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Meta-Notes
About the Meta-Notes (a meta-meta-note?!)
In most of the site I have been content to simply describe the various worlds of Romoene, often (though not always) maintaining the fiction of writing from the point of view of a native of one of the worlds, living at a particular point in their history.
At times, though, I've felt that I wanted to say more about the background to certain aspects of Romoene, or the thinking that led me to particular decisions, and that is what this collection of meta-notes is for. Occasionally it just rambles off into some loosely related musings.
Where applicable, there are links to this page from other pages -- they will appear as links in the format [m.1], where the 1 is the number of the note.
[1] The Origins of Medísca
Medísca has its origins in a setting for fantasy RPGs, and hence began with a lot of traditional fantasy RPG clichés, sometimes thinly disguised (the Saeru, for example, are obviously the Medíscan equivalent of elves).
During the course of its development I have found myself torn in several directions. I rather like traditional RPG fantasy settings, and wanted Medísca to be a classic example of one. On the other hand, I have a yen to create something more original, more 'realistic', and some aspects of Medísca have been pulled in that direction.
Recently I decided that the only sensible option was to let Medísca (and indeed the other worlds of Romoene) continue in the way it is currently going, towards a greater level of realism, and eventually start a completely new and separate world for a more straight-forward fantasy setting. This other world is still in the early stages, and won't appear on this web-site for quite a while yet.
[2] The Development of Tonal Languages
For the languages of Medísca I have assumed that they originally used tone as a means of stressing particular words (as with English and othe Indo-European languages), and that this later evolved in some languages into a full tonal system. There is no reason to assume that this is the case with languages in our world -- tones used for lexical purposes are likely to be just as fundamental as tones used for stress or as adjuncts to grammar.
Tones used for grammatical purposes are a feature of English. For example, a statement intended as a question uses a rising tone at the end (often on the last word): "You're going to London?". In Medísca I have imagined this as a starting-point that in some languages developed into a full set of grammatical features.
Just for fun, here is a (loose!) musical rendition of the tones used in two versions of the same sentence in English: