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Okay so I've been wondering and I can't get a straight answer from anywhere:

In 40k fluff it says that the main language used by imperials is gothic, there are three versions that I know of:

1. Low gothic: spoken by most in the galaxy

2. High gothic: spoken by important people (i.e. ecclesiarchs, inquisitors, planetary governors, etc.)

3. Proto gothic: Apparently spoken before modern gothic

Apparently by the books I have read is that low gothic is basically English, high gothic is basically Latin and proto gothic is.........something in between

So whats the deal? are the languages like they put them in the books and novels, or is their some other sort of explanation?

I'm especially interested in proto gothic since the only place I have seen that in real use is in Gaunt's Ghosts. Are these languages written down somewhere where people can use them to translate or something?

I wouldn't worry too much. Like a lot of fluff it doesn't make proper sense when examined in detail.

Historically, Gothic was a language in its own right, used by the Goths, and unrelated to Latin or Greek.

The Gothic used in 40K for words like "Administratorum" is a mash-up of bits of relevant Latin and ancient Greek, slightly adjusted.

AFAIK there aren't any organised references to any of the 40K languages because there are only a few dozen or so words existing that GW have invented.

From a practical viewpoint, Latin predated English as a historical language. Modern English owes much more to early Germanic languages than to Latin, though a lot of words were borrowed in from French, which derives from Latin.

Modern English also uses loan words from Japanese, Hindi, Arabic and Nahuatl, among others, so it's not like it is a very pure language.

On the whole it is hardly likely that after 38,000 years, either English or Latin would still exist in anything like their current forms.

High Gothic is the offcial language of the Imperium and Low Gothic is the common language; we know there are local languages as well, but Low Gothic allows most people to communicate with any person from any other world reasonably well, it could even be some kind of Esperanto.

Low Gothic is represented as English (in those publications printed in English but you probably get what I mean) and High Gothic is represented by Latin, or rather Dog Latin.

However both Low and High Gothic are not English or Latin, they are simply represented as those languages because the historical significance of them should be obvious to us and so we can infer that, just as English is commonly used language today, and Latin is the language used for law and in earlier periods as the official language of governments then that is the same case in the Imperium with Low and High Gothic.

In the Gaunts Ghosts books, proto-gothic (spoken by a group of isolationists left over from the days pre-imperium) looked more like middle English than anything else.

And there are of course local languages spoken without reference to (or so far evolved from) low/high gothic that they fall outside the language spectrum of the Imperium, perhaps only sharing a handful of words if that.

SilverMK2 wrote:In the Gaunts Ghosts books, proto-gothic (spoken by a group of isolationists left over from the days pre-imperium) looked more like middle English than anything else.

Thanks for that, I looked it up, seems Abnett got his inspiration for proto gothic from middle english.

That brings up another question, in the same book, followers of Chaos have their own language as well, the most notable three words from it are "Voi shet magir!" where do you think that language came from?

Sounds a bit like Konkani but that's purely speculative.

WARORK93 wrote:

SilverMK2 wrote:In the Gaunts Ghosts books, proto-gothic (spoken by a group of isolationists left over from the days pre-imperium) looked more like middle English than anything else.

Thanks for that, I looked it up, seems Abnett got his inspiration for proto gothic from middle english.

That brings up another question, in the same book, followers of Chaos have their own language as well, the most notable three words from it are "Voi shet magir!" where do you think that language came from?

That sounds oddly reminiscent of "No Sherlock"

The meaning of Voi Shet is closer to 'who are you'? than anything else it would seem.