5 Point Languages

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by talonthehand

Nah, still doable. You can learn how to (for instance) speak french without learning its tendency to not pronounce the last letter of the word, and as a result look like you're a first grader when it comes to writing.

And of course, with a non-phonetic language like Chinese, your ability to read it and your ability to speak it can be completely unrelated.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by malloyd

The one that is a bit difficult is Native proficiency in one and Broken in the other.

As Bocephus wrote it above, the case of Daniel Jackson in the Stargate movie and TV series is a good example here. As an archeologist, he knows how to read (or even write) ancient Egyptian without knowing how it was really pronounced.

I am a bit in that case too (though not that much). I learned English by reading (especially GURPS rules) and, so, I can read it quite fluently. But it is much harder for me to understand spoken English because I don't always recognize words (and, sometimes, I even don't notice separations between them). To learn spoken English, I now watch my favorite TV series in English, with English subtitles (for hearing impairment). It really helps, but I still will have a lot of work to do before being able to understand a conversation without having to listen the same sentences several times in a raw ...

There also is the case of written languages with ideograms, like Chinese, Japanese (with kanji) ... Someone can be very fluent with one of those spoken language without having spent enough time to learn the thousand or more ideograms necessary to write or read it fluently*.
___

*Edit: passed by Ravenfish!

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

And of course, with a non-phonetic language like Chinese, your ability to read it and your ability to speak it can be completely unrelated.

Well not *completely*. I'd say that if you have accented or better proficiency in Hanzi or an equivalent Sino-Xenic script like the kabun reading of Japanese Kanji, you probably ought to buy Broken fluency in Early Middle Chinese too. Of course the fact that Early Middle Chinese probably hasn't had any actual speakers for 12 to 15 centuries makes that of limited utility, but still, you can probably get across some key spoken words in most modern Chinese languages, or at least to other readers of Hanzi.

[Gollum]

If you know how to read Chinese ideograms, you surely know some kanji and vice versa.

But being able to read them doesn't give you any hint on how to pronounce them. Two Chinese persons can read and perfectly understand the same newspaper without being able to understand the least word of the spoken Chinese of the other. Even for basic words like hello, thank you or good bye, hànyǔ and wúyǔ are very different. Maybe even more different than French and Spanish for instance.

[Varyon]

Back when I had a degree of fluency in French (I'm probably below Broken at this point, due to lack of practice), I was probably best at reading it, then hearing it, then writing it (which I was probably only slightly worse than hearing), and finally speaking it. Granted, at GURPS levels of resolution all of those were probably at Accented level, but the idea someone would be better at reading and writing than at speaking and listening - or vice versa, considering all the people that struggle with reading and writing their own native language - hardly strikes me as inappropriate. That said, I would be willing to drop the price of most languages to be effectively [5] by breaking things up a bit differently - the spoken language is still [1] for Broken, [2] for Accented, and [3] for Native. The written language, meanwhile, is [1] for being able to read/write the script at all (if you understand the spoken language, this lets you read/write at roughly Broken level by sounding it out it in your head), another [1] to be able to read/write at Accented level, and [2] to be able to read/write at Native level. Thus, languages that use the same script as a language you already know the script for only cost [5] for full Native fluency. Realistically, some scripts are harder to learn than others; the GM may opt to increase price in some cases.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I'm text-fluent at whatever level I am at with English

From the posts I've read of yours, I'd say Native, at least for writing - those who have writing comprehension at Accented tend to have slightly "off" (but typically not technically incorrect) writing syntax, while your posts read like a native writer.

Originally Posted by Gollum

As Bocephus wrote it above, the case of Daniel Jackson in the Stargate movie and TV series is a good example here. As an archeologist, he knows how to read (or even write) ancient Egyptian without knowing how it was really pronounced.

To be fair, IIRC the folks Jackson was speaking with in Stargate were actually pronouncing things a bit differently from the ancient Egyptians (which makes sense, they'd been isolated from that culture for quite a few generations); I believe they were pronouncing certain vowels differently, and once he figured out the shift, he was able to converse with them quite readily. Of course, Daniel Jackson is also a highly cinematic character, with Language Talent at a minimum.

