Interlingua

[dataweaver]

How would you handle a character who knows Interlingua - or some sort of trade pidgin, for that matter? That is, languages that aren't intended to be complete, primary tongues, but rather easy-to-learn "second languages"?

[prestidigitator]

Re: Interlingua

 

I usually make them 1-point Adders for the language(s) they relate to (like literacy or intimate knowledge of dialects). Good for pidgins, secret codes, etc. You could probably also do it as (part of) a Professional Skill in some cases.

[torchwolf]

Re: Interlingua

 

I suppose Interlingua or Esperanto would have 2 pts of similarity to Latin and Spanish and 1 pt to most other languages, excluding the Arabic/Semitic family, Chinese dialects, Japanese and many "native" languages (native North and South American, African, Aborigine, etc.).

 

Then again, I'm not a linguist (nor Linguist).

[dataweaver]

Re: Interlingua

 

I don't know about Esperanto; but Interlingua was constructed by using grammar and words from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English, German, and Russian, with a bias toward the Romance Languages. The effect is that people with a passing familiarity to the likes of Spanish, Italian, or French are generally able to puzzle out what a statement in Interlingua means.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Interlingua

 

After reading up on Interlingua, and a short history of it (really short to be honest), it's similar to Esperanto, but not as widespread in use.

 

Within the context of the Hero System I would apply the following traits to Interlingua:

2 Point similarity with English, French, Intalian, Portuguese and Spanish

1 Point similarity with German and Russian.

 

This is from a really brief history of the language's development, where the first five are the primary references and the last two are secondary references (at least, according to wikipedia and one other random website I looked at).

[torchwolf]

Re: Interlingua

 

After reading up on Interlingua, and a short history of it (really short to be honest), it's similar to Esperanto, but not as widespread in use.

 

Within the context of the Hero System I would apply the following traits to Interlingua:

2 Point similarity with English, French, Intalian, Portuguese and Spanish

1 Point similarity with German and Russian.

 

This is from a really brief history of the language's development, where the first five are the primary references and the last two are secondary references (at least, according to wikipedia and one other random website I looked at).

 

Eminent modeling.

Incidentally, this proves the Language Similarity rules covers learning such inter-languages easier.

In a medieval Fantasy Hero, Latin does the same, only backwards from the Romance language similarities (well, duh, since it's the very cause of those similarities).

[Bloodstone]

Re: Interlingua

 

Within the context of the Hero System I would apply the following traits to Interlingua:

 

2 Point similarity with English, French, Intalian, Portuguese and Spanish

1 Point similarity with German and Russian.

 

Ok, I'm no linguist, so take this all with a grain of salt...

 

I think I would disagree on the 2 point similarity to English. I'm really not seeing how Russian or German would help much either, despite what Wiki says.

 

Almost the entire vocabulary seems to be derived from Romance Languages, so Latin (Vulgar) should be a 2 pt similarity as well.

 

I came to this conclusion by looking at a website written almost entirely in Interlingua:

 

http://www.interlingua.com/

 

I can read and understand the vast majority of it because of my familiarity with Spanish (Mexican dialect). Now, I've also picked up some French and German, plus a smattering of Italian and Portuguese (Brazilian), so I've probably got a slight leg up on most folks for puzzling these sort of things out.

 

But I was able to read the website at a decent speed, with only occasional pauses. Granted, I might be reading one or two things slightly differently than intended, but I'm getting he gist of everything here.

 

It would take a LONG time for me to puzzle anything out if I only knew English, but I could probably make heads or tails of it with enough time (a good deductive mind and a decent grasp of English etymology would help too...)

 

That said, I'm not seeing how anyone fluent in only Russian or German would be able to read any of this. So far, maybe 1 word in 20 might have a Germanic base. I don't think I've run into anything Slavic yet at all, but since my Russian and Polish sucks I rally couldn't say for sure...

 

For the record, I'm pretty sure we have somone on these boards that IS a actual linguist.

[dataweaver]

Re: Interlingua

 

That sounds like a 3- or maybe even 4-point similarity to Spanish (and presumably French, Italian, and Portuguese): you read the Interlingua site at a decent clip without any training in Interlingua at all, which either means that you got a point or two in it for free from your existing languages, or that you were making successfil Int checks to puzzle out the words' meanings. I can see English being a 2-point similarity, maybe three, largely due to its tendency to mug other languages for "loan words"; while German and Russian might be 1- or 2-pointers.

