One language - many alphabets

[Keampe]

In game, I'd definitely split the language. I might allow them to have the spoken at 3cp native level and 3 points worth of the written. Most efficient would be to have 3 cp in one written, but I might allow them to divide it if they've got a character that would be like that.

- Shane

[AlexanderHowl]

Character should start with the spoken language and one of the written forms for free (they could purchase additional written forms at Broken for 1 CP, Accented for 2 CP, and Native for 3 CP).

[Prince Charon]

Given the large number of symbols in kanji and in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese writing, should literacy in those cost more?

[Celjabba]

If all the writing systems used for a language are learned together and assumed to be know by a native speaker : normal cost.

If a native speaker would learn and use one or another : a perk for each writing system past the first.
Same for alternative or archaic writing form.
For exemple the Oromo language can be written in
Latin (normal),
Arabic (alternative),
Ge'ez (archaic),
or Sapalo (underground) :

choose one for free, add a perk for each writing system past the first.

Another exemple would be the Chinese woman underground writing Nüshu.

In some case ((Traditional and Simplified Chinese for exemple) , a perk is almost too expensive as an user of one system can get by in the other with some difficulties.
In other case, a perk is too generous and calling it another language would be fair (Syllabary or Logogram instead of alphabet)...

But unless you are willing to have different costs for writing languages according to the method used (alphabet / Syllabary / Logogram / mix of everything), I think it is easier to go with perks.
It may be too "generous" in some case, but it is easy to use and languages are already expensive and not used enough in my opinion.

[YankeeGamer]

Turkish had one alphabet until the end of the Ottoman Empire, then a brand new one was imposed--now, reading the old one is definitely a separate skill.
(A new alphabet/method of writing the language is also a great 1984 style tactic to make older records had to access--useful for helping keep people ignorant of the reality behind things like genocides.)

[Varyon]

Here would be my inclination. Note I'm probably messing up some of the terms here.

Syllabary: This is a script consisting of distinct sounds/syllables, making it easier to read the correct pronunciation once you know the script. Hiragana and katakana are good examples. It only has two levels, Broken for [1] and Proficient for [2].

Alphabet: This is a script consisting of letters that make up words, with the arrangement influencing the pronunciation. The familiar Latin script is a good example. It has the normal three levels, Broken for [1], Accented for [2], and Native for [3]. Optionally, treat this instead as Broken for [1] and Proficient for [2], reserving the third level to be associated with a spoken language (so [+1] to be able to know English pronunciations, [+1] for French, [+1] for Spanish, etc).

Pictogram: This is a script consisting of (perhaps highly-stylized) images. Pronunciation is incredible varied and dependent on the order of characters and, in some cases, the context. Of the three types, it tends to have a massive lead in number of distinct characters. Kanji is a good example, as are both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. It has four levels (realistically, probably closer to five or six, but there's not enough benefit to justify this; indeed, it's hard to justify charging [4] from a game-balance perspective) - Broken for [1], Accented for [2], Native for [3], and Expert for [4].

[tbone]

First a few comments on Japanese. (Qualifications: I'm writing this from Japan, where I've been speaking and hearing and reading and writing the language for the greater part of my life. But I'm not a specialist in linguistics.)

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Isn't Japanese like that? Two or three "alphabets"?

I'd answer that simply like this: Japanese has multiple character sets - which is the norm for pretty much any well-developed written language. Take English: two sets of phonetic characters (the upper-case alphabet and the lower-case alphabet, collectively called "the alphabet"), a set of typographic characters (punctuation marks, etc.), some miscellaneous logograms (like "&"), a set of Arabic numerals, and maybe other sets (any full-fledged linguists out there?). Those multiple character sets are all thrown together into a single written language.

Japanese works no differently: it has multiple character sets that make up one written language. These happen to be two sets of phonetic characters (the hiragana syllabary and the katakana syllabary, collectively called kana), a set of typographic characters, some miscellaneous logograms, a set of Arabic numerals - and, yes, a big set of Chinese characters. They all come together into one written language.

In short, it's all a single written language, like any other. That said, the inclusion of Chinese characters in that one written language makes a big practical difference! It indeed makes for a lot more to learn, and the details of how those characters are used in combination with other character sets is . . . well, beyond the needs of the thread, I think. Suffice to say, Chinese characters are a rich and complex addition.

Originally Posted by johndallman

For Japanese, I'd say that Native literacy has a prerequisite of having learned the language as a child. The same may well be true of Chinese.