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Varyon

To be fair, IIRC the folks Jackson was speaking with in Stargate were actually pronouncing things a bit differently from the ancient Egyptians (which makes sense, they'd been isolated from that culture for quite a few generations); I believe they were pronouncing certain vowels differently, and once he figured out the shift, he was able to converse with them quite readily. Of course, Daniel Jackson is also a highly cinematic character, with Language Talent at a minimum.

I do agree, the case of Daniel Jackson is probably not very good because it is a fictive one ...

And, actually, ancient Egyptian was probably like modern Arabian nowadays: a common written language for several different spoken languages (Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, and so on). An other good comparison may be modern written Chinese (hànyǔ ideograms). Wúyǔ also use them but doesn't at all pronounce them the same way.

Furthermore, centuries really modify things, and not only vowels. They can distort things so much than they make them almost impossible to recognize. My wife learnt le Moyen Français (Old French) and l'Ancien Français (Ancient French). I didn't. I can read le Moyen Français of Rabelais, for instance, even if some words or phrases are hard to understand, like "icelle herbe moyennante" instead of "au moyen de cette herbe" (by mean of that weed). It's a bit like reading Shakespeare in English. But I absolutely cannot understand l'Ancien Français. To me, it is as much a foreign language as Latin or Italian.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Gollum

If you know how to read Chinese ideograms, you surely know some kanji and vice versa.

But being able to read them doesn't give you any hint on how to pronounce them. Two Chinese persons can read and perfectly understand the same newspaper without being able to understand the least word of the spoken Chinese of the other.

This is true but misses my point. Chinese characters are (typically) composed of a radical (a non-phonetic bit that hints at the category of meaning) and a phonetic bit, that actually does express the "approximate" sound of the word. The radicals are necessary because Chinese has so *many* homophones, especially when you are only approximating them. But in literary Chinese (wenyan) the phonetic bits typically encode sounds in late Old or Early Middle Chinese, a language that isn't spoken anymore. Many people learning to read "Chinese" characters do learn what sounds those bit of the characters mean, they just aren't the sounds in any language they speak themselves - in Japanese these are the various on'yomi "sound-reading" ways of pronouncing the characters. Essentially learning to read these characters involves learning a bit of a language nobody speaks anymore.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Furthermore, centuries really modify things, and not only vowels. They can distort things so much than they make them almost impossible to recognize. My wife learnt le Moyen Français (Old French) and l'Ancien Français (Ancient French). I didn't. I can read le Moyen Français of Rabelais, for instance, even if some words or phrases are hard to understand, like "icelle herbe moyennante" instead of "au moyen de cette herbe" (by mean of that weed). It's a bit like reading Shakespeare in English. But I absolutely cannot understand l'Ancien Français. To me, it is as much a foreign language as Latin or Italian.

Yeah, you get something similar with English. I can (or at least could back when I tried in college, but then that's when my French was around Accented level) read and understand Middle English, like in The Canterbury Tales, moderately well, although I suspect I horribly mispronounce it. Old English, like in Beowulf, might as well be a foreign language.

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by TGLS

This is just tooling around with things.

Normally you buy languages in three levels, marginal understanding, non-idiomatic understanding, and idiomatic understanding. You buy both Spoken and Written language at these levels. I don't understand how one could understand a language idiomatically in one sense (Written or Spoken) and not the other. So I've been wondering whether it would make sense to knock full fluency of a language down to five points, where having native understanding in one half applies to the other.

I can read high German at accented level, but I have a hard time understanding native German speakers, so I have broken verbal. That's what classroom language learning can produce.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Many people learning to read "Chinese" characters do learn what sounds those bit of the characters mean, they just aren't the sounds in any language they speak themselves - in Japanese these are the various on'yomi "sound-reading" ways of pronouncing the characters. Essentially learning to read these characters involves learning a bit of a language nobody speaks anymore.

No doubt there's a linguistic link, but I doubt learning kanji would give any speaking ability in Old Chinese, any more than I could speak Ancient Greek because I know the etymology of words like "necromancer".