One language - many alphabets

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by 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...

As a nightmare :)

Like Khoufou,
aka
Kheops or Cheops (by way of Greek),
Saurid or Salhuk (by way of Arabic),
Souphis or Sofe (by way of Coptic> Greek or Latin),

There are many variables, depending on what the players know and how close the spoken and written form are.

Assuming they know the original language in the original script and they know the destination script, I would say they can read it at one level below their normal knowledge.
But if they are not litterate in the original script and they know the destination script, they can attempt to decipher the text at a broken level with an IQ (or linguistics) roll.

So :
Player know Hebrew at Native/Native and English at Native/Native and find a text transliterated in latin script : treat as Native/Accented.
Player know Hebrew at Accented/None and English at Native/Native and find a text transliterated in latin script : treat as Accented/Broken(require IQ roll).

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anders

How do you handle a setting where there's one language that is written with many languages? Do you allow Literacy to cover all languages? Do you split it up into talking proficiency and alphabet proficiency? Do you have the character specify what alphabet they learned the language with, and then charge a perk for each extra alphabet?

Familiarity Penalty if you run into it for the first time. Learning alphabets is one of the easiest parts of learning a language, and multiple alphabets or writing system per language is in fact very normal for many languages throughout the world. Requiring one group to pay more points for full fluency in both its spoken and written language is a can of worms (getting into various language supremacist views, eww).

[Ashtagon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Chinese (either form) or Japanese Kanji also present a problem when even a Native reader encounters unfamiliar characters. The characters give rather limited clues as to what they might mean. In contrast, alphabetic languages usually allow a reader to figure out the roots of unfamiliar words and take a guess at meanings.

https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm is required reading here.

Alphabetic languages can give clues to that allow a reader to figure out the roots of unfamiliar words precisely because the reader may to some extent be familiar with a related word. It is exactly the same with hanzi-using languages. If I see a word with 学 in it, I know it has something to do with studying or learning, even if I don't know the other characters in that word. Similarly, if I see a made-up word with "edu" in it, such as edutainment, I know it has something to do with studying or learning.

For those who understand how the writing system works, each gives their readers clues to help them understand unfamiliar words.

----

Standard literacy in Japan is considered to be 2000 kanji (the "joyo kanji"). This accounts for 99.72% of all kanji use, according to corpus analysis. This represents a normal high school education. But there are supposedly 50,000 kanji. Some of the additional kanji are hentai-gana, which are basically obsolete or variant forms of "modern" kanji, and I am told are recognisable for those who know what to look for (using these comes across as writing in mock-Middle-English). I can't find a cite, but I'm told that most of the rest are used mainly for historic proper names.

Given that the extended kanji are primarily used for proper names, I'd make recognising them a function of Area Knowledge or Savoir-Faire (high society), with a proviso that you can't even make the attempt unless you have full literacy in Japanese.

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For languages that have multiple writing systems (Serbian with Latin and Cyrillic scripts was an example upthread), I'd say pick one, and you choose which script you get for free. Getting the second script is 2 points for semi-literacy, or 3 points for full literacy. This would also apply for languages that have been written with three or more different scripts.

It is indeed a can of worms requiring, say, an English speaker to pay for Latin script all over again to learn French and again for Spanish, German, etc. But given that each language has slightly different conventions for turning letters into sounds, at least some additional cost is justified.

[Michael Cule]

I'm remembering my attempts to put Tekumel into GURPS.

Professor Barker was a professional academic linguist. So of course he gave his made up world lots of languages (several of which were complete enough to write things in) and there were scripts as well but never I think multiple scripts in a language...

Given that the setting included time travel from the first it might just be worth it to track how far apart a scholar's ability to speak and to read ancient languages had drifted and to have some comedy (probably with fatal results) when facing Nayari of the Silken Thighs with only broken Bednálljan. But this is a very edge case and normally it's going to be a lot easier to have one level of competence for an entire language.

I'd do the same for Japanese to be honest. You can speak and read the language: your capacity is much the same in both abilities.

Is a more complex bit of character building going to pay off in fun things during the game?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

Is a more complex bit of character building going to pay off in fun things during the game?

This really is the big question. And additionally, will the players use the points? I've made an IW template with 15 points in languages rather than something divisible by 6 to encourage players to have nuanced languages choices.

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

It is indeed a can of worms requiring, say, an English speaker to pay for Latin script all over again to learn French and again for Spanish, German, etc. But given that each language has slightly different conventions for turning letters into sounds, at least some additional cost is justified.

Yeah, its a big can of worms. And if you let the latin script count for everything, how do you build someone who can speak and read english but only read spainish, and that badly?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by 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.

Another way to put that is that literacy isn't the same thing in Chinese as it is in English - and using the same word (and rules for acquiring it) may be deceptive. The cross language utility of those two kinds of literacy is simply *different*, calling them the same thing and charging the same point costs for them in a setting where you are actually going to have to use them across languages is not going to make sense.

I'd be happier if each phonetic script was a perk that would allow you to read and write any language (familiarity would apply to matching it with a specific spoken tongue "properly" but once you've learned an alphabet you can take dictation in a language you don't recognize at all and somebody literate in that language has a decent chance of eventually puzzling out what the original speaker said) and each script with a lot of logographic content was a separate "language" that cost whatever languages do but would allow you to access the default rules to extract some level of meaning from something in another "dialect" of it, even if that "dialect" was being used to write a language whose spoken form has no genetic relationship at all to the one you know. It's still far from perfect, but seems a lot closer.

[MIB.6361]

In my fantasy setting, there are languages like that.

For example; Elvish and Sylvan use the same written language. But the spoken languages are far enough apart that they are two different languages.

So if you have one of them at full literacy, you can read and write the other one for free.


If someone needs to differentiate between the two in written form, there could be context clues like you might find going from London, England English to Texas, USA English.

[RogerBW]

My article in Pyramid #3/044 for languages-as-skills uses language skills plus script perks, and I think that's still a reasonable approach to take. (After all, plenty of languages didn't get written down at all before the foreign empire turned up.)

That said, I'm with Michael in that I think this is optional extra work that should be balanced against the reward: is it going to be fun, in the particular campaign you're setting up, to have the additional detail about who can't read what?