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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • oh, it’s definitely standardized, no doubt. But people are people, and some of them are going to call out as it’s familiar to them, and in some sort of urgent response… you’re not going to get too confused at the German guy reading off grid coordinates as ‘24-Richard Wilhelm Theodor…’ to get to a particular random stretch of the Atlantic. (using the MGRS coordinates. 24RWT)

    but most of my point was that’s not an actual language; you’re still going to have to designate some language as the common language- and get enough understanding to at least be functional in that. it seems logical to just pick one… but, uh… well. humans aren’t very logical.






  • Good god no. Conjugation is bad enough in English. You don’t want know what my latin grammar is like.

    For the record the phonetic alphabet isn’t language and I’m pretty sure there’s slight differences between regions/languages. (Alpha, Able, Apple; for example,)

    It’s just a way to spell out letters for clarity over radio. The idea is to create extra syllables in the letters using “familiar” words so that if static or something comes across, you can piece it together; also, “a” is easily confused for “way” or “say” or “may”, and such.


  • Latin was the market language of Rome, and commanders/generals would have issued orders and received reports written in Latin.

    Most soldiers would have spoken it, including the local auxiliaries that were conscripted. (Or at least a pidgin version of it.)

    Even if the conscripts would speak whatever amongst themselves, they’d have understood Latin. (It’s also very likely that foreigners brought into the province would pickup at least a pidgin version of the local language.)

    To clarify, this would be like the French foreign legion not speaking French. (The do. Maybe not natively, but French language skills are necessary for conscription.)

    The issue at hand is that the EU is not an empire, it’s an economic alliance of sovereign countries each with whatever language they happen to speak. For an empire, it’s easy to dictate things like “Latin is the official language, all business is conducted in Latin.”