[Songs/rule question] Celestial Tongues and phone numbers

[ISNorden]

Most people who know the IN rulebooks remember that the Celestial Song of Tongues has a 15-word limit per use. Some of my PCs have used it to send silent, long-distance "call me" messages...but how many "words" long is a phone number?

• If it's one word per digit, telling someone to make long distance calls could become VERY difficult!
• If it's one word for the whole phone number, then the Song becomes too easy to abuse.
• I personally decided that one "code chunk" counts as one word...a country code of any length, an area/city code, and the main number itself. Phone numbers use up 2-3 "words" with this rule, similar to the system used in classified ads that charge per word.

Fellow GMs, do you use a different rule altogether? If you do, feel free to discuss it here!

[JCD]

Originally Posted by ISNorden

Most people who know the IN rulebooks remember that the Celestial Song of Tongues has a 15-word limit per use. Some of my PCs have used it to send silent, long-distance "call me" messages...but how many "words" long is a phone number?

• If it's one word per digit, telling someone to make long distance calls could become VERY difficult!
• If it's one word for the whole phone number, then the Song becomes too easy to abuse.
• I personally decided that one "code chunk" counts as one word...a country code of any length, an area/city code, and the main number itself. Phone numbers use up 2-3 "words" with this rule, similar to the system used in classified ads that charge per word.

Fellow GMs, do you use a different rule altogether? If you do, feel free to discuss it here!

Fifteen words is fifteen words and I'd keep it as a hard limit myself*. Now, in America, a phone number is 10 words long. Occasionally, you can cut it down ('Three hundred, five five five, seventy eleven' Seven words**)

One assumes that if one is in a similar culture/geographic region and has some earth experience they might recognize a phone number when they hear it...and the person might be able to delete the area code. ("Gee Otto. I got the strangest message from Marisol. A string of seven numbers. I wonder what it signifies..."*** Horton, Seraph of Cluelessness)

Now a foreign number can be more numbers with the addition of the country code, so bear that in mind.

* 'If you want to continue this call, please deposit One Essence for the next 15 words. Thank you' Angelic Telephone and Telegraph.

**According to his degree of cluelessness, a Celestial might read the number out as a total! (Six billion, one hundred forty five million, five hundred fifty one thousand, two hundred twelve for 614-555-1212 which coincidently is 15 words. You think they choose that number by accident?)

*** An Infernal wicked GM would read the numbers once and watch them scramble for any kind of writing implement.

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by JCD

Fifteen words is fifteen words and I'd keep it as a hard limit myself.

Yeah, I'm inclined to go with the Gertrude Stein-style "A word is a word is a word." While I can see some players arguing that the digits are "letters" in the "word" of the phone number, the analogy doesn't really play out. In a written word, you can pronounce the word ("BARN") or sound out the individual letters instead ("B-A-R-N"). How do you sound out a phone number in a way that's different from reciting its individual digits?

(Anyone who does figure out how to pronounce an entire phone number at once deserves at least 3 Essence from the GM for sheer audacity. :) )

[Azel]

Well, and this is personal nonsense here, but since celestial tongue is hyper-compressed speech into mere tones, using the numeric tone system should be a breeze to convert. So the pronunciation of a phone number is the "musical phrase" of its numeric tones. Very much like "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" where the aliens spoke through tones simple enough for humans to understand.

Further, languages differ tremendously. One language 15 word phrase is 30+ in another -- or less than 5. At some point I just subscribe to the idea that 'humans are geared for human speech as language, celestial aliens are geared for condensed concepts as language.' Which means that a phone number is just one concept; just like the numbers Pi or E have a name, celestials who can understand concepts (or numeric tones) can speak the "name" of phone numbers.

But that's just me, who suffered from too many linguistic classes... ;)

[JCD]

Originally Posted by Azel

Well, and this is personal nonsense here, but since celestial tongue is hyper-compressed speech into mere tones, using the numeric tone system should be a breeze to convert. So the pronunciation of a phone number is the "musical phrase" of its numeric tones. Very much like "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" where the aliens spoke through tones simple enough for humans to understand.

Further, languages differ tremendously. One language 15 word phrase is 30+ in another -- or less than 5. At some point I just subscribe to the idea that 'humans are geared for human speech as language, celestial aliens are geared for condensed concepts as language.' Which means that a phone number is just one concept; just like the numbers Pi or E have a name, celestials who can understand concepts (or numeric tones) can speak the "name" of phone numbers.

