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Old 02-13-2016, 01:21 PM   #21
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I think it can fairly be said that absent magic or superpowers or the like, if you run into a new language, you can learn it from living speakers, or you can learn it from a bilingual in a language you know, or you can never learn it. An exception might be made for languages that are related to languages you know, where you might guess at meanings; but absent common roots, there's just no way to figure out meanings.
The Tarzan method is right out?
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Old 02-13-2016, 01:37 PM   #22
johndallman
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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... I thought the reason the Rosetta Stone helped so much was because of the fact that it had the same message repeated in Heiroglyphs, a different Egyptian script, and most importantly, Ancient Greek. You seem somewhat knowledgeable about this so sorry if I overestimate the value, but having something that basically says, "if you solve this puzzle, you will get this answer" sounds like a pretty big bonus to skill... though even with a huge bonus to skill, it was still probably a task on the order of a -15 to -10ish like you say.
Ah, now I'm with you. The Rosetta Stone made the job possible at all. Without it, there was no way to get started on any sound basis: there had ben a long history of claimed decipherments. Even with it, there were several important steps before any reading was possible, and it look longer to get fluent. The Wikipedia article on the Stone has a lot more detail.

I used this kind of idea for a plot line in Infinite Cabal. Annio da Viterbo was a fifteenth-century monk, scholar and fraud who claimed to be able to read Etruscan. An alternate-history version of him, hearing of some fellow-cabalists who had become experts in alternate ancient Romes, commissioned them to find him a Rome where he could learn the language.
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Old 02-13-2016, 01:46 PM   #23
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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...decoding a dead language in a vacuum without a side by side existing translation?
Is simply, in the real world, not possible.


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Or there's the infamous Voynich Manuscript, whose language is still untranslated.
Possibly because it's nonsense invented to be an amusing diversion by someone who was both far too intelligent and crazy for his own good.


In 3e when Linguistics added to Language skills it served some level of practical purpose. Now it's at best a bit of an anthropological forensic skill and at worst mostly useless. Though I like the use it was put to by Edges' group.
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Old 02-13-2016, 01:49 PM   #24
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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aided by the Rosetta stone of the periodic table (lifted from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky).
Hey, credit where it's due. That plot element was H. Beam Piper's 40 years before Vinge used it.

Starting with a small but not trivial bilingual - a couple hundred words might be enough distributed over a large enough meaning space - and several non-bilingual books, I think a research team could hope to succeed in a year, and a lone student wouldn't need an entire lifetime.

Since the central method is guess the meaning of unknown words based on the context of the ones you do know, then check to see if those guesses make sense everywhere else, it certainly speeds the process enormously if you know even a fairly distantly related language - it constrains your guesses - but isn't necessary as long as you have that large enough starting bilingual.

If you don't, then yeah knowing something related at least means there's a chance (you can get your starting bilingual by guessing too with some hope your guesses are correct enough to make progress), but it will be much slower - every time you become convinced one of your core guesses was wrong, it undermines your confidence in all the words you thought you had figured out from contexts including it. That's the sort of situation those decades long community projects like Hieroglyphic or Mayan come from.

If you have neither a bilingual or a related language, I'm inclined to say it's hopeless, but maybe not *quite* if you have a large enough corpus. Mostly for still undeciphered languages, we don't.
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Old 02-13-2016, 01:58 PM   #25
johndallman
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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Possibly because it's nonsense invented to be an amusing diversion by someone who was both far too intelligent and crazy for his own good.
You got the quoting confused: that was Daigoro, not me.
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Hey, credit where it's due. That plot element was H. Beam Piper's 40 years before Vinge used it.
Fair enough. I've never been able to get on with Piper's writing and thus met it in Vinge.
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Old 02-13-2016, 02:18 PM   #26
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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Hey, credit where it's due. That plot element was H. Beam Piper's 40 years before Vinge used it.
I came up with that independently in the mid 1990s, when writing a story about first alien contact (back then I know nothing of Vince except what I had read in "True Names"). Using the Periodic Table seemed like a super obvious "common ground" to establish, to me.

Even if aliens wouldn't arrange the elements the same way, our arrangement would make some degree of sense to them, and their arrangement would make some degree of sense to us.
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Old 02-13-2016, 02:29 PM   #27
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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Fair enough. I've never been able to get on with Piper's writing and thus met it in Vinge.
I like Piper, but I'll confess he's a writer in the old style of SF - short and focused more on the intellectual game than characterization or literary flourish. A lot of good writers of the past seem to be disappearing from the awareness of SF readers, I think mostly because of the "short" part of the older style. Their peers who wrote not so dissimilar stories but in novel lengths - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein - seem to be holding up OK.

There are actually quite a lot of linguistics related SF plots that can inspire game uses of the skill - Jack Vance, Samuel Delany and L. Sprague de Camp all seem rather fond of them. Though you need to be careful if your players are too well informed - it's not unusual for SF writers' understanding of language to be substantially shakier than their grasp of harder sciences.
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Old 02-13-2016, 03:35 PM   #28
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

Respect to Piper and Vinge, but I'd think that the problem with the periodic table as your key is that it gives you a collection of a couple of hundred (somewhat specialist) nouns, but no verbs, adjectives, or adverbs, and no grammar. And given how bizarre real-world human grammars can be, I'd really want a good key before I tried to crack a grammar suited to an alien brain.

Heck, look at the problems with Linear-B. Archaeologists may be able to tie it up a bit to Linear-A, which in turn seems to be a script used for an early form of Greek, but absent a clue or two about the language which Linear-B is being used to write, it's all just lines on a page.
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Old 02-13-2016, 05:07 PM   #29
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

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...Even if aliens wouldn't arrange the elements the same way, our arrangement would make some degree of sense to them, and their arrangement would make some degree of sense to us.
The way I understand it, that's the Only way to arrange the periodic table.
The layout is based on how the elements react to one another, and deeper, to how the electron shells shake out, which is why they react the way they do.
That is, Between Calcium and Gallium, a whole new electron shell opens up, and starts filling in before the last one is finished, giving us the properties of the Transitional Metals.
That Hydrogen and Helium are alone on the top, because the first, innermost, shell will only hold two electrons. The next will only hold six, (although there's another copy of the first, for a total of eight,) etc.
But it's been better than two decades since I took Chemistry, and I didn't do that well in it, so I could well be wrong.
Or just wrong enough to confuse things, which seems more likely.
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Old 02-13-2016, 05:33 PM   #30
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

I occasionally have Linguistics on my sheet for flavor but rarely use it. On the other hand there was that hacker I made who, in a fit of paranoia, re-wrote his cyberdeck so the OS was in Klingon and then encrypted everything to overkill levels.

Drove people crazy trying to counter hack him sometimes.
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