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So I just use Vulgar Lang[1]. I assume I'm a filthy pleb? It's been good enough for my elf games to date? [1] https://www.vulgarlang.com/generator/
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Oct 14, 2019 18:50
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homullus posted:It's obvious that they meant they applied the phonetic changes described in Grimm's Law to Sumerian to produce a consistent and new set of words. But that's exactly the problem. I don't think Xiahao Dun was taking issue with the fact they used the term "Grimm's Law". I think his point was that Grimm's Law describes a very specific set of phonetic changes that historically happened to occur with the Germanic languages; it's not some sort of general process that all languages go through; and it doesn't make sense to apply that same very specific set of phonetic changes to an unrelated language (whether you call it "Grimm's Law" or not). I mean, I guess he could have been more explicit, but I think I got what he was saying; it didn't come across to me like he was just trying to show off his linguistic knowledge; and you really seem to be going out of your way to be gratuitously insulting toward him for some reason. That being said, I do agree it would also be interesting to see a discussion of alternatives that could have been used and what very old languages do (or did) exist.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:56
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Per Xiahou Dun's reaction to the white wolf ancient language stuff, I'm reminded of my own (and, presumably, anyone with even just a little bit of education in anthropology)'s reaction to the film Quest for Fire (La Guerre du feu). It is a wonderful film in my opinion, and I enjoy re-watching it every few years. However, it also depicts three different "tribes" (or in at least one case, clearly a different species) of Homo-genus peoples as neighbors, with wildly different levels of technology, a thing that certainly never happened and is actually absurd. (Different species of Homo genus definitely coexisted in prehistory, but among the same species, immediate neighbors have never shown to have totally different toolkits. We have seen cases where a new toolkit, such as Clovis, sweep through and eliminate a different (older? "more primitive"?) toolkit, but again that's not a case of weird side-by-side coexistence.) From a storytelling perspective, it works out OK. There's these guys in basically furry ape-suits who are supposed to be maybe australopithecines or their descendents who attack with unworked rocks and stuff, there's our caveman humans who have spears and other stone tools and wear skins, there's a group of cannibal red-heads with I guess similar levels of technology but also the ability to make fire, and there's an "advanced" village of people who make huts and (apparently) fermented drinks and have good fire-making technology. The story of the protagonists heading out from their caveman group to find a source of fire and then encountering these strange people, and how it affects them, and ultimately bringing back both a mate and the technology itself, is compelling, particularly because the acting is really good. But if you're not caught up by the story you may find yourself yelling "no loving way" at the screen a bunch. Even in 1981 when the film was made, it's clear that Gerard Brach (the writer) and Jean-Jacques Annaud (the director) did not consult a modern anthropologist; they're working from a novel from 1911, it should occur to them "hey maybe there's been some new developments in anthropology in the last 70 years?" Showing some cultural differences does not require radically different technology levels, especially given that the tribes on the screen are inhabiting different biomes. It's one of those things where you can really enjoy what's presented, and engage with it, and perhaps see some aspects that were done well and correctly, even while recognizing that it could have been more accurate (and consequently perhaps actually educational in some degree) just by taking the effort to consult with a domain expert or two. Re: Jargon. When I write a document for developers working with my company's software, I do not have to define "PaaS." I know my audience understands what Platform as a Service is, and can unpack "platform" and what is likely meant by that, and that's very convenient in particular for keeping a concepts topic concise. Remember, concision is a good thing! It's also not terrible that the word "platform" has a general colloquial definition in English that is different from its meaning in this specific realm. That's just how jargon works; you use clear writing to indicate by context that you are using the jargon-version of the word, just as you use context (right?) to help any reader understand any homonym. Where jargon is annoying or inappropriate is when an author invents a term to refer to a concept that already has an accurate and reasonable term; or, where a document introduces a lot of new jargon at once, which can be overwhelming. Worst is when the invented jargon word chosen by the author is also a homonym with one or more other, normal-use definitions that could also fit into the sentences they're writing. You can sometimes notice the writer subconsciously struggling to rectify this bad choice by always using initial caps for their special jargon word, just to provide that clarity. I can't think of an obvious example right now but I bet someone else can come up with a few. "Platform-as-a-Service" or PaaS or even just "platform" is a good jargon word because it'd be very rare for me to be writing about developing applications while sitting on some kind of raised stage or pedestal, nor as part of a political party or candidate's set of proposals, nor while wearing shoes with extra thick soles. It's contextually easy even for a reader who doesn't know the definition yet (including readers for whom English is not their first language) to notice via the context that we are using "platform" in a special way here; no other dictionary definition for the word remotely fits. Imagine if instead of "mana" you decided to codify the units of magic power characters gain and spend for spells as "Faith." You'd have to capitalize Faith all the time, and when you also have gods and priests in your game, it starts to get extra confusing. That would be a poor choice of jargon words, even if it was chosen to be evocative of what you are trying to say about magicians in your game and setting, because you are likely to find yourself writing sentences for which the word "faith" could be contextually appropriate; or at least, sentences with the word "faith" that will cause your reader to stop and think "wait, did they mean 'Faith' here, and just forget to capitalize it?" In other domains, jargon words tend to just sort of appear in the lexicon, probably because lots of jargonish stuff gets trialed in people's casual conversations or powerpoints or whatever, and then the ones that are particularly useful catch on and get repeated until they're the industry standard. It's maybe kind of a weird exception, that in this little weird domain of RPGs we have single authorities intentionally creating and enforcing system-specific jargon words that the audience simply has to accept if they want to use the game. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Oct 14, 2019 |
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Oct 14, 2019 19:16
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If you want a fantasy series that gives a poo poo about anthropology and archeology lemme tell you about a light, speedy yarn called the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
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Oct 14, 2019 19:41
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Leperflesh posted:Per Xiahou Dun's reaction to the white wolf ancient language stuff, I'm reminded of my own (and, presumably, anyone with even just a little bit of education in anthropology)'s reaction to the film Quest for Fire (La Guerre du feu). Yeah, I think I had a similar reaction (though less forgiving) to one page in an obscure role-playing game called Imagine Role-Playing. (Which I might someday review on Fatal & Friends—I see someone once started to review it there, but the review was abandoned—if I ever find my copy, which is somewhere in a storage unit. Also if I ever feel like suffering, because it is long and boring.) The page in question was an overview of physics—which happens to be my own academic area of relative expertise—and I am not exaggerating when I say that almost everything on that page was completely and painfully wrong. The author(s?) threw out all these technical terms that they clearly didn't comprehend in the slightest and spouted paragraph after paragraph of outlandish nonsense. This wasn't supposed to be the made-up physics of their fantasy world, either; this was supposed to be a discussion of real-world physics and how it could be applied or varied for the game, except that despite their know-it-all, quasiauthoritative tone the authors' knowledge of physics apparently was limited to having read a few buzzwords and leapt to fanciful conclusions about the rest. I... really hated that book, based mostly on that one aggressively counterfactual page. (One small example of the misinformation there: the book claimed that life violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is a sometime creationist talking point, but... isn't remotely true. Some of their other physics "facts" were even sillier.) Granted, it's been many years now since I read it, and it's possible I'm remembering it as worse than it actually was. But even if it wasn't quite as bad as I remember, that still leaves plenty of room for it to be really bad.
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Oct 14, 2019 19:58
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dwarf74 posted:If you want a fantasy series that gives a poo poo about anthropology and archeology and potsherds and menhirs lemme tell you about a light, speedy yarn called the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
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Oct 14, 2019 19:58
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dwarf74 posted:If you want a fantasy series that gives a poo poo about anthropology and archeology lemme tell you about a light, speedy yarn called the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Quickest 400 hours of audio books you will ever listen to.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:00
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Jerik posted:One small example of the misinformation there: the book claimed that life violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is a sometime creationist talking point, but... isn't remotely true. It's certainly one of the more interesting proofs of the existence of the Sun I know of.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:02
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Jerik posted:(One small example of the misinformation there: the book claimed that life violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is a sometime creationist talking point, but... isn't remotely true. Some of their other physics "facts" were even sillier.) Let's be honest though, you have to be into deep postgrad to use entropy (the physics concept) correctly other than to flattly tell people that you can't make perpetual motion machines.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:06
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I like the First Tongue as a setting element but particularly in Werewolf 2E it's crept really far into the actual rules base and it has done no favors to functionality nor to style. Like, you have to remember the difference between "wasu-im" and "basu-im" instead of remembering the rules for Death Rage.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:09
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Agreed, I know the different between soft rage and hard rage but I can't tell you which one Wasu-im is.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:14
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Kurieg posted:Agreed, I know the different between soft rage and hard rage but I can't tell you which one Wasu-im is. the hard rage first tongue word starts with H iirc e: nvm, i'm thinking of the word for human form
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Oct 14, 2019 20:15
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Weak and weedy wasu-im, big and beefy basu-im. Those are admittedly terrible words to use in the rules, because they're too similar; the same way Exalted has some problems with 'essence score' and 'essence pool.'
