Old Tongue Wiki:Maximizing Richness

Core Project Philosophy: Maximize Richness

This project exists as a labor of love for the stories that are the Wheel of Time. From the books to the show, OldTongue.info loves the Wheel of Time world. Thus, we make no distinction in canonicity between the books or the show. Any canon appearance of a word, even if just in a song lyric, is treated as "full" canon.

Furthermore, this project exists to make the Old Tongue into something more than just a corpus of a few hundred words and some vague grammar that got used for flavor in a canceled show and finished book series. Our purpose is to continue the work that fans throughout the years and Naomi Joy Todd in the TV series started: treating it like a serious language and trying to extend and expand it.

The guiding principles of doing this are to treat the language like something touched by humans, used by humans, and changed by humans. Consistency is important, but even more important than pure consistency is rich consistency. Some humans who used the Old Tongue would have expanded it one way, while others expanded it another. As those people talked among one another and reconciled their variants and dialects into the larger whole, the language would be shaped by a rich consistency and inconsistency that is characteristic of all human languages. We extrapolate and interpolate freely, to increase the amount of Old Tongue we have, so that fans can learn this language as a language and not just a small vocabulary project.

We make clear where the authors are creatively inserting new words, meaning, or grammar, versus what comes from the canon. However, we make no attempt to draw sharp lines around canon content as inherently purer or "truer" Old Tongue. We recognize that such thinking has never been an accurate or reasonable way to look at human language, and our linguistic approach reflects that understanding.