 

After thinking about it some more, I suspect that the other difference between Interlingua and more traditional languages is that it's rare to find anyone with anything approaching "native" fluency in the former. Most speakers have only one or two points in it. The same would hold for trade pidgins: there may not be such a thing as native fluency.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Interlingua

 

I only speak English and was able to read that site pretty clearly. Of course since the vowel shift half of English sounds like French anyways. The only Spanish I speak is food. No Portuguese at all, nor Italian.

 

I have a spattering of all those languages, and aeons ago I could speak French fluently but I'm so out of practice I don't claim to speak it anymore.

 

I have no idea if I'm accurate or not, so I won't say either way, regarding the similarities and simulating them with System Mechanics. Seems to me that French, English and Spanish have the heaviest influence, from an English speakers POV.

[torchwolf]

Re: Interlingua

 

I really do not know why I did this, but anyway:

 

 

Esperanto (1887-), its later variant Ido (1900s), and Interlingua (1937-):

All of these three are intended as International Auxiliary Languages (IAL). They are similar enough for the purposes of the Language Table that they could probably be purchased together as IAL, but (especially when spoken) treating them as dialects of Latin, much as Gaelic doesn't distinguish between variants.

 

 

While not exactly correct from a linguistic viewpoint, that should suffice for game use; if you want some deeper detail, you could for example rule that Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua have only 4 points of similarity, since they are indeed discrete (though largely mutually intelligible) languages.

 

 

All are based on words from the Romance language family. Esperanto and Ido are designed to be learned easily and are partly constructed from Slavic grammar. Interlingua is intentionally built from Latin.

 

 

As for native speakers:

(from wikipedia): “Native Esperanto speakers (in Esperanto denaskuloj) are born into families in which Esperanto (and usually other languages) is spoken. This usually occurs when the parents meet each other at an Esperanto gathering but do not know each other’s native language. Often one or both parents choose to use Esperanto as the main language in communicating with the children, who thus acquire the language in the way that other children acquire their native languages; those children then become natively multilingual. It also happens that the parents use Esperanto between themselves, but use another language when speaking with the children. Then the children, who wish to understand what the parents are saying between themselves, learn (or at least comprehend) spoken Esperanto.”

 

Personally, I suspect that the IAL languages have no 5-pt fluency level, since they are relatively recently constructed and have nowhere near the vocabulary of naturally evolved languages (Esperanto-English dictionary is 55,000 words).

 

 

OK, hope someone finds this useful.

[Bloodstone]

Re: Interlingua

 

I only speak English and was able to read that site pretty clearly. Of course since the vowel shift half of English sounds like French anyways. The only Spanish I speak is food. No Portuguese at all' date=' nor Italian.[/quote']

 

You may well be right and I may be over emphasizing the influence with Spanish just because of my (somewhat) bilingual POV.

 

To test this, I showed the site to my boss. He's never taken a class in any foreign language. He was able to decipher several paragraphs rapidly. He got caught on a few words.... and had a good laugh at the line "Appare sex vices per anno"

 

But overall he figured it out pretty easily. Well, either that, or we both mistranslated it wrong

 

Another odd observation... at one point there is a paragraph on the site where the word "photo" clearly appears in English. It's surrounded by several words that, in my mind, were clearly Spanish. So I read the word as "foto", complete with a Spanish accent

[ghost-angel]

Re: Interlingua

 

I think that's the general intent - there's enough of any one language, or words that are so similar between languages, that a native of one of the contributors will 1) naturally filter it through their personal language and 2) be able to easily translate unknown words simply due to the context of being in known words (even if said known words looking horribly misspelled).

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: Interlingua

 

In a Star HERO setting, an artificial language to which there is really little point on Earth today might be valuable. Harry Harrison was a great exponent of Esperanto: his anti-hero The Stainless Steel Rat "spoke Esperanto like a native", and the villains of one of the novels taught Esperanto to a coalition of aliens in order to better control their actions.

 

I remember Esperanto advocates noting that the European Parliament had a huge translation staff and thought it would be better if everybody used Esperanto. And I thought "Sure -- trade thirty languages only some people understand for one language nobody understands!"