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Oct 14, 2019 20:23
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dwarf74 posted:If you want a fantasy series that gives a poo poo about anthropology and archeology lemme tell you about a light, speedy yarn called the Malazan Book of the Fallen. It's a measly 10083 pages long! As an aside, if you're a Malazan or Black Company fan, please go check out Band of Blades.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:24
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Gerund posted:Let's be honest though, you have to be into deep postgrad to use entropy (the physics concept) correctly other than to flattly tell people that you can't make perpetual motion machines. Oh, I don't have a problem with someone not understanding a technical subject. What bothers me is someone not understanding a technical subject and then pretending to be an authority on it anyway and actively spreading misinformation. I guess that's why the First Tongue stuff in Werewolf doesn't bother me as much as Imagine Role-Playing, even aside from the fact that linguistics isn't my specialty. I mean, I think it's interesting to read about what the Werewolf writers did wrong, but the fact they made those mistakes doesn't fill me with ill will toward the creators the way that page from Imagine Role-Playing kind of did. But that's because the Werewolf writers clearly aren't trying to present themselves as experts in ancient languages or claiming they're describing the Way Things Really Are, while Imagine Role-Playing came across as really self-important and convinced of the truth and profundity of the scientific details it was propounding while being utterly, utterly wrong.
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Oct 14, 2019 20:27
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My understanding is that the First Tongue conlang method of 'take Sumerian, through it backwards through an unrelated linguistic transformation' is mostly to produce a consistent feel and sound, plus to hide some of the jokes. Such as the fact that the First Tongue name of the Little Road Tyrants, the spirits of stop lights, actually translates as Red-Yellow-Green rather than Little-Road-Tyrant.
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Oct 14, 2019 21:50
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Jerik posted:But that's exactly the problem. I don't think Xiahao Dun was taking issue with the fact they used the term "Grimm's Law". I think his point was that Grimm's Law describes a very specific set of phonetic changes that historically happened to occur with the Germanic languages; it's not some sort of general process that all languages go through; and it doesn't make sense to apply that same very specific set of phonetic changes to an unrelated language (whether you call it "Grimm's Law" or not). I mean, I guess he could have been more explicit, but I think I got what he was saying; it didn't come across to me like he was just trying to show off his linguistic knowledge; and you really seem to be going out of your way to be gratuitously insulting toward him for some reason. It looks like you are saying it doesn't make sense to apply a set of phonetic changes to a language you intend to be made up for a game. Is that what you are saying?
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Oct 14, 2019 22:06
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Mors Rattus posted:My understanding is that the First Tongue conlang method of 'take Sumerian, through it backwards through an unrelated linguistic transformation' is mostly to produce a consistent feel and sound, plus to hide some of the jokes. A notable and deliberate exception was the auspice names, which were just the auspices from W:tA given a phonetic makeover to make them sound like the rest of the First Tongue. Ahroun -> Rahu, Ragabash -> Irraka, etc.
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Oct 14, 2019 22:23
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Lemon-Lime posted:It's a measly 10083 pages long! I checked it out long enough to find out that Taken-equivalents are playable and then stopped because that's the opposite of what I would ever want from a Black Company game.
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Oct 14, 2019 22:24
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homullus posted:It looks like you are saying it doesn't make sense to apply a set of phonetic changes to a language you intend to be made up for a game. Is that what you are saying? No, that's clearly not what anyone's saying, and at this point I don't know if you really don't understand what's being said here or if you're just trying to be as insufferable as possible, but either way it's apparently not worth trying to engage with you further. Mors Rattus posted:My understanding is that the First Tongue conlang method of 'take Sumerian, through it backwards through an unrelated linguistic transformation' is mostly to produce a consistent feel and sound, plus to hide some of the jokes. Okay, now if that's the case, if it's not really in-universe supposed to be Sumerian with the Grimm's Law phonetic changes applied but that's just a fun method they used to create their own invented language that isn't supposed to be related to any real-world languages, then heck, as far as I'm concerned that's another matter altogether. Yeah, in that case I think any criticisms of the historical and linguistic inaccuracies are pretty much moot.
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Oct 14, 2019 22:28
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It's the language naturally spoken by spirits, which are an entire order of being separate from material reality. In-setting the spirit language is implied to be either the language humanity spoke before the Tower of Babel type event, or alternatively it's just that it probably inefluenced Sumerian's development. In-setting you can't discover the First Tongue by running Grimm's Law on Sumerian, though I imagine a character who pieced together how to talk to spirits from linguistic reconstruction would be a perfectly cromulent NPC or PC? Just, the specifics of that reconstruction would be different and thoroughly within the fiction. E: it's also explicitly not the ur-tongue of all language, which is High Speech (wizard glossalia).
