See Challenge # 100.

So Ling... Chinese Kamigawa; Spirits vs non with a different flavour.

Lots of equipment.

Spirits like duality. Let's go with a dual spirit of some kind.

White likes spirits, spirits like white; the white creatures are cats - a mist cat; done.

What the heck, when in doubt - go big. The beginning. The End.

Name from google translate "Begin (the) End" (I tried other formulations, but this seemed shortest and most pronouncable)

But what should it do? ETB/LTB? That's life/death, not beginning end.
How about start/end of turn?

That's tempting - kinda fiddly though - and what should it do? Gain life, lose life? Ouchie, that's just fiddly AND annoying.

Could tap stuff down; that's white. Ok, I kinda like that. And an extra tap/untap isn't toooo powerful, maybe. Ok, it probably is. But what the heck, I've got a named legendary here. And it's vulnerable to any old ping effect.

Better make sure it's not a T1 drop though, just to be safe.

actually the topolect used in So Ling is Cantonese, using Jyutping romanization. So the name should be Hoici Gitcuk. you can use this dictionary to get Jyutping of Chinese characters: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php

Most spirits in the set so far don't have a second type, but that could be pushed in the 2nd or 3rd sets in the block.

....yeah; I pass that name over, as sounding like a cross between coughing blood and being a goblin. But fair point.

true, Cantonese is a harder sounding language, not unlike German and even English. By the same token, it has more flavor and attitude than Mandarin. (Albeit I love playing around with the R sound like northern speakers, yet prefer listening to Taiwan accent over mainland.)

Pinyin resembles too much like Japanese. So another point for Jyutping's distinctness. But now that you mention it, borrowing real languages as a basis for fantasy languages would make them more consistent. e.g. Mandarin=Merfolk, French=Elf, Cantonese=Goblin, German=Vampire, Latin=Human.

This idea of yours amuseum, I rather like it. I feel it's bound to take some people out of the narrative, because they're bound to recognize one of the languages. But all you really need to do is use more obscure sister languages, and everything is cool again. Hearing Elves speak in French would probably drive me a little nuts, since I can kind of sort of comprehend that language when spoken. If they spoke Basque, though, you'd get the same effect as a made up language for me, I'm sure.

But, now that I think of it, maybe it's not so bad? I mean, so the Elves speak French. I'd probably get over it pretty fast...

We'll use these mainly to inspire names and places and tribes, not write complete sentences (unless you're into that kind of thing. Tolkien spent his life in this kind of work.) You would see mostly derivatives. cf. Leonin from Latin and Merfolk from French.

The central idea is the phonology and spelling of that language. French has an embellished spelling style, e.g. 'eau' when most languages just write 'o' or 'ou'. Frequent combinations like L' and D' and 'que' words, etc. make it distinct when spoken and written.