially misunderstood.

Would names!fairies be gods or powerless here? They speak, using sound, but they don’t use language.