Alicornutopia

This is an old idea of mine for a fantasy world, which I recently noticed was absurdly suited to glowfic.

Spoken words are magic. The magic sits in the relationship between the word and the speaker's understanding of the word, so you can't do magic in a language you don't speak to near-perfect fluency. And magic has an exponential decay curve, so every time a ritual is spoken with specific words it'll be half as powerful as it was the previous time. (The power behind words replenishes, but on a scale of thousands of years; this isn't known to most people in the world because even when millennia-old rituals are found they won't work for you unless you're fluent in the language they were written in, and even scholars of ancient languages can't achieve the necessary degree of fluency without knowing how the languages sounded spoken aloud.)

The population is human, and all-but-exclusively uses signed language; spoken language still has enough residual power that you wouldn't get through a paragraph without breaking a glass or hurtling your interlocutor into the wall, yelling 'STOP' at someone is approximately punching them in the face, reading a poem aloud will probably give everyone in the vicinity the equivalent of an acid trip, etc. Imperatives will mostly have the described effect, saying things will sometimes make them true and if there's not enough power for that will make them look true, prayer has higher variance than imperatives in terms of the odds of success and the resemblance of the results to what you wanted. Affecting living things directly takes a lot of power; no one is sure why. Promises to do things are not binding per se but they're sticky.

The population's around two billion; if everyone started talking aloud, after a year or so magic wouldn't really be a thing at all, but that year would be pretty lethal and no one seriously proposes it. There are local Fëanorians. No one has ever made a conlang detailed enough that fluency in it counted for magic, but the local Fëanorians are planning to do that and use it to give themselves better language skills and then invent more conlangs and then fix everything wrong with the world. Tech level in their country is Renaissance, ish.

(There's a local Melkor+Sauron. They are abominations brought into being by some prayer back when language was young, and they have slept for eighteen thousand years and now the languages they remember are back to full power.)

The setting is of course suited for glowfic because anyone dropped on it from another world is pretty much a god, though if they don't figure out what's going on really fast they'll both do a ton of damage and stop being a god.

In the world I created this setting for, some Earth humans on a church summer hike wandered in, said a prayer, and accidentally instantiated the Abrahamic god, who was then the primary antagonist. I am still intrigued by this idea.

Okay, dumb question: how do people learn languages in this setting, if they're never/hardly ever spoken? Just from reading? Wouldn't that make it hard to get to fluency? How do they know how to pronounce things?

Actually, how did language evolve in the first place? (Also: do animals' communicative noises have any effect?)

The fluency threshold is higher than any nonhuman species and was higher than most human communication until some critical threshold in prehistory, when suddenly language Counted and humanity promptly nearly wiped themselves out. This happened probably six or seven times before they got lucky and threaded the needle. How much spoken language you'd be exposed to varies by community; there's pretty much invariably some completely-spent songs and rituals which everyone knows, and you'd sing your children lullabies, you just wouldn't use spoken language for conversation.

I'm guessing based on the fact that the society made it to the Renaissance that written language != spoken language? Or maybe we're early enough that the printing press isn't a thing yet, in which case its introduction might be even more traumatic than it was historically.

...half-remembered anecdote that may be relevant: until relatively recently historically-speaking, almost everyone read to themselves out loud rather than silently. Augustine has an anecdote about being really surprised that one of his teachers *didn't* read out loud to himself. See e.g. this reddit thread for some links. I feel like this could be interestingly relevant here.

Also: Our world didn't hit 2 billion people until the twentieth century; does this mean the world here is sufficiently physically larger than Earth or is magic influential enough to drop the mortality rate by enough? In the latter case the primary reduction in deaths is likely to be infant mortality/deaths in childbirth, and in that case I'd expect societies to be well past the demographic transition, with all that implies societally.

*SQUEE*

Also also: is the magic associated with a word associated with the *meaning* of the word or the *sound* of the word or both? (Sound must have at least *something* to do with it if sign language doesn't trigger the effect.) Do homophones (or, conversely, sufficiently close synonyms) deplete each other? What about different-language homophones? What about linguistic drift? (Do 'Sauron' and 'Thauron' deplete the same power source?) Or regional pronunciation differences? What if I have a lisp?

(Obligatory link to signified and signifier)

Oooh, exciting! Do people in this setting have spoken-language names or just sign ones? If they have spoken language ones, does that have any effect on them, like, if local Feanor's fifth kid is still called some equivalent of 'Little Dad', does that literally make local Curufin more likely to be like their parent? Presuming that babies names are spoken at all, I guess they could just be written down somewhere.

You say that affecting living things takes a lot of power; how does one increase one's magical power in this setting?

What manner of beings are local Melkor and Sauron exactly? Also, does praying to a God that doesn't yet exist instantiate that God? Are there a whole lot of random Gods hanging around from early human religions?

Magic can do substantial handling of infant mortality, though I'm undecided if that's 'that's small enough you can nudge it just with regular spoken words' or 'some of the heavy-duty stuff lying around from the ancient past includes super powerful healing shrines' or what. The society the Fëanorians are from is /at/ the demographic transition - seven surviving kids was typical of their parents' generation, wouldn't be typical in theirs - and I haven't decided about the rest of the world; it's not an Earth but I am reluctant to make it tons bigger than an Earth or anything lest I have to be responsible about things like the geographic differences that'd imply.

Also also: is the magic associated with a word associated with the *meaning* of the word or the *sound* of the word or both? (Sound must have at least *something* to do with it if sign language doesn't trigger the effect.) Do homophones (or, conversely, sufficiently close synonyms) deplete each other? What about different-language homophones? What about linguistic drift? (Do 'Sauron' and 'Thauron' deplete the same power source?) Or regional pronunciation differences? What if I have a lisp?

Magic associated with a word comes from the way a sound is tied to the speaker's understanding of the language; homophones and synonyms don't usually deplete each other but variants do, and 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). Saying something you don't understand won't do it; if you could in fact say aloud a list of homophones without having an opinion about which of the homophones you mean, it wouldn't do anything, but if you said 'rose' and on some level were thinking of the flower or alternately of the past-tense verb, you'd get magic related to that one. Experiments like these tend to kill you pretty young; the Fëanor does them all the time anyway.

Oooh, exciting! Do people in this setting have spoken-language names or just sign ones? If they have spoken language ones, does that have any effect on them, like, if local Feanor's fifth kid is still called some equivalent of 'Little Dad', does that literally make local Curufin more likely to be like their parent? Presuming that babies names are spoken at all, I guess they could just be written down somewhere.

Names are just signed, giving your baby a spoken name is a feature of scary stories in the genre of our world's 'fairy-curse' ones.

You say that affecting living things takes a lot of power; how does one increase one's magical power in this setting?

You can't increase your power except by learning powerful words. Words accumulate power over time very very slowly, and spend half of what they've got available when they're spoken.

What manner of beings are local Melkor and Sauron exactly? Also, does praying to a God that doesn't yet exist instantiate that God? Are there a whole lot of random Gods hanging around from early human religions?

Praying to a god that doesn't yet exist would instantiate that god if your prayer used sufficiently powerful words. There are a whole lot of Weird Magic Residues from early human religions, the sapient ones are the local Maiar/Valar alts.