Aright I have a question. In the Theban tribunal mages there use Ancient Greek as the language of power. Are there any other launguages you can use to do this? For example if I wanted to create a Bjornaer who used Gothic as a language of power what are the rules for doing it or are there any virtues I could find that could allow me to do this.
Thanks for your time.
Not 100% sure what you mean by language of power, just the language of magic/spell casting? (Read Sundered Eagle long long ago) .
The Hibernian Tribunal book has some magi who use old Irish for their magic. And I think the Hermetic Basque and Hermetic Sahirs might get to use their languages. This is typically captured as Exotic Casting (Minor Hermetic).
In the Theban case, it seems like they mainly be Bilingual for magic, meaning they read both, but chose one language for their laboratory texts. They would need to have sufficiently high Language Ability (1 or 4?) in both to be effective. But there might be a case that a Magi only has one language high enough and uses that one (the rules as written require hermetic magi to have Latin 1 of course). This is probably seen in the Theban Tribunal with some magi being Greek only in defiance of the latin speakers, but optionally your Gothic Language caster might only be able to develop their own spells in Gothic, and not use any of the books of the Order.
Generally, the language should be a Dead Language (Latin, Ancient Greek), but not sure that is required.
The description then goes on to show that it's relatively easy to make this breakthrough (if the hermetic world would even call it a breakthrough). The Sundered Eagle (also curiously on page 29) notes that the magi of the Theban Tribunal used this process to adapt Hermetic Magic into the Greek language immediately before the Sundering of Tremere.
So, you could use another language, but you'd have to either:
(1) accept the -10 to CT for effectively not using your voice; or
(2) make a simple breakthrough to use another language.
I'm unaware of any other official language that's been so adapted. But I'll admit that I may have missed something. My understanding is that the official hermetic language of Hibernia is Latin, though many people speak Gaeilc.
Been reading Hibernia, and pretty sure some of the covenants are using Irish as part of some larger conflict with the rest of the Order. It might be just one or two though. Have to update with a quote later, or correct myself!
I shouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Hibernia is not one of the tribunals that I know particularly well, I did a quick search through the book and didn't find anything> But I would't be surprised if I missed a reference.
There's a magus, Palatus of Bonisagus at Cliffheart, who's trying to research a way to cast spells in Irish (page 84 of The Contested Isle), but he hasn't got there yet.