Thanks, man. I was waiting for you to show up.

That's the plan. mu-hahaha...

Oh man, you SHOULD play an immortal elf. It can be a 1,000 point edge offset by a 500 point arrogance flaw and a 500 point Ridiculousness flaw.

Hehehe. Stupid elves...

Gee...and I've just been defaulting to pig Latin with an upper-crust British accent. Boy, is my face red.

Well, if you want to nit-pick, I'll go you one better.

In fact, IEs would not speak Sperethiel as their native language. Its a variant of what ever they spoke in Ed.

As for native speakers, I seem to remember a few Canon references to elves only speaking "The Voice"--I think they were examples in earlier BBBs and from the original Sprawl Sites. So there is a precedent for Sperethiel speaking elves.

Besides all that, maybe the character I have in mind simply speaks Sperethiel as his primary language but speaks one or more others as well--like in Europe. Since he speaks Sperethiel the most, it would affect his speech patterns. Kinda like if you hang out down south (in the US) long enough, you pick up a bit of a drawl. Amongst other things...

Odd. I use Pig Latin in a really bad Norweigan accent for the Ork (Trog) tongue. Go figure.

Demosthenes, I'm going to assume you come from the standardized connaucht accent.
I agree that sperethiel matches up much better with tolkiens' elvish than any of the gaelic dialects I've seen.
Some of the dialects are so close to dead though that I can't say with any certainty. Then you have the old timers from Cork who speak in a totally different manner(my grans, deceased).

Well, my "native" dialect is Conamara Irish, but I'm very familiar with Donegal/Northern Irish, and you can't deal with Gaelic language media without running into the Munster dialect all the time.

The differences in pronunciation and language are enough that it can be hard to understand someone with a really broad dialect, but the fundamental rules for pronouncing the kinds of sounds that turn up in Sperethiel words all the time are essentially the same.
Hence, my comment on Sperethiel not having much to do with Irish/Gaelic pronunciation.
You could try Cornish, but if you're going that far afield, you might as well have the Elves speak Basque (what a cool idea...)

[end of thread derailment and bumping]
My apologies to whoever had to wade through my (none too-thorough) linguistic ranting.

Definately. That's why there's talk in the TT book about the inner council speaking a language that sounds kinda like Sperethiel, but which Sperethiel speakers can't understand. Old Sperethiel or whatever you want to call it. Modern Sperethiel is probably some descendant of that...? Presumeably. Or one could be Theran (which, if I remember my ED, was related to Elvish) and the other could be actual Elvish. Who knows?

As for cannon refrences to Sperethiel-only speakers, I don't remember and my Sprawl Sites (and 1st and 2nd eds) is buried under a ton of rpg books and I'm too lazy to go dig any of them out and look. Again, it's possible, just not all that likely to be common. You'd have to have been born after Sperethiel was made available to learn as a language (who actually "re-introduced" Sperethiel? I don't remember anything about that in TT or TnO or anything else. And when? Anybody know?) and you'd have to have been in a place where it was used around you constantly as a child (if you want to learn it as a native speaker). So, probably some nationalist noble's kid in TT or TnO? And I'm sure you'd probably speak some other langauge. I mean, what percentage of the world speaks Sperethiel? You'd definately learn something else, I have no doubt.

As for the pronounciation of Sperethiel influencing your pronounciation of other languages: I suppose it's possible. It just really depends on where Sperethiel came from and what kind of accent was introduced with it. Did the IEs reintroduce it and, therefore, reintroduce its "native" accent, or...?

Anyway, you should do whatever you want with your character. I'm getting a degree that involves a hefty dose of linguistics so I just like to think about these kinds of things, just because.

@ Demosthenes and Arz: Definately not anything like any of the Celtic languages, as far as I know any of them, either. But the Basque connection would be kinda cool... I mean, no one knows what Basque is related to and all that...

Also, since Tolkien took a lot of his Elvish grammar from Finnish, then would it make more sense to make Elvish be pronounced like some mutant Finnish dialect? Any Finns out there - would Elvish work at all with Finnish pronounciation?

BTW - Demosthenes: My Irish is a bit rusty, but does your .sig say what I think it says? (Not any sick ar$e like your own sick ar$e?)

Tolkien based his two Elven dialects, Quenyan and Sindarin, on Old Icelandic. If I remember correctly, it hasn't been spoken in quite some time.

Well, that's more or less so. But there's also the fact that some languages simply don't employ certain sounds at all, so their speakers don't learn to manipulate their lips/tongue etc to form those sounds. My wife is Italian and speaks perfect English (doing post-doctoral research on 19thC Irish periodicals it's kind of necessary), and has been taught proper pronunciation. She still can't quite manage certain uses of "th" or "h".

My understanding of Japanese problems with "R" and "L" sounds is that, since their language doesn't distinguish between those sounds, unless they are exposed to other languages which do, many Japanese actually cannot distinguish between the two sounds at all because they lack the mental equipment to do so. Unfortunately, I can't recall where I read that particular gem, and I suspect it's a gross oversimplification. It's been a long time since I dug out my linguistics textbooks.