I'd disagree entirely. Any individual may face some personal barrier in learning this language or that language, or piano or auto mechanics or whatever, but those exceptions aside, I'd say anyone who puts the time into it will learn to read Japanese or Chinese. Just a matter of study, that's all.

Originally Posted by johndallman

There are two major forms of written Chinese, Traditional and Simplified characters. Simplified still has thousands of characters, the primary difference is that the forms of the characters are simplified.

That's my understanding. And it points to an interesting feature: here you have a written language with two variants - or should we say it's one written language, with two variants of a key character set? Either way, I think it's safe to say that in GURPS terms they'd essentially default to each other. Which isn't mechanically the right way to put it, of course, as they're not handled as skills. But the concept is there. (In 3e, it'd be easy to use a -1 or -2 skill default between the two, but in 4e, I don't know that the difference is enough to merit a rules distinction.)

Originally Posted by johndallman

In Japan, where social prestige is very important, use of Kanji is very prestigious

Respectfully, I have to say I don't get that. I'm not aware of any unusual importance of "social prestige" here. And Chinese characters are a normal part of the Japanese writing system, learned and used by everyone here; I don't see any area where "prestige" comes into the picture.

However! You could be referring to days of yore, when it might not be unusual for, say, a commoner to learn the easy phonetic characters (kana), while learning very little of the numerous and complex Chinese characters. In that sort of setting, learning the latter could indeed be a sign of education and status.

And that's where some game-related stuff comes up, so let me jump into that. I've fiddled around with better ways to handle languages in games, particularly that tricky topic of writing systems, as have many gamers, and . . . I don't think I have any great solutions to offer. Just some thoughts.

Fortunately for all here, I'm short on time and will just hammer out my crude rules of thumb, which will probably parrot much of what others have already said:

• I think what the original poster was asking was simply "How do you handle a language that's written in more than one alphabet"? (There are many such examples in history, as posters have noted.)
• The script in question may not be an alphabet per se, but for simplicity, I'll call it "alphabet" and will assume that this refers to some set of characters, possibly with multiple variant sets, plus whatever miscellaneous logograms and typographical marks and numerals and other goodies go with it.
• "Knowing" an alphabet can be assumed to mean knowing the sound(s) of any given character, knowing the name of any given character (if that differs from the sound), and knowing any basic complications related to these (standard written variants of characters, the sounds of common combinations of characters, etc.).
• Given the above, a simple solution to the original question is simply, "Any language you can read includes one alphabet. To add another alphabet, handle it as a perk." (The cost problem: Simply "knowing the alphabet" is a lesser accomplishment than having actual Broken literacy, which also costs just 1 point. I don't have a solution for this, unless it's to always charge 1 point for Broken literacy plus 1 point for the alphabet, if that's a new one for the character.)
• The above addresses the addition of a significantly different alphabet – say, the Greek alphabet when your native alphabet is English. For simplicity, assume that more minor differences in alphabets – say, English vs French vs Polish variants of the Latin alphabet – can be brushed off as unimportant, or handled as familiarities (whatever that means for languages).
• "Knowing" an alphabet means you can read a known language written in that alphabet.
• Some combinations of language and alphabet will be poor matches. (Russian written in the Latin alphabet will work reasonably well. English written in Korean hangul might not.)
• "Knowing" the alphabet in a given piece of writing, without knowing the language itself, means . . . possibly humorous results, as you "sound out" things without any real understanding. But this can still be perfectly useful for, say, picking out the name of a city in the text, the name of your spy contact, etc.!
• All the above addresses "alphabets" that have up to . . . oh, many dozens of characters. Written languages with many hundreds or many thousands of characters - in modern terms, Chinese characters - arguably call for different treatment. Another character point or two doesn't sound unreasonable to me!

