Most notable thing I found in this chapter was how language was painted to be indistinguishable from magic because it’s a sophisticated technology. This immediatly made me think that lexicographers were like magicians with incredible power. And that led me to believe that I could roleplay as a Lexicographer if I ever play a Dungeons & Dragons game. No, seriously. D&D is a role-playing game that you play with friends. One of you is the master that decides how the overall game goes, and the others are characters living in the game-universe with different backstories. A typical run can take months, or even years to complete. It has many classes you can choose to role-play as: the Cleric (healer), The Druid (can talk to animals and trees), The Paladin (holy warrior that took an oath), Rogue (sneaky puzzle-solver), etc. These classes are distinguished from each other with their roles, key abilities, and playstyles; and they all contribute to the run with their individual decisions.
So, Lexicographer the class would have:
- The role of building the Earth by distinguishing between definitions.
- Key abilities as strong sensitivity for cultural differences and strong adaptation skills.
- A playstyle that consists of scholarly magic usage, a character that mediates between the built Earth and the lived
Let Me Explain
The chapter initially notes that words seem like they can exist in a vacuum – having meanings on their own. However, it is then concluded to be not true. I agree that words have meanings that are constructed with context. This is why I think D&D is the perfect example for building a view on languages.
From my perspective, languages are like games that you and people around you make the rules of, just like D&D. Altough both languages and D&D have certain methods that are built upon, they don’t have definite rules. As the chapter suggests, culture is a big contributing factor to the fluid nature of rule-making when it comes to languages. Think about the example of the Druid class. They have an ability to talk to dogs. Altough they usually don’t know what the dog means, they imagine it and make it fit to the story. Just like the example in the chapter, the meaning of the sounds the dog makes can change culture-to-culture. This tells me that our real-world definitions are imagined to be useful for the story we are playing in real life. I think this view also parallels with the chapter noting how words reflect cultural details like history, or social awareness.
Where The Class of Lexicographer comes into play is linguistic labor. According to the chapter, an individual doesn’t need to know the biology of a duck in detail to use the word “duck”. However, everything we know about “ducks” is embedded in the word. So it is clear that the meaning of “duck” is not just the simple average of meanings it has in the general population (or your D&D party). The meaning is figured by the linguistic experts: what I call the class of Lexicographer. I think the role of figuring definitions for your D&D party would definitely contribute to the depth of the game, just like how linguistic experts do. I find the idea especially intriguing because a dictionary for me is one of the best ways to keep record of the meanings we have – as Turkish individuals or as Human species. Because as the chapter mentioned, meanings hold cultural value, so it is important to keep their records and not lose them.
I also think the Lexicographer should have a strong sensitivity for cultural differences, adaptation skills, and a motivation for mediatorship. Here’s why: the Turkish dictionary has countless words that I don’t know the meaning of. I think that’s a great thing! Some words hold meanings for specific groups – could be technicians, or subcultures. If linguistic experts didn’t have a sensitivity for cultural differences, those words might have been lost. This could play as the inside jokes category in the D&D dictionary in my opinion. What words a conversation between a Paladin and a Barbarian (both warriors) can include may not be found in a conversation between a Cleric and a Druid (both healers). Adding to that, the Lexicographer also should have strong adaptation ability. Because the meanings of words can change through time and new words could be invented, a linguistic expert should be able to adapt to the party language – as it happens. Finally, the playstyle includes a scholarly magic usage (self-explanatory), and a character mediating between the built Earth (with all meanings they figured) and the lived Earth (with meanings the party uses in general). Again, I think this is important for keeping record of the cultural values and meanings.
Conclusion
All in all, D&D is a fantasy role-playing game that imitates real-life. Just like we have linguistic labor experts in real life, I think we should have them in D&D too. Because overall, I think the linguistic labor makes life more fun and meaningful, like a D&D game.
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