SnepShark

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yrgirlkv
@yrgirlkv

reading earthsea has me thinking about magic based on Old Languages and True Names but also trying to build such things based on like, my own preferences and beliefs so i was working out a setup for this like "oh, what if instead of a single true name you had to just describe relationships between things? and that way, anything could have a dozen true names, it could have any true name, as long as you were accurately capturing its relationship to everything else in the spell or whatever, and you could have dozens of different magic languages and people would have preferences and get into arguments and oh god, oh no, i've invented programming, fuck"


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

"True Name" as reductive shorthand for "Perceiving and Understanding the Deep Truth of Something As It Exists In This Context and Moment In Time", a term for speaking to laypersons. True names almost infinitely long because even a stone or a stalk of wheat are so incredibly complex and unique, so most conjurers limit their utterance to the first few words or phrases simply because otherwise the ritual is gonna take all! God! Damn! Night!!!

In Fallen London, the magic language that allows one to describe and manipulate reality is litterally called "the Correspondence." It has a grammar and syntax and stuff (never precisely described, of course.) That being said, I think it might be a reference to the correspondence theory of truth, as in this language correspond to the state of the world, because the Correspondence can only tell truths.

The thing I love about true names is that if we assume the semantic content is the important part of a name, then over time with language drift the true name as written down somewhere stops being true. All it takes is, say, one Bugs Bunny to redefine what a nimrod is.

So to invoke something by its true name from reading ancient tablets, you'd have to have a really good grasp of ancient pragmatics.