So. Applying that to examples:

• You have written fluency in your native language of Mongolian in the early 20th century. You use vertical traditional Mongolian script. Reformists try to replace it with the Latin alphabet; people like you refuse to learn, and the movement fails. Later there's a push for Cyrillic; you give in and learn. You pay a point, and can now read and write Mongolian using Cyrillic (and you can "sound out" Russian texts to a point, but would have to learn the language to make sense of it).
• You're a native of Japan, or China, or many places in the modern world, where the native written language isn't based on the Latin alphabet but media, product names, billboards, pop culture, everything is dotted with words (both native and foreign) written in that alphabet. You, and almost everyone around you, pays a point to know the Latin alphabet. (You may or may not also study an associated language, such as English.)
• You're a British spy, heading off to the Far East. One of the first things you do is learn the "alphabets" of Korean and Japanese, and . . . this is where things get tricky. A generous GM may say, "Pay a point for each; okay, you can sound out words in either language. Now start actually learning the languages." But a more strict GM may say, "That just gets you hangul for Korean and kana for Japanese; you'll need more points for Chinese characters." And that kind of sounds sensible - except that when the PC "knows" all the phonetic and Chinese characters of the language, their pronunciations and meanings . . . yet hasn't yet bought actual literacy . . . what does that even mean? It starts getting weird.

Okay. Not a good place to stop, but enough from me for a while!

[Polydamas]

To add to what tbone is saying ... the Chinese script is uniquely complicated. Students are expected to pick up any alphabet or abjad within a one-semester course while also learning grammer and vocabulary, and it does not requires a lot of subsequent practice beyond reading. Cuneiform is a bit harder but only ~600 signs, if you just had to learn say "sign forms used in Neo-Assyrian administrative texts" not "all forms used for more than 2000 years" it would go quicker. But the Chinese script has a very large number of signs, they are physically complicated to draw, and its the only system where I hear of adults having to keep practicing how to write not-so-rare words. One point is way too much to pay for most scripts, a one-semester course is traditionally about 1/2 point.

And of course written Chinese is used as an interlingua between different Sinitic languages, so often learning to write Chinese involves learning a language you don't speak at home.

The alphabets and abjads in a region are usually closely related: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic are all one family, I suspect the same is true for many of the South Asian scripts. I learned to sound out Cyrillic before a short trip to Russia, if you already know the Greek and Hebrew scripts its not a big deal.

So the Chinese script is the hard case which makes bad law. For most of history, "this book was printed in Mainz and I never learned to read black letter, working through it will take a while" is likely to be more of a problem than "the note is in Greek letters, curse it, I have to use one of the five scripts I learned for fun when I was ten."

[Celjabba]

My father is active in genealogy ... even a know alphabet in a language you are literate in can be *very* difficult to parse.

Google Latin gothique or Russian Cursive for some notorious examples.

And let's not even speak of the plethora of *unreadable* German cursive Fraktur scripts ...

So, without even going to the Chinese scripts, you could justify having literacy in one specific script, and having to pay more for variants (archaic or regional or both), or alternate scripts (my exemple of Oromo, with 4 completely unrelated scripts (latin, arabic, ge'ez and a made-up one) currently being in use.

But that being said, in 99% of the games I played in or ran, that would have been an un-needed level of details.

"Yes, your character is literate in German. But you learned to read it in Antiqua, and this document is written in Sütterlin, sorry..."
would be a very realistic answer, but may upset the player.
Try telling a player "Yes, your SOE agent can read german as a native, but he will need to pay 3 points for Fraktur, 3 points for Sütterlin, 3 points for Schwabacher (we will throw in Antiqua for free since he know English) and there is no guarantee you will be able to read everything you see, even then...

If it is important in your game, this is how I would handle it :

• If a language can be written in several scripts, you know one for free when learning the language.
• -
• If a script have various form (archaic or regional), treat this as a familiarity.
  If you never encountered it, treat your languages written level when using that scripts as being one level lower (broken > none, Accented > broken, Native > accented) until you practiced enough.
• -
• If a language is written in a script you don't know, you have to learn that script.
  Treat each new scripts as a perk. Until then, you cannot read/write in that language+script.
• -
• If you know a script in one language, you know it for every language that use that script, with a familiarity penalty at first.
• -
• At the GM decision, some scripts can be treated as "difficult".
  Those require a leveled perk to learn, level 1 cap the language at broken, level 2 at ac cented, level 3 at native. Chinese may be a good exemple. You get the first level for free when learning the language.
• -
• At the GM decision, cursive and block forms can be considered either 2 separate scripts or 2 separate familiarities for the purpose of those rules.

[The Colonel]

Just out of interest, how would you handle PCs being faced with a transliterated language? That is, one that has been recorded in a script that is commonly used by another language. Romnaji Japanese I guess comes close, but transliterating into Latin script is also a common fate for any language that uses another written form: Greek and Hebrew being common victims in my experience. I could see that being a significant twist in an adventure plot...