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on the one hand: very cool. feels very fantasy. feels like they have it together more than we do. you want to talk to someone from another place? cool we all know Common. great job all around
on the other hand: it can't always have been named Common. at some point it was English and all the people who spoke English just up and decided you know what we're gonna rename English to Common and everyone else can suck it
this implies the existence of many universes where the aspiration fails, and Common is only spoken in like, southeastern wales
I figure the only way you can honestly name it like that is if it’s a conlang built for trade or whatever
It would be fun (well, "fun") to enforce Common being a rudimentary conlang. Simple transactions are fine, but comprehension of artistic expression is penalized and comprehension of technical topics is impossible if you and your interlocutor don't share a "real" language. Or, alternatively, conversations with NPCs undertaken when Common is the only shared language are limited to three-word sentences with no words longer than two syllables.
As a corollary, Characters who speak only Common are reduced to semi-coherent gremlins who can only talk TV.
naming a fictional language common but less than 30% of the global population speaks it
Also - it's unrealistic. At many times in history there have been common languages - Roman Latin, Aramaic, Persian, Ecclesiastical Latin, French, English. But at no point were any of them actually called "Common". In some sense - the very act of having to name it "Common" means that it isn't common. Because if it were common you wouldn't even need to name it - you'd just start speaking it. The current actual worldwide common language is the tongue they speak in Hollywood, and that doesn't have a name even to those who speak it.
Something that always makes me laugh is that the actual phrase we have that means "common language" is "lingua franca" which is funny because although it literally means "a French language", the actual language that the phrase "lingua franca" is in is... er... Latin! Oxymorons are fun.
Thinking about it, if you don't want to say "English", I would honestly say "Latin". Since you're clearly not writing Latin, I think everybody would understand that what you mean is... "common".
maybe Common is just the nearest english translation for the name of their language, which has similarly bizarre roots
If the universal translator were any good it would change it to "how triangles talk." That is literally what "English" means...
Addendum - the real origin of "Angles" is fundamentally unknowable. But by far the funniest explanation is because they come from the Land of Tri-Angle. So I'm sticking with it.
The general phrase ‘lingua franca’ started life as the name of a specific thing, the Lingua Franca, which was ‘the language of the Franks’ because in some parts of the Mediterranean everyone from NW Europe is a Frank. (With apologies if you already knew this and were skipping it to save space. I think it’s interesting enough to append.)
I always assume that if it's called "common" or "basic" or whatever that's just a stand-in for the audience to understand it is the "common language".
like maybe this is weird but in D&D or whatever I didn't think they were literally speaking English, they were speaking "Common", and we (at the table) were speaking English because that is our equivalent of "Common" (it's our common language, at the table).
maybe the word for that language came to mean 'common' in that setting. like if we said "the most english element in the universe is hydrogen"
or maybe it's actually Cómon, the language of the Cómo people, or something like that, and just happens to sound like "common".
It would kinda make sense if it were a creole made from the most common languages in the region that ended up becoming more popular than the original languages.
It's weird that I've only seen one fantasy setting make the joke of "common" being spoken almost purely by the citizens of one empire in the setting, but I guess it's just one of those weird kinda-ideologically-sketchy D&D-isms that has spread throughout all fantasy writing at this point
I hate it both because it's lazy worldbuilding and because it tends to come packaged with the idea that "Orc", "Hobgoblin" and "Troll" are languages, which is offensive.
I have a setting with one language (at least presently) and... well they don't have a name for it then. So what happens when due to Plot Stuff a person from another world turns up? Speaking a different language? The papers are reporting of a "man speaking nonsense like a newborn baby".
