Super-Complex Language

[MistWing]

Yet another question...

 

I'm thinking of making a secret language that would be very difficult for someone else to figure out. My idea is to add the Crypography skill to a Language skill and declare it to be a very hard language to learn (requiring Cryptography at the same or better skill level as the language's Cryptography).

 

What do you think of this? Is this the way to go, or is there a better method?

 

Thanks

MistWing SilverTail

[Fitz]

Are you using the Language Similarity system? Because it may be simpler just to decree that it has no similarity to any other language, so that it takes an extra point to learn. To be able to get reliable information they're thus going to have to spend at least 3pts for Fluent Converstaion, and more likely 4pts for Completely Fluent. Plus, if it's a written language only you coulfd also sting them for Literacy -- another point.

 

If 5 character points isn't enough, then you can just restrict the learning opportunities through roleplaying.

 

I guess what I'm saying is that a language is a language is a language; even a wildly different language will use the same learning skills and brain function as a normal one. Adding additional character point requirements seems to me to be unreasonable in terms of the Language aquisition rules as they stand.

[Derek Hiemforth]

I agree with Fitz. I'd just rule it to be dissimilar to all other Languages, and therefore have it cost one extra point. I suppose if you wanted to make it even tougher, you might also rule that the Linguist Skill Enhancer doesn't apply to it, or say that it's really dissimilar to any other Language, and charge two extra points instead of just one.

[BobGreenwade]

One of the alien species in the Star Hero game I'm putting together has just such an incredibly complex language. The extra point -- or even up to three -- for dissimilarity really is the way to go.

[austenandrews]

Since human language has a strong biological component, I'd say an alien language might even have other requirements to learn, such as a minimum INT, or maybe even an INT roll to use it.

 

For a complex but human language, I agree with just adding an extra point or three to reflect the difficulty. Unless knowing the language has some other inherent benefits that need to be factored in.

 

-AA

[Jhamin]

If you are concerned with people just plopping down some points and "figuring out" the language, then just remind them that many GMs require people to actually justify their point expenditure.

 

If the language is that odd, then the justification gets that much harder. In the real world there are several languages no longer spoken by any living person that are not intrinsicly harder than a living language but that scholars have spent decades trying to deciper with little or no success.

 

If Hyrogliphics were un-learnable without the rosetta stone, then a language that is intentionally obtuse is pretty safe.

[zornwil]

I like MistWing's idea. I think it's worth doing even if only to see how it plays out. I think it would well simulate some language governed by rules not normally associated with language but with decoding. I'd assume the language would be difficult because everything in it - even grammar - is highly contextual AND idiosyncratic, so that even the members of the civilization don't speak it "naturally". I'd guess though that there'd be a tongue more common than this language among those not so disciplined.

 

With all due respect, I think saying "a language is a language' is not enough if this language is supposed to be so mysterious and far removed from how we ordinarily perceive language.

 

But then again we are not sure of the context MistWing is putting this in. It might be interesting to hear more about the purpose of the speakers of this language within the campaign world.

[Ghost who Walks]

Originally posted by Fitz

I guess what I'm saying is that a language is a language is a language; even a wildly different language will use the same learning skills and brain function as a normal one. Adding additional character point requirements seems to me to be unreasonable in terms of the Language aquisition rules as they stand.

Not necessarily.

 

At its most basic, language is simply a form of communication, of which there are several methods.

 

Any sense can be used to communicate...humans use sound (language) and writing (sight). Brail is a form of touch language. Morse code, hand signals, and sign language are all examples of a sight language.

 

A species might also use senses that are outside of human range, into ultrasonics, for example.

 

Or it might decide to communciate by scent/pheremones.

 

Originally posted by Jhamin

If Hyrogliphics were un-learnable without the rosetta stone, then a language that is intentionally obtuse is pretty safe.

There was a reason for this. Hieroglyphes are like chinese letters...a single symbol represented an entire word or concept. All european written languages are descended from the phoenecian alphabet, where the symbols represented sounds. I imagine if a Chinese archaeologist had been around, he would have figured it out.

 

Sumerian alphabet was also picture based. Untranslatable for centuries, they finally found some people in the swamps of southern Iraq who were still using it (after over 6,000 years). So they translated the tablets and found hordes of grocery lists, shopping lists, inventories...

 

If the language you are trying to create is supposed to deliberately be a code (Like Navajo code-talkers), then all bets are off. You can make it as complicated as you want, your only potential problem is finding people to learn it.

 

It does present an interesting idea for Star Hero/fantasy...imagine a small, fairly useless creature whose only value is that he can form mindlinks with others of his race. Put to work by a more powerful race, they now have a fairly impenetrable system of communications. Until a powerful psionic came along, of course.

 

Game mechanic wise, your idea sounds pretty good. It provides another use for cryptography.

[BobGreenwade]

Originally posted by Ghost who Walks Any sense can be used to communicate...humans use sound (language) and writing (sight). Brail is a form of touch language. Morse code, hand signals, and sign language are all examples of a sight language.

 

A species might also use senses that are outside of human range, into ultrasonics, for example.

 

Or it might decide to communciate by scent/pheremones.

There's another approach, which I use for the above-mentioned alien species, the K'dathkhoni. It takes a bit to explain, so bear with me.

 

First, imagine that a language uses the same word for any form of precipitation falling from the sky to the ground -- rain, snow, hail, drizzle, sleet, or whatever else. You'd have a pretty easy time learning that one word, but a native speaker of that language might take a while catching on to which of the words matches up to what kind of precipitation. It's like comparing out word love for the six (or more) words in Greek covering the same concept.

