[Basic] Skill of the week: Linguistics

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by SRoach

The way I understand it, that's the Only way to arrange the periodic table.

You can swap the 2 dimensional arrangement around a lot (I rather like the continuous spiral wrapped around a cylinder with the d and f shells as loops out from it myself) but really that's superficial. The *linear* order is fixed. Seriously if you have something with tens but not hundred of entries with associated numbers, and there's some way to read it so one set of the numbers starts with values that round to 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20 it's pretty much clinched already. There might be other things that could generate that sequence, but how often are they likely to be written down? If the numbers match to more decimal places and/or the next 80-some entries are that close too, it's not chance.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Assuming you're not a lot younger than I think you are, you've been exposed to a fair amount of Danish as a child and a teenager, so being able to tell apart Danish from Norwegian or Swedish is unimpressive. However, being able to tell apart Norwegian from Swedish would be Linguistics or something else that costs points.

I think I'm older than you, Peter. But anyway, I find it quite easy to tell Norwegian and Swedish apart, even easier if I only have text.

I can tell Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Faroese, and Finnish apart. I recognize German, French, Spanish, Italian, English. I have most of the Slavic languages in some sort of Slavic languages category in my head, that is I can tell you they're Slavic languages not not which one. Ditto for Arabic. I think I can recognize Japanese.

Is this Linguistics, or some weird Perk?

[dcarson]

In Omnilingual by Piper they had a lot more then the periodic table, although that was a key starting point. They did get the number system from that. They then were able to use chemical journals to get things like dates and descriptions of reactions. A large library of a technological civilization has a built in bilingual.

[dcarson]

Linguistics is a important skill in my current Stargate campaign. To keep it from being too important most planets there are at least some people that speak the goa'uld language that is based on ancient Egyptian. I also gave the linguist a Power Up that since they have aspected Serendipity and language Talent they can spend points to already know any Earth language. Add high Linguistics and they can communicate with Earth descended cultures on most planets.

[Mithlas]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

In 3e when Linguistics added to Language skills it served some level of practical purpose. Now it's at best a bit of an anthropological forensic skill and at worst mostly useless.

It can't be used to identify languages the character isn't Familiar with, dialects they might have passing familiarity with, or any of the previous 'decoding' examples? I'd think that's appropriate even if it shouldn't give extensive detail on something strange. What (else) was it used for in 3E?

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Using the Periodic Table seemed like a super obvious "common ground" to establish, to me.

Other stories have been based on exchanges of mathematical principles and physics, which might allow a little more of the grammar but would take decades more puzzling and extensive samples if there is no aid like the bilingual sample or multilanguage transcription. An alien with different scientific and cultural proclivities might rearrange the elements according to proclivity for isotopes found in nature, or energy required to alter certain volumes under certain pressure conditions. The problem is cultural bias, which isn't even the same from Krasnodar to Vladivostock.

Originally Posted by malloyd

There are actually quite a lot of linguistics related SF plots that can inspire game uses of the skill - Jack Vance, Samuel Delany and L. Sprague de Camp all seem rather fond of them. Though you need to be careful if your players are too well informed - it's not unusual for SF writers' understanding of language to be substantially shakier than their grasp of harder sciences.

I'm unfamiliar with those (might have to check them out). Not infrequent for writers to make mistakes, especially when writing something outside their expertise...like politics.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Also, it's interesting to speculate about the Linguistics skill, as envisioned by GURPS, being reasonable to have in a medieval setting. I've come to the conclusion that it makes no sense, and so any amateur philologist will need a different skill to represent that kind of ability.

Medieval, maybe. But I understand that more than one linguist has said that the grammars of Sanskrit written in ancient India are the most accurate descriptions of a language ever created. And that looks to be TL1.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by johndallman

You got the quoting confused: that was Daigoro, not me.

I have no idea how that happened.

Originally Posted by Mithlas

It can't be used to identify languages the character isn't Familiar with, dialects they might have passing familiarity with, or any of the previous 'decoding' examples? I'd think that's appropriate even if it shouldn't give extensive detail on something strange. What (else) was it used for in 3E?

It had the same use it has now plus the "adds 1/10 of Linguistics to all Language skills".

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The Tarzan method is right out?

I don't believe it would work. You have a picture of a cat next to the word "cat," let's say. But there are multiple other words following "cat." My Webster's says "a carnivorous mammal long domesticated as a pet and for catching rats and mice." So then you look up "a." There's no picture, and the definition is going to be abstract. You look up "carnivorous" . . . It gets impossibly complex. Even if the vocabulary is much simpler, suited to children, figuring out the function words, and what relationship they established between the content words, and how the content words relate to each other, is going to be baffling.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by malloyd

There are actually quite a lot of linguistics related SF plots that can inspire game uses of the skill - Jack Vance, Samuel Delany and L. Sprague de Camp all seem rather fond of them. Though you need to be careful if your players are too well informed - it's not unusual for SF writers' understanding of language to be substantially shakier than their grasp of harder sciences.

You can add Heinlein to that list. He alludes to linguistics in a number of places (for example, in Double Star); it's important to "Gulf," and quite central to Stranger in a Strange Land, which is all about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Of course, that hypothesis is fairly dubious as actual linguistics, but Whorf's essays appeared in a periodical published by MIT Press that Heinlein almost surely read; he wasn't just making stuff up.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Possibly because it's nonsense invented to be an amusing diversion by someone who was both far too intelligent and crazy for his own good.

(Not johndallman here)- Perhaps, but there are a number of researchers who consider it to be a natural language.