#but i cant imagine living centuries and slowly having to watch as your language goes extinct and knowing you cant stop it.

[eirxair]

Merlin Thoughts

Okay so bear with me here for a moment.

So you know how King Arthur is said to have lived during the 5-6th century? Well during that time its most likely he would've spoken this language called Brytthonic (or however you spell it. its a dead language that im pretty sure Welsh comes from)

But anyway, this language is like completely dead now and like super different from modern English. Which brings me into my initial thought.

So, after Arthur's death Merlin obviously lives for centuries upon centuries afterwards. Which means that Merlin would not only have to live without Arthur, Merlin would not only have to outlive everyone he knows and loves, but Merlin will also have to outlive his own language.

Maybe its a subtle change at first, slang changes as it does every generation, slowly but surely sentence structures change, new invaders and travellers alike bring about exposure to other languages, which affects the vocabulary, the sentence structure, the spelling, the pronunciation.

Merlin has to live day by day watching helplessly as time gives his native language a slow and painful death.

And maybe Merlin forgets how to speak it, he has no one to speak it with, so eventually he grows used to not speaking it, only to realise one day maybe centuries later that the language he was fluent in, the language he grew up with is no longer on the tip of his tongue.

Maybe he can only remember certain words or phonetics, their meanings confused by the ticking passage of time. And perhaps Merlin breaks down sobbing in agony because his language, the last thing that connected him to Arthur and his past, feels foreign to him now.

But it gets worse; Merlin knows that Arthur will rise from the lake one day, and he has to live with that knowledge knowing that when he does, they won't be able to understand each other.