 

Now take that idea several steps further. We have a few words under the concept of rain, including drizzle, downpour, mist, and perhaps a few others, depending on intensity. The K'dathkhonev language separates rain into seven levels of intensity and three ways of evaluating the intensity (steady, pulsating, or intermittent), making twenty-one general types of rain. It also distinguishes between rain coming down during the day, at night, or at twilight (the general divisions of dawn and dusk); whether the rain is over water, flat land, or mountains; and the temperature of the water in the rain (warm, lukewarm, cold, freezing, or partially frozen). That yields 945 forms of what we call "rain," and each has its own two- or three- syllable root word completely unrelated to any of the other 944.

 

And that's just for rain -- nearly every concept in the language takes things to that extreme. There are dozens of conjunctions that cover every shade of and, or, but, therefore, however, and so forth.

 

As you can guess, a native speaker of the K'dathkhonev language would likely have a much easier time learning English than you or I would have learning his language. In game terms, the language has a 3-point dissimilarity penalty for all other languages, but a native speaker would not have to pay that penalty -- I'm thinking of modeling that with a variant form of Linguist as an Everyman Skill.

[Jhamin]

Originally posted by Ghost who Walks

There was a reason for this. Hieroglyphes are like chinese letters...a single symbol represented an entire word or concept. All european written languages are descended from the phoenecian alphabet, where the symbols represented sounds. I imagine if a Chinese archaeologist had been around, he would have figured it out.

 

But you have to remember that European archaeologists knew of Chinese and had deduced that the symbols represented concepts rather than sounds, but that didn't help them much. They still didn't know what any of the symbols represented. The Rosetta stone gave them a sample of text in three different languages, two of which they knew. It still took years until a language expert worked it out.

 

Language is pretty complex. The Navajo code language wasn't a weird dialect or special obfuscation of the normal, it was only slightly modified. The thing was that Navajo had origionated from an entirely different langague family than anything the Japanese were familiar with, they simply had no way of relating it to anything. That is why they could never translate it.

[Ghost who Walks]

Like your K'dathkhonev, BobGreenwade. Sentances would be short (Why say its raining tonight when you can say one word?) yet very complex.

 

We are on the same page regarding the Rosetta stone, Jhamin. Language is one of the most important cultural concepts, since it is the primary means to give information to the next generation.

 

A couple more points, just general.

~The longer a language has existed, the more complex it will become. This is partly dut to changes in the language, and from borrowing terms from other languages.

 

~For a lot of languages, changes will occur with every generation, as new words are invented, or used for other defenitions. The slang terms "cool and hot" are good examples. A species that lives long enough (say the Malvans) may require electronic translators to speak to the younger generations.

[Zeropoint]

Regarding the K'dathkhonev language and its myriad variants of "rain": you also need to consider the number of phonemes available for the language, and the rules for constructing syllables from them. Unless the language has a very large number of sounds (possibly including sounds that a human can neither produce nor distinguish) and/or a very liberal set of syllable construction rules (compare English vs. Japanese), it may turn out that there aren't enough syllables to make a thousand unique three syllable words for every basic concept.

 

Of course, there are many different ways to alter the sound of a phoneme. A vowel could be shorter or longer, higher or lower pitched, rising, steady, or falling in pitch, in addition to simply having the tongue, lips, and cheeks (and any other applicable mouthparts) in various positions. A language that regards all of these as meaningful distinctions would probably be very hard for humans to learn.

 

Oh, one more thing: you might want to look into "artificial languages" or "constructed languages" (AKA 'conlangs') for more information on just what goes into making up a language.

 

Zeropoint

[BobGreenwade]

Originally posted by Zeropoint

Regarding the K'dathkhonev language and its myriad variants of "rain": you also need to consider the number of phonemes available for the language, and the rules for constructing syllables from them. Unless the language has a very large number of sounds (possibly including sounds that a human can neither produce nor distinguish) and/or a very liberal set of syllable construction rules (compare English vs. Japanese), it may turn out that there aren't enough syllables to make a thousand unique three syllable words for every basic concept.

 

Of course, there are many different ways to alter the sound of a phoneme. A vowel could be shorter or longer, higher or lower pitched, rising, steady, or falling in pitch, in addition to simply having the tongue, lips, and cheeks (and any other applicable mouthparts) in various positions. A language that regards all of these as meaningful distinctions would probably be very hard for humans to learn.

 

Oh, one more thing: you might want to look into "artificial languages" or "constructed languages" (AKA 'conlangs') for more information on just what goes into making up a language.

 

Zeropoint

Actually, I'm already a conlanger -- I've invented two languages, one of which already has a net presence. (I'm even thinking of suggesting that Rav Zarruvo, the language I have on the net, be used as the Rigellian language in the Hero Universe.)

 

Essentiallly, the language of the K'dathkhoni do use every single sound in the IPA, including more than a few that need special notation, and their syllable construction rules are vitually nonexistant. The origin of their language is that they took to learning languages to such an extent that their "global language" is a melange of nearly every language that had developed, including a few from other worlds (though these were merely influences). Imagine Earth's global language being a mixture of English, Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, Hawaiian, Swahili, Bantu, Ethiopic, Cherokee, Klingon, and Minbari -- not just one of these languages strongly influenced by the others, but as much of a blend as "Spanglish" is of Spanish and English. Then you have the general idea -- I repeat, the general idea.