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Oct 14, 2019 23:02
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Jerik posted:Okay, now if that's the case, if it's not really in-universe supposed to be Sumerian with the Grimm's Law phonetic changes applied but that's just a fun method they used to create their own invented language that isn't supposed to be related to any real-world languages, then heck, as far as I'm concerned that's another matter altogether. Yeah, in that case I think any criticisms of the historical and linguistic inaccuracies are pretty much moot. I think the implication that "Hey, maybe in the setting-of-the-CoD-that-we-can't-call-the-WoD-or-nWoD-anymore, the First Tongue influenced Sumerian" is supposed to be there, because, like... sure, why not? Sumerian is a mortal-spoken ancient language in that setting and the First Tongue is a metaphysically significant supernatural-spoken also ancient language also in that setting, and they sort of resemble each other. Clearly something could be going on there, and it would have to be in the direction of the the First Tongue influencing the mortal tongue because the First Tongue would have to predate it. But who knows the details? To the extent that was ever meant to be present, it's only a vague implication. The First Tongue was never supposed to be good Sumerian or an assertion of the universality of any particular phonetic shift; it's just a conlang with consistent-enough phonemes to feel like one conlang and not a bunch of mashed-together syllables made up off the tops of authors' heads.
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Oct 14, 2019 23:05
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Joe Slowboat posted:In-setting you can't discover the First Tongue by running Grimm's Law on Sumerian, though I imagine a character who pieced together how to talk to spirits from linguistic reconstruction would be a perfectly cromulent NPC or PC? Just, the specifics of that reconstruction would be different and thoroughly within the fiction. Netchurch could probably figure out the First Tongue by running Grimm's Law on Sumerian, but he is fortunately locked safely away in the o/cWoD.
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Oct 14, 2019 23:09
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CitizenKeen posted:So I just use Vulgar Lang[1]. I assume I'm a filthy pleb? It's been good enough for my elf games to date? I love Vulgar. It takes a lot of work to make something that's easily intelligible to people without a linguistics background though.
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Oct 15, 2019 00:00
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Jimbozig posted:I checked it out long enough to find out that Taken-equivalents are playable and then stopped because that's the opposite of what I would ever want from a Black Company game. You may want to look again. The Chosen and Broken have playbooks but they are for the GM use, not the players.
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Oct 15, 2019 00:30
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LongDarkNight posted:You may want to look again. The Chosen and Broken have playbooks but they are for the GM use, not the players. Lol, really? Haha, I literally read playbooks, went "ugh" and then stopped reading. I'll definitely give it a second look, knowing that! Thanks for the heads up.
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Oct 15, 2019 00:38
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I still don't really understand why this is an argument since I thought I was pretty careful to phrase things as "O that's a really good idea, but I just have some minor qualms with the implementation that most people would never notice that stick in my craw as a personal problem". Because that's my actual opinion. It's legit a good idea and I'm only armchair quarterbacking it.homullus posted:Yeah. I think it would be great if Xiahou Dun wrote about good candidates for a very old language to use in a game. I would bookmark and read Xiahou Dun's game conlang thread, in the a parallel universe where that existed. The question is a bad one and ignores how language has actually happened. There probably was a first language but it's totally lost to time. And way beyond the time-scale that we could hope to reconstruct with any tools available or on the horizon. quote:
I'm sorry I didn't fill your arbitrary level of information necessary to make a good post? Excuse me? I never even actually said that I'm a linguist. What the hell. And yeah, I have handled a bunch of older documents than that for work (I specialize in old Chinese), and I was mentioning it cause it was relevant? I was bringing up relevant information to the conversation that I happen to have, not doing like a weird power play. Calm down. quote:It's obvious that they meant they applied the phonetic changes described in Grimm's Law to Sumerian to produce a consistent and new set of words. Please just skip that stuff and move directly to why Grimm's Law doesn't do interesting things to Sumerian, or why another (older) language would be an interesting choice, or whatever. No because this doesn't make any sense. Grimm's Law isn't a magic process that happens to languages. It's a specific thing that happened to one group of languages once. It's pure technobabble and isn't even a meaningful statement. You can't just "apply Grimm's Law to something". That's just running regex on something. It has nothing to do with how sound change actually works and makes zero sense. I made that physics analogy for a reason ; it makes that little sense. quote:
This is just bizarrely Eurocentric as gently caress. And not in a way that even makes sense cause I guarantee you have no idea what PIE sounds like. Not accusing you of nothing cause you're generally a good poster that I enjoy, but you do know this is like straight up Nazi rhetoric, right? That whole appeal to a great Aryan past and all that. Meanwhile from a linguistic standpoint I could point out dozens of other languages. quote:
Woof. That's a tall order. The short version is that I charge for that and it'd take some actual work. The slightly longer version is that you'd have to keep in mind that you'd need to localize everything, first of all, so there are going to be both start up and on-going costs. Then if I wanted to make things more salient specifically to English speakers, I'd drop the whole idea of reproducing and go for something more evocative and admit that I'm not reproducing the actual sounds. Probably something with lots of Old English/Germanic style compounds, but I'm just going off the dome here. Like make death rage "Mordbot" or something, I guess. I could probably think of something better if it wasn't late and I wasn't tired. But all of this was under the assumption that it was actually meant to be a real reproduction which it seems might not be the case. If it's 100% just a total conlang than it's harder for me to criticize it unless it does something silly.