But that's just me, who suffered from too many linguistic classes... ;)

Whatever makes you think that Angelic is hypercompressed? You are opening up a huge can of worms where the players will invent languages where 'Tuk' means 'you need to assassinate the red headed woman whom I indicated before that summer day, no not that one, but the other one.'

A word is a concept. Seven is seven, eleven is eleven. Anything more then that an you are doing everyone a disservice.

[ISNorden]

OK, you've convinced me...one digit equals one word in any other context, and there's no good "game reason" for a special exception. "Tamar--I made it, call me at [six-digit Swedish phone number]...Rinnah" should just barely make the cut, right?

Edited to add: If Rinnah had been on the other side of the Atlantic (and forgotten where Tamar was), he WOULD need a second message to explain "Just remembered, you're overseas...country code 46, city code 31. My fault!"

[JCD]

Well, he knows who HE is, so you can cut Tammar.

"Call Rinnah. Stockholm Sweden, one two three four five six ." Ten. Your angels need editors.

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by JCD

Well, he knows who HE is, so you can cut Tammar.

"Call Rinnah. Stockholm Sweden, one two three four five six ." Ten. Your angels need editors.

And most folks assume Stockholm *is* in Sweden (and for less familiar celestials, a quick Google would confirm it), so you only need nine words. :)

As a side-note, Tamar is female. :)

[Andygal]

Also, if the recipient in question was savvy enough to recognize a phone number you might be able to drop the "call". Since most folks would assume that a person giving them a phone number means them to call the number. Or it could be a matter of having arranged beforehand to send somebody your local phone number on arriving somewhere new, in which case you really just need the number.

[Azel]

Originally Posted by JCD

Whatever makes you think that Angelic is hypercompressed?

In brief, this. (Though it's mentioned elsewhere.)

Archangel of War, Vassal of War distinction: "Angels of this rank can sing the celestial language while in their corporeal forms. This lets them communicate five times as quickly as any Earthly language... Mortals will hear only whistled snatches of urgent, martial song." IN core 1st ed, p. 131.

Originally Posted by JCD

You are opening up a huge can of worms where the players will invent languages where 'Tuk' means 'you need to assassinate the red headed woman whom I indicated before that summer day, no not that one, but the other one.'

A word is a concept. Seven is seven, eleven is eleven. Anything more then that an you are doing everyone a disservice.

Heh, language is nothing but opening cans of worms, as my scarred memories can attest. However, your discussion here is now dealing with hermeneutics (knowledge that deals w/ interpretation) and post-modern assessments of language (dealing w/ representation's interference w/ knowledge, a.k.a. the arguments of nominalism). Fun stuff, did that too, have the essay battle wounds to prove it.

Mercifully, what I am talking about is not related to your tangential topic. In fact, to stay strayed in the tangent for a brief moment more, humans already do similar things, which is quite well known in police code, thieves cant, and even down to familiar modern pager/txt codes. Additionally Superiors 1 details how Dominicans routinely utilize such previously agreed upon codes, in various communicative forms (Superiors 1, p. 61). Nothing stops players from doing such things with Cel Tongues, either, by the way.

But what I am speaking of is compressed information. Or, more In Nomine relevant, the nature of Realism; the distinction and "realness" of concepts, divorced from complications of expression that occur through representation, (of which language would be an example). For those unfamiliar w/ more than one language, it would be akin to the difference between similar yet differently nuanced words.

Let's start easy: "A brownish red color" and the word "maroon" is a basic example of compression encoding; one's 4 words, the other is just one, they both mean the same. Now more complex: note the difference between similar, but not the same, concepts in the words "indifferent," insouciant," and "blase." Shades of meaning from "generally neutral, devoid of sympathy," "casual lack of concern, carefree, light-hearted" and "unimpressed or indifferent due to previous familiarity" are all nuanced and wordier meanings encoded within a more compressed mutually-agreed coded framework. That coded framework is better known as "language."

Now throw in an IN celestial perspective and nominalism haziness is mostly tossed aside.

Which brings me to my main point: "(no more than 15 words)" is an example for the English language in explaining a guideline -- not an actual hard and fast rule. The spirit of the message is "keep it brief." Thus getting lost in the vocalizing modalities of expressing a phone number within the exampled guideline of '15 English words' is really missing the point of the song, in my opinion.

Celestial Tongues: "... It allows the performer to bind a brief message (no more than 15 words) into a bit of Essence and then loose it into the cosmos, where it makes its way directly to the mind of the receiver..." IN core 1st ed, p. 85.

But hey, to each their own. :)