I admit, I'm so far behind that ya'll're over the horizon buuutt...
Vampires would probably agree to a single language, at least in large geographic swathes in Ye Olden Times, for the same reason that there are agreed upon business languages and science terminology in our world: it makes it easier to communicate exactly what you mean to communicate and come to an agreement.
Ironically, French is one of the world's business languages and certain documents and court records are kept in French (with English and possibly Chinese translations - but don't quote me on the Chinese thing) because it's easier to know that This Is The Language That We Use For Business. Also because the French were historically quite powerful and obsessive record keepers at the time this idea started taking root and coming into practice. The guy who takes the (court) notes gets to decide the language that they're kept in.
India may not like most of what the British brought them but they do like the fact that various sects and geographic outliers can communicate with the rest of the country at large. Before the British came, there were hundreds of languages in use and it was rare for anyone to speak their neighbors' languages fluently enough to know exactly what they were agreeing to. (Although there's this interesting phenomenon regarding the on-going development of their English that's being studied at the moment...) Everyone learns English... and not because they want to be customer service reps.
All of that said, however, I don't think French would be the dominant language of anything immortal because French is a badly spoken Latin dialect at best. (So are all of the modern romance languages.) What they would use as the default "business" language would depend on when they decided that they needed such a thing as the "dominant" language varies over time and by region. (For example, all the Latin and Greek in our language. And there are a surprising number of modern words that were derived from Mongolian because of Ghengis Khan... in fact, to this day, language-related variations on "Khan" are both names and surnames in countries that the Mongols captured.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-10-25 07:59 pm (UTC)Vampires would probably agree to a single language, at least in large geographic swathes in Ye Olden Times, for the same reason that there are agreed upon business languages and science terminology in our world: it makes it easier to communicate exactly what you mean to communicate and come to an agreement.
Ironically, French is one of the world's business languages and certain documents and court records are kept in French (with English and possibly Chinese translations - but don't quote me on the Chinese thing) because it's easier to know that This Is The Language That We Use For Business. Also because the French were historically quite powerful and obsessive record keepers at the time this idea started taking root and coming into practice. The guy who takes the (court) notes gets to decide the language that they're kept in.
India may not like most of what the British brought them but they do like the fact that various sects and geographic outliers can communicate with the rest of the country at large. Before the British came, there were hundreds of languages in use and it was rare for anyone to speak their neighbors' languages fluently enough to know exactly what they were agreeing to. (Although there's this interesting phenomenon regarding the on-going development of their English that's being studied at the moment...) Everyone learns English... and not because they want to be customer service reps.
All of that said, however, I don't think French would be the dominant language of anything immortal because French is a badly spoken Latin dialect at best. (So are all of the modern romance languages.) What they would use as the default "business" language would depend on when they decided that they needed such a thing as the "dominant" language varies over time and by region. (For example, all the Latin and Greek in our language. And there are a surprising number of modern words that were derived from Mongolian because of Ghengis Khan... in fact, to this day, language-related variations on "Khan" are both names and surnames in countries that the Mongols captured.)
So, uh, yeah, that's my epistle...