Languages

[pnewman]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Homerule? Try Basic page 506:

The problem with that rule is that it does not define or give examples of 'close' so it opens up far more questions than it answers.

Example - Will native fluency in Latin give me any fluency in Italian? If so is it broken or accented? Does it matter if it's Classical Latin or Church Latin? Is there a difference between Written and Spoken? Which way?

Does native fluency in English (early 21st century) give me Accented Fluency in English (Elizabethan) and Broken Fluency in English (Chaucerian)? What if its the other way around chronologically - how fluent would Shakesphere be in English (early 21st century)?

Should the answers above be based on objective linguistic facts, popular perceptions of the relatedness of these chrono-languages, and/or how cinematic the campaign is?

What about languages with limitations applied to them? What's the right
discount on Read/Write for (Read only) or (Write only) or on Speak for (understand but not speak) or (speak but not understand)? [Of course these limitations might require a neurologically odd character, but some characters are odd.]

[Lonewulf]

Originally Posted by pnewman

The problem with that rule is that it does not define or give examples of 'close' so it opens up far more questions than it answers.

Example - Will native fluency in Latin give me any fluency in Italian? If so is it broken or accented? Does it matter if it's Classical Latin or Church Latin? Is there a difference between Written and Spoken? Which way?

Does native fluency in English (early 21st century) give me Accented Fluency in English (Elizabethan) and Broken Fluency in English (Chaucerian)? What if its the other way around chronologically - how fluent would Shakesphere be in English (early 21st century)?

Should the answers above be based on objective linguistic facts, popular perceptions of the relatedness of these chrono-languages, and/or how cinematic the campaign is?

What about languages with limitations applied to them? What's the right
discount on Read/Write for (Read only) or (Write only) or on Speak for (understand but not speak) or (speak but not understand)? [Of course these limitations might require a neurologically odd character, but some characters are odd.]

I think it's left intentionally vague. Basically, "Whatever the GM is willing to allow." As seen in your many many examples, it would be impossible for the handbook to cover the actual instances.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by pnewman

The problem with that rule is that it does not define or give examples of 'close' so it opens up far more questions than it answers.

Example - Will native fluency in Latin give me any fluency in Italian? If so is it broken or accented? Does it matter if it's Classical Latin or Church Latin? Is there a difference between Written and Spoken? Which way?

Does native fluency in English (early 21st century) give me Accented Fluency in English (Elizabethan) and Broken Fluency in English (Chaucerian)? What if its the other way around chronologically - how fluent would Shakesphere be in English (early 21st century)?

Should the answers above be based on objective linguistic facts, popular perceptions of the relatedness of these chrono-languages, and/or how cinematic the campaign is?

What about languages with limitations applied to them? What's the right
discount on Read/Write for (Read only) or (Write only) or on Speak for (understand but not speak) or (speak but not understand)? [Of course these limitations might require a neurologically odd character, but some characters are odd.]

Because the answers all those questions would probably take up a small book just by themselves.

[Lonewulf]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

Because the answers all those questions would probably take up a small book just by themselves.

And would probably interest only a few players, overall.

[vicky_molokh]

Regarding the default between written Chinese and Japanese: don't count on it. Japanese relies on Kana far more than a Chinese person does. Chinese has much more glyphs than Japanese (50k vs. 2k). To complicate matters further, the word order isn't the same, and given that a single glyph is not necessarily equivalent to a single word, things get even trickier.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by teviet

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.

Yeah, I knew "pictographic" wasn't quite the right term, but I couldn't remember the right word for a script where each character represents a word.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by pnewman

The problem with that rule is that it does not define or give examples of 'close' so it opens up far more questions than it answers.

These are all questions that the GM has to answer in their campaign, and giving the answers for real-world lanaguages would, as NineDaysDead said, take up far too much room.
That said, Infinite Worlds does give some guidelines for languages defaulting to earlier or later versions, and Power-Ups 2: Perks has a couple perks for the "speak but not understand" and "understand but not speak" options.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Molokh

Regarding the default between written Chinese and Japanese: don't count on it.

True, for modern Japanese/Chinese at least. I was more referring to classical Japanese/Chinese, before Japan had seriously altered the characters, or added the other scripts. I doubt Japanese and Chinese would even have a Broken default at this point.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Yeah, I knew "pictographic" wasn't quite the right term, but I couldn't remember the right word for a script where each character represents a word.

My copy of The World's Writing Systems uses "logographic."

Bill Stoddard

[Lonewulf]

Chinese script is part pictographic (it was mainly pictographic at the time of the Oracle Bones), part logographic, and possibly something else added in there (if there is anything else to add anyways).

Some characters do represent images, like, say, the character for "bird".

鸟

There are some more extreme examples, especially in some of the simpler concepts.

A lot of the abstract concepts or details don't tend to be like that, though.