First, I’d like to thank you for your incredible Wheel of Time series. It’s given me incredible reading enjoyment as well as given me the opportunity to build Wheel of Time areas on an online internet game, a MUD [Multiple User Domain]. My question is when was the transition period between the Old Tongue and the new tongue? I assumed it was after the Breaking, but many of Mat’s memories still have the Old Tongue in them, and they were long after. When was the change, and what caused it?
I have gone into this in some depth in other places, but basically after the Breaking, the primary language was still what is called the Old Tongue. In the period between the Breaking and the Trolloc Wars, what would become the language spoken today began to develop as a common or vulgar tongue. During the period between the Trolloc Wars and the War of the Hundred Years, that vulgar tongue supplanted the Old Tongue as the usual or everyday mode of speech, and the Old Tongue regressed to being more and more something of scholars. At the time of Artur Hawkwing, anyone who was educated, whether noble or commoner, could speak and write the Old Tongue, but in everyday life, most people used something very much like what is spoken today. And it was the simple swamp.
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