Language help please.

[Jareth Valar]

We are using "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" from Pyramid 3/42. Great article overall by Roger Burton West.

However, I have a couple of area I'd like some help with.

With the article a basic native speaker of a language has a base skill of 12. Using this, I would assume that anyone with a language skill of 12 would be considered Native by the base rules. That being said I'm thinking a skill lev el of 8-11 would be Accented and anything lower would be Broken?

That being said, in the article it uses the language skill as a cap, something that doesn't wholly work for me. That said, even a native speaker with a Singing of 21 would have to roll against a language of 12 as well. I know there have been some suggestions on how to handle "Cap skills" elsewhere on the board, but I cannot find them. Any thought on how to handle this without using it as a cap?

Also, when pulling in new languages, does anyone have any idea on how to judge modifiers for related/offshoot languages? I was thinking on a modifier for every step away from the language (if using language classification trees) but I've seen some trees with more branches that there should be modifiers. Any thoughts would help greatly.

We love the article and use this as the base language set for our modern games, but we've come into some areas where we need more that the listed languages and have always had an issue with cap skills.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Jareth Valar

We are using "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" from Pyramid 3/42. Great article overall by Roger Burton West.

Took me a minute. It's in Pyramid 3/44.

With the article a basic native speaker of a language has a base skill of 12. Using this, I would assume that anyone with a language skill of 12 would be considered Native by the base rules. That being said I'm thinking a skill lev el of 8-11 would be Accented and anything lower would be Broken?

I don't know how to work those out for West's article, but I can point out that in GURPS Update, the topic of converting third-edition language skills to fourth-edition language advantages is given a "quick and dirty" treatment: you know your native language at IQ+4, Native skill is 13+, Accented skill is 7–12, and Broken skill is 6 or less. Mind you, this is just a "quick and dirty" conversion, not precise.

[Jareth Valar]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Took me a minute. It's in Pyramid 3/44.

Doh't! I looked at it while typing too. *facepalm* Sorry.

I don't know how to work those out for West's article, but I can point out that in GURPS Update, the topic of converting third-edition language skills to fourth-edition language advantages is given a "quick and dirty" treatment: you know your native language at IQ+4, Native skill is 13+, Accented skill is 7–12, and Broken skill is 6 or less. Mind you, this is just a "quick and dirty" conversion, not precise.

That's good to know. The article puts Native at IQ+2, so skill 12+. I take it in 3rd baseline attribute was 9?

[Stormcrow]

No, in the third edition, basic attributes were level 10 for 0 points. Language skills were Mental skills, anything from Easy for things like pidgins to Very Hard to things like alien languages that cannot be pronounced by the character. There was a special progression for your native language; it didn't follow the normal costs, and you automatically started with it at IQ level. The third edition had more detailed differences in different language levels than the fourth edition does.

Like I said, the guidelines in GURPS Update are just a quick and dirty guide for converting characters. You mustn't read too much into them.

[Culture20]

In the real world, I know quite a few people with mastery of English far greater than my own who still retain their accents. Removing an accent is more a long term familiarity or result of acting skill.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Culture20

In the real world, I know quite a few people with mastery of English far greater than my own who still retain their accents. Removing an accent is more a long term familiarity or result of acting skill.

Very true. There are poets, lyricists and wordsmiths with astonishing skill in and command of their own language who could not change their own native accent to save their lives, because that's a skill set closer to musical ear than linguistic excellence.

[Varyon]

Naming the comprehension level between Broken and Native as Accented was, in my opinion, a mistake. Everybody has an accent, and changing yours to a different one is really a different skill from the language itself. But coming up with a different name is difficult. The way I interpret it, that middle level means you have more-or-less full comprehension of the language, but sometimes use the wrong syntax, get tripped up by more colorful uses of the language, etc. "Partial" implies too low of comprehension to really match, while "Fluent" implies too high. Maybe Accented really was the best option... but it has the problem that it implies Native means you don't have an accent.

Of course, making language into a skill avoids that, as you can just put a number to the comprehension. Offhand, I'd say something like 8 to 9 corresponds to Broken, 10 to 11 to Accented, 12-14 to Native. 15+ makes you an Expert with the language, while 20+ makes you a Master.

Singing... probably shouldn't be capped by Language in many cases, although you may need to take Extra Time when practicing the song to get the sounds right (like how an actor can take extra time to practice lines in a foreign language to make themselves sound like they know the language just as well as the character they're portraying, even if they don't speak a lick of it). If you're improvising, sure, a Language cap could apply... but I'd instead be inclined to just allow Language to be a Complementary Skill to spice up your lyrics. It's not like you need complex language skills to sing an entertaining song. Heck, I've heard plenty of songs in anime where the singer is singing in English for part of it and are nearly impossible to understand (and when not, what they're saying sometimes doesn't make any sense), but it still sounds good.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Naming the comprehension level between Broken and Native as Accented was, in my opinion, a mistake. [...] But coming up with a different name is difficult.

"Read Rules, Not Titles" —Kromm, How To Be a GURPS GM: Managing Expectations.

"[Character traits] have to be inspiring enough to get players to consider the abilities, concise enough to fit on character sheets once chosen, and evocative enough to remind everyone of what they do in play." (p. 4)

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The way I interpret it, that middle level means you have more-or-less full comprehension of the language, but sometimes use the wrong syntax, get tripped up by more colorful uses of the language, etc. "Partial" implies too low of comprehension to really match, while "Fluent" implies too high.

Though you may use it for a more demanding level than most people. I'd note that both the common measurement standards (the American FSI/IRL and European CEFR) use "fluent" at intermediate levels, specifically at FSI 3+ or 4 (on a 1 to 5 scale) or CEFR B2 (4th of 6 labels). Other terminology used there that could work include Independent, Working and Conversational (which I rather like as a replacement for Accented, as it much more clearly tells you what the key achievement for the level is).

[whswhs]

I'm setting up a campaign in Hero System, which distinguishes FIVE levels of language use. The third level is "completely fluent, with accent"; the fourth is "idiomatic, native accent." I think that's how the word is used in the vernacular, as opposed to the technical terminology of linguistics. Linguists talk about "marked" and "unmarked" forms of a word; I think it might be said that in any particular community, there are marked and unmarked accents.

Wanting single words to put on character sheets, I came up with "basic" (as in the standard rules), "conversational," "fluent," and "native" for the first four levels. I'm not sure what to call the highest level where you can mimic dialects like Enry Iggins . . .

My own limited experience with foreign languages is that there are at least two levels of partial reading comprehension: One where you can decipher a text word by word, painfully working out the syntactic role of each word; and one where you can read sentences, but may have to pause occasionally to look up a specific word or puzzle out a specific grammatical construction (which, to be fair, I also have to do in English—just much less often!). The two feel very different. I expect that there's something comparable in spoken language, but my spoken French isn't as good as my written French.