this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
94 points (99.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

44868 readers
783 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Apologies if this is not the correct community for this question, happy to post elsewhere if that is the case.

In English, it feels common place for fantasy novels to use Latin inspired words for their spells or magic languages - unfortunately Harry Potter is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are more! Sci-fi can also fall into this 'trope' using Latin themed titles or names - such as "Augustus", "Primus", military titles, names etc.

Is this common for other languages in Europe to pull from Latin for their fantasy/sci-fi books? Do novels in the eastern hemisphere pull from dead/uncommonly spoken/ritualistic languages for this purpose? Does one languages pull straight from other living languages?

Is Sanskrit used in South-Eastern Asia? Are there extinct Chinese dialects that live on in the fantasy/sci-fi genres? Do novels written in an Arabic language use a dead sister language from the Arabic continuum? Do books in South American pull from the wealth of languages spoken before European colonization? Do languages with multiple alphabets (looking at you Japanese, but would love to learn about other languages with multiple alphabets) use only a specific alphabet for magic spells? Is Swahili used for magic words in Somalian media?

I'm not looking for answers on these questions explicitly (not that they wouldn't be appreciated), just giving examples of the theme.

A notable (English) exception I recently read - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - which uses names from the native language(s?) of the Americas, primarily Aztec if I'm remembering correctly.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago

Anime and japanese (and chinese?) culture often uses German or French imagery or words in ways that either lack some context and sometimes it's complete gibberish. The "Frieren" anime uses German words for names that would not be names in German. (Frieren is a verb means, "being cold", but actually not the kind of emotionally cold that the character Frieren is either, it just means being physically cold).

The use of latin is actually deeper rooted in mysticism and religion. Nobody really used it as a spoken language after the fall of the roman empire, but the chatholic church still used it it's ritualistic language until the bible was translated to German by Martin Luther. That's not the only case of that happening either, if you look into the sumerian and related languages, they shared an alphabet, but the actual grammar and pronunciation and use shifted and it evolved in a way that the older language grew to be exclusive for religious rituals, while the more common language was a different one.

Another example that might have slipped your attention is mathematic's use of Greek symbols. We don't speak Greek. We don't have those symbols readily available on keyboards or anything.

Programming languages of course. They're basically exclusively in English. Some of the concepts in programming are actually cumbersome to translate and make the most sense if you have an understanding of English.