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.