oh my god yes im glad you mentioned how weird it is that everyone speaks english! like, Where Is Mev From? sure, im shite at dates, but if mev made everyone speak english despite being "irish" he was probably from an area in ireland that, at least when he was growing up, had a primarily english/plantation-descendant population? which, if it was in dublin and he was rich, would actually make a lot of sense. huh. maybe?
I don’t really know that much about Ireland/Irish history so correct me if I’m wrong, but while English is the ordinary language, I think Irish is still the administrative language, so all the state servants still have to be able to speak, read and write Irish to this day. Apparently in some enclaves they even still use Irish as the ordinary language.
According to Wikipedia:
“English was brought to Ireland as a result of the Norman invasion of Ireland [1169–1175] of the late 12th century. Initially, it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with mostly Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country. By the Tudor period [1485 - 1603 ], Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory lost to the invaders: even in the Pale, "all the common folk… for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit, and of Irish language" [...] However, the Tudor conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th century led to a second wave of immigration by English-speakers, the suppression and decline of the status of the Irish language, and marked a forced decrease in the use of Irish. By the mid-19th century, English was the majority language spoken in the country.”.
According to the Skulpedia the Great Mage War was around 1700's - 1930's.
So he would have needed to grow up in the Pale/near Dublin (which I think is likely bc he made Dublin his home in the Leibniz Dimension) between the late 12th and the 15th century or between the 16th and 18th century putting his age at around 600/700 years at the oldest and 400/500 years at the youngest bc Skul was 433 in the first book and I doubt that Mev is younger than him).
Even so, Irish should at least be Mevolent’s second language given how common it was until the mid-19th century and how it is still the administrativ language at this point in time. And regardless if Mevolent himself was rich/part of the aristocracy, as an student of the Unnamed I would expect him to get higher education which I think would include learning Latin (and maybe Greek).
I’ve reread the part bc maybe I misremembered and it was ‘all languages Mevolent spoke’ as in plural. But nope, it’s singular.
It bothers me so much tho bc it’s such a cartoonishly evil and narrow-minded thing to do. It’s maybe something Landy would do if he were ever to become the tyrant ruling the world, but Mevolent has been shown as highly intelligent and I just don’t view that as something an intelligent person would do, regardless if evil or good.
Maybe the Unnamed was English and Mev was the son of a powerful Irish family and the Unnamed took the first borns of all the ruling mage families he conquered with him back to England and made them his students/loyal to him instead of loyal to their own families, which of course would include cutting their ties to their roots? So Mev was forbidden from speaking Irish and forgot it eventually. Tho I think that is highly unlikely considering, unless stated otherwise, all of Landy’s important character’s are usually Irish, plus, Mev is stubborn, he would have definitely made an effort to relearn Irish after killing the Unnamed, even if it’s out pure spite.
But even the Leibniz Dimension itself makes it weird that Mev forbid all languages apart from English. ‘Tahil Na Sin’ and ‘Tahil Na Kurge’ are not English names. I think it’s pretty obvious that ‘tahil na’ means ‘city of’ and I was wondering if that might be Irish/Gaelic. But in Gaelic that would be ‘baile na’, meaning ‘place of’. I mean, the ‘na’ part is correct at least. And the Irish word for city is ‘cathair’ or ‘cathrach’. I tried to look up what ‘tahil’ means/what language it is but the only result I’ve got is that it means ‘grain’ in Turkish, aaaand that doesn’t seem right given the context. My best guess is that the language used to name the mage cities is a fantasy language based on on Gaelic? Maybe?
I mean ‘old (magic) languages’, have been mentioned in SoW.
Which btw also directly contradicts there only being one official language as there are obviously still other languages in use if you even use them to name cities.
TL;DR: Mevolent having banned all languages apart from English make no sense, not logically, not historically and not even in-vers.
