Languages

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Icelander

It feels more realistic for me if a native English-speaker has to spend 1 point on Broken competence with French or German, but 2 points for the same competence with Mandarin or Arabic. It replicates the real world situation where is is far easier to add a new language that uses the same script and many similar assumptions about grammar and vocabulary (ultimately derived from Latin) than it is to learn something completely new.

Through speaking and reading English and French (Probably about Accented/Native in the latter), I was able to puzzle out written Spanish, even before I had any training, so long as is wasn't excessively complicated. That feels like Broken literacy despite only putting effort into English and French. I've now had about 50-60 hours training in Spanish, and I can read it much better now, which also tends to argue in favour of reductions in cost for very similar languages.

[Lonewulf]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

The problem is, we're not really talking about a "default" situation here. For example, I am a native speaker and writer of English. I don't know any spoken Spanish - if you put a printed page of Spanish in front of me, I might be able to pronouce some words, awkwardly, but I'd have no idea of what the page meant. Clearly, no default exists. But if I were to spend even a few hours learning spoken Spanish, the same page would suddenly hold a lot more meaning, since puzzling out the sounds would now give me meaning. Logically, that means that I must have spent the points on learning the written version.

I think this goes to the weird way reading and language works in the real world, and how it's hard to realistically convert into a game.

What you're talking about is a language that's based solely around spelling out sounds. If you know the word "Katze" in German, you should have some reasonable expectation of knowing how to spell it with minimal training (and sound it out) if you have an idea as to how the alphabet works and how words are structured. It's really that simple.

The words are based almost primarily on the pronunciation of the words through speech. This means that, if you spend all of your time learning how to speak and converse in the language, and if you already have background knowledge on how the alphabet works (English to German, zum Beispiel), it should come readily to you. Meanwhile, it's impossible to build up 3 in reading/writing without building up the Speaking skill to at least broken. I mean, I suppose there would be issues of rapid speakers being hard to understand, but you'd still know what the words mean and how they're pronounced (regional dialects may be a concern, anyways; and non-phonetic languages may be more difficult).

However, if you're talking Chinese, it's perfectly possible to learn 3 points in Speaking and/or 3 points in reading/writing alone. Pinyin is available to make it easier on western speakers, but even that's limited by the pronunciation symbols, making it equally difficult for someone that's not used to a tonal language.

没那么简单!

(And, just as a note, from what I've heard, it takes longer for Chinese students to become adequate in reading/writing in Chinese than it is for English speakers to become adequate in reading/writing in English).

[nondescript handle]

Originally Posted by Kraydak

Most of the current western-European languages use very similar letter-pronunciation schemes (whatever the technical term is). [...]

You really overestimate the effect of the latin script.

The "letter-pronunciation schemes" (i.e. the mapping of phonemes to graphemes) are quite different because the inventory of phonemes of even closely related western european languages are quite different.

For example "w" can refer to voiced labiodental fricatives or voiced labial-velar approximants, just think of the difference in German and English: "Ve have Vays to make..."

And thats just for single letter graphemes, digraphs (e.g. "sh") and trigraphs (e.g. "sch") are almost always different. Not to mention diacritics (e.g. ü, ú, ù, û, and so on)

And only a few western european languages are truly phonemic (like Spanish, Finnish), for most a grapheme can represent several phonemes (and vice versa)(e.g. the "gh" in the famous "though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through"). And most have quite complicated rules when to use which grapheme for a particular phoneme.

And some, like English, use not the contemporary phonemes, but map graphemes to the historical phonemes.

And "Language: Written" is more than just spelling (i.e. punctuation).

[walkir]

Originally Posted by jalapeno_dude

However, see "Languages, Culture, and the Common Tongue" in this month's Pyramid for an optional system that takes things like language relatedness into account.

This would imho be the only interesting thing of 3/16, so how big and flexible is the article? Is it worth 8$ even without a campaign to use it at the moment?

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Lonewulf

The words are just there to provide pronunciation. This means that, if you spend all of your time learning how to speak and converse in the language, and if you already have background knowledge on how the alphabet works (English to German, zum Beispiel), it should come readily to you.

Well, there are usually a number of individual inconsistencies and quirks of the written version of a language compared to others that use the same script. For example, I know that "j" and "ll" are pronouced very differently in Spanish than in English. And some systems are just weird - most Celtic transliteration systems are not intuitive to an English speaker at all.

Originally Posted by Lonewulf

However, if you're talking Chinese, it's perfectly possible to learn 3 points in Speaking and/or 3 points in reading/writing.

A pictographic system is definitely different than a sound-based system, yes. It has the benefit of allowing a default between written forms without learning the spoken version, as between classical Chinese and Japanese.