To get back on track:

Which is where we descend into all kinds of fun, because the Sperethiel precursor (that is to say, the language from which modern Sperethiel originates) is...Sperethiel, in Earthdawn...though no doubt there are differences between the two languages.
Given how widespread, geographically and culturally, Sperethiel was in the Earthdawn era (and I'd ask AH to check me on this as my ED knowledge is sketchy at best), should it not have left some trace upon other languages?

Of course it's possible that it did...it just depends on fun things like when the Indo-European migrations began.
If the IE (Indo-European, or aryan if you prefer a more loaded word...) migration and linguistic take over of Europe/the Mediterranean took place after the ED era, then it's possible that Sperethiel was one of those pre-Indo-European languages which just died out, leaving tiny little clues (such as the word "thalassa" in Greek, which is not of IE origin AFAIK).

Or the Sperethiel precursor could always be Etruscan...
I like this idea, because no one has the least idea what Etruscan was like, so a GM can pull ideas out of his a$$ all day and not have to worry about where they fit in with the real world...
Which is handy, given how much of a spanner the existence of Sperethiel must throw in the works of SR-era academics.

I can just see the great linguists of the 2060s embroiled in huge arguments and debates about synthetic languages, loan-words, traces of sperethiel-precursors in non IE (and how's that for irony) languages, and pet theories revolving around any given dead language that just happens to match a given academic's prejudices.
Matrix runs to screw people over before they publish...

I'll stop now before I descend even further into ridiculousness.

@ Demosthenes: This is true. But all of this happens at a young age. While the debate is still going on, its pretty well accepted that unless you learn pronounciation of a language at a young age (say, before you're done with puberty in your late teens or so) the chances of you sounding like a native speaker are pretty small. Some people can do it, but they're sort of the Olympic champions of pronounciation. Its possible, but rare. You can still speak the language perfectly fluently, like your wife speaks English, but little differences in pronounciation will give you away as a non-native speaker.

And yes, if your native language(s) don't have a particular sound, its very, very difficult for you to hear it. Before your 1st b-day (or so), after you've been hearing your native language(s) spoken around you for a while, your brain is apparently wired up to distinguish between certain sounds and regard other distinctions as noise. There was an experiment where it was shown that American babies younger than 9 months (I think) could distinguish differences in pronounciation that were found in Czech, but not in English. After about 9 months, they couldn't do it anymore. I forget the reference, but I did some research on this last year.

So anyway, after that you could learn to distinguish these sounds (a Japanese person can be taught to distinguish R and L, for example) but it's a lot harder. It takes a good bit of practice, as lots of ESL/EFL students will tell you.

So how all this relates to Sperethiel is (to get back on topic) that unless you learned Sperethiel as a young child, most of these niceties of pronounciation are going to be lost on most learners. And this bastardized version would get passed down, unless corrected. Now, I could see (at least in the Tirs) a wide-spread effort to fight this - especially since the actual percentage of Sperethiel- speakers is pretty low, if I remember correctly.

As for Sperethiel "purity" - what do you think? Is there an Academie Francaise (sp) of Sperethiel? And who controls which Tir's version of Sperethiel is the "standard" one? There may not be much difference yet, but some of those Elves are long-lived enough to be planning for when there will be... Linguistic terrorism - the new category of Shadowrun

Exactly my point - English speakers who don't put in ten years into the study of a language, learn pronounciation from native-speakers, and spend time in a specific dialect region can't do that. In the sports world, that's what Olympians do: practice like crazy for a lot of years. You may now officially consider youself an Olympic-class German speaker, though your Italian is apparently only an Olympic alternate...
BTW, cool run idea!

@ AH: Thanks for the info. My ED is pretty rusty. You know, I always wondered if the different IEs had different accents. We don't really know if they were all (or even mostly) from the same area, do we? Hell, some could even be from the Second world, for all we know.

@ everybody: One of the things I've always thought would be kind of cool, is if at least one of the other racial languages got started again. I mean, in Dunkie's will some Robert Page guy got left an "ancient document" about Orcish. The seeds are there... I guess when FASA decided to minimize the ED-SR crossover stuff, they axed Orcish. Pretty realistically, too - its damn hard to ressurect a langauge. Though not impossible - Israel did it. Why not the orcs?

That was more or less what I had in mind. The other aspect to bear in mind as regards Tir Tairngire (more so than Tir na nOg, which seems likely to retain an Irish-to-midatlantic type accent) is that many of its inhabitants are Elves of many different origins and backgrounds...which in turn would have an influence upon the development of the local accent, especially if people started learning Sperethiel in school, or simply hearing a lot of it.
It'd still take ages to become distinctive...unless, as Prospero says, someone is deliberately speeding things up...

Me too. It's Etruscan dammit.

Thank you!
Glad you like the idea. Since it'll be at least a month before my L5R game is wrapped, any feedback from anyone who wants to steal it and use it is more than welcome...

As to resurrecting the Orkish language (I guess FASA just didn't like Orc with a "c"), I think that in itself could lead to all kinds of interesting runs...

The Orks don't have to resurrect a language, they merely have to coopt one. My 'Ork' rigger, Fiver, firmly believes that the ancient Orkish language was channeled in the 1980's by Marc Okrand. Because of this, Fiver has learned and made sure his numerous children are all taught the Klingon language.