What I would suggest is this - when learning a language that shares a sound-based system with a language you already know the writing system for, the first point you get from study counts for both speaking and writing. So if you speak English natively, and spend 200 hours with a teacher learning Spanish, you can put a point towards both Broken Spoken Spanish, and Broken written
Spanish.
I wouldn't let the benefit go much beyond Broken, though. IMO, Broken writing is about right for "can sound out most words, but misses language-specific pronouciation tricks", while Accented is good to represent the "knows how to pronouce everything, but doesn't know the formal conventions."

You wouldn't get that benefit with something like Chinese, of course, but I think the ability to learn Chinese (Written) and default to Japanse (Written) at a level or two lower, despite spoken Chinese and Japanese being completely unrelated, is a reasonable tradeoff.

[teviet]

Originally Posted by Lonewulf

(And, just as a note, from what I've heard, it takes longer for Chinese students to become adequate in reading/writing in Chinese than it is for English speakers to become adequate in reading/writing in English).

It's true, and was once seen as a serious handicap: the CCP introduced simplified characters and pinyin to promote literacy, intending first to make logographs easier and then eliminate them altogether. Only the first took hold.

But logographic scripts have some advantages too, notably in written defaults between different spoken languages. A Mandarin speaker with no knowledge of spoken Cantonese can still read a newspaper in Hong Kong: they are different languages (spoken), but only regional variants (written). Either speaker could probably puzzle their way through a Kanji text with absolutely no idea how to speak Japanese.

特巍

EDIT: Ninja'd! But I'll offer one technical correction to Kelly: Chinese characters are neither pictographic nor ideographic (unlike, say, the Dongba script). In theory a pictograph is supposed to be meaningful without knowledge of any associated language.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

The problem is, we're not really talking about a "default" situation here. For example, I am a native speaker and writer of English. I don't know any spoken Spanish - if you put a printed page of Spanish in front of me, I might be able to pronouce some words, awkwardly, but I'd have no idea of what the page meant. Clearly, no default exists. But if I were to spend even a few hours learning spoken Spanish, the same page would suddenly hold a lot more meaning, since puzzling out the sounds would now give me meaning. Logically, that means that I must have spent the points on learning the written version.

Indeed.

Which is why, you'll note, that I said that the Written versions of the language ought to have a default. If you haven't spent any points on the language, your default lacks context and is useless. But spend 1 point on Spanish (Broken/Spoken) and your default in Spanish (Broken/Written) becomes relevant.

Or that's how I play it.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

The problem is, we're not really talking about a "default" situation here. For example, I am a native speaker and writer of English. I don't know any spoken Spanish - if you put a printed page of Spanish in front of me, I might be able to pronouce some words, awkwardly, but I'd have no idea of what the page meant. Clearly, no default exists. But if I were to spend even a few hours learning spoken Spanish, the same page would suddenly hold a lot more meaning, since puzzling out the sounds would now give me meaning. Logically, that means that I must have spent the points on learning the written version.

Or the written form defaults to (lower of spoken form of same language and written form of other language using same basic phonetic script [mostly the same forms and relations to sounds], -1, with a minimum of Broken if both bases are present.)

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Which is why, you'll note, that I said that the Written versions of the language ought to have a default. If you haven't spent any points on the language, your default lacks context and is useless. But spend 1 point on Spanish (Broken/Spoken) and your default in Spanish (Broken/Written) becomes relevant.

This is a tricky one, since in 4e, languages are technically advantages (and thus hypotheically priced for utility), but work a lot like skills, with defaults and such.

I think my preference would be to split the difference, as it were. If you have written comprehension in a language with a sound-based script, then with any language that you speak and that shares the script, you can read it at Broken, but only at one quarter speed (sounding things out takes a lot longer than normal reading, after all). Spending the point for the written version removes the speed problem, but keeps the usual Broken penalties (which probably represent things like mispronouciations and whatnot).

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Or the written form defaults to (lower of spoken form of same language and written form of other language using same basic phonetic script

That just doesn't work, though. As I said, I speak and write English at the Native level. I can't honestly claim to have any default at all in any of the languages that share the latin script, however.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by teviet

It's true, and was once seen as a serious handicap: the CCP introduced simplified characters and pinyin to promote literacy, intending first to make logographs easier and then eliminate them altogether. Only the first took hold.

But logographic scripts have some advantages too, notably in written defaults between different spoken languages. A Mandarin speaker with no knowledge of spoken Cantonese can still read a newspaper in Hong Kong: they are different languages (spoken), but only regional variants (written).

IME the difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters is big enough that you should be reduced by atleast 1 comprehension level.