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Oct 15, 2019 04:54
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I think it’s really just meant to have a pseudo-Sumerian aesthetic and steal words from wherever as desired, and they ran all the words they did use (Sumerian and others) through some phonetic shift inspired by Grimm’a Law to make them all sound vaguely like they came from the same language. So total conlang fantasy bullshit, but one with an interesting set of steps. It seems meant to sound old, alien, and yet consistent with itself so that werewolves sound like they have a coherent culture of their own derived from the spirit world rather than just human civilization. Plus, I just like things that are vaguely Sumerian-influenced, they don’t come up enough in fantasy for my preference. E: sound like the same language to amateurs, I don’t think any of this process was expected to really impress IRL linguists.
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Oct 15, 2019 06:52
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Joe Slowboat posted:
O yeah, totally. I keep circling back to this, but I fully admit I'm picking some serious nits and most people wouldn't be bothered. I compared it to the uncanny valley specifically because I really like it as an idea, but because I'm the kind of person really interested in that topic (and thus super into this idea), I can see seams in the implementation. I specifically brought up WtF cause I like the use of a conlang as an evocative thing and said that. We were specifically talking about my area of expertise so I wanted to chime and try to be informative. Both to people who might not know about the topic but also since we have a bunch of the writers here so they can think about this. (You know, with all their free time and extra research dollars that they're totally rolling in. I appreciate they're trying their level best, and again want to underline that I think it's a great effort and really cool.)
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Oct 15, 2019 07:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:Woof. The slightly longer version is that you'd have to keep in mind that you'd need to localize everything, first of all, so there are going to be both start up and on-going costs. Then if I wanted to make things more salient specifically to English speakers, I'd drop the whole idea of reproducing and go for something more evocative and admit that I'm not reproducing the actual sounds. Probably something with lots of Old English/Germanic style compounds, but I'm just going off the dome here. Like make death rage "Mordbot" or something, I guess. I could probably think of something better if it wasn't late and I wasn't tired. Wasn't this basically Tolkien's approach? Like, his whole linguistic background with Westron (the common tongue) was to back it through Anglo-Saxon so that it sounded exceedingly familiar to English-speakers but also just foreign enough to be fantastical. Samwise's original name just meant "half-wit" and so it was translated that way.
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Oct 15, 2019 07:33
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I dig this. I go on similar tirades about law's depiction in fantasy tabletop.
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Oct 15, 2019 07:34
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Zurui posted:Wasn't this basically Tolkien's approach? Like, his whole linguistic background with Westron (the common tongue) was to back it through Anglo-Saxon so that it sounded exceedingly familiar to English-speakers but also just foreign enough to be fantastical. Samwise's original name just meant "half-wit" and so it was translated that way. Not exactly--Tolkien only ever developed a fairly limited subset of the "actual" Westron language, since English stood in for Westron in the "translated" text. What he did was, for a lot of the languages of Men in LotR, was picked real-world languages as stand-ins that had the same approximate relationship to modern English that those languages had to Westron. So the Rohirrim speak Old English, because "real" Rohirric was an older but still partially-mutually-intelligible form of Westron. Dalish was even farther removed while still sharing a common ancestor, so it got glossed as Old Norse, etc. (This was mostly a lot of legwork to justify why the Dwarves in The Hobbit had Old Norse names even though Dwarvish is clearly inspired by Semitic languages.) He also invented a lot of Hobbitish words by linguistically modernizing archaic terms from Old English, as though those words had remained in regular use and had thus evolved into modern English. It also led to some bending over backwards to explain some of the linguistic puns or phonetic translations in the books. For example, in Elvish, the river that runs near the Shire is called the Baranduin, which the Hobbits glossed as "Brandywine," because it sounds similar. Of course, in "real" Westron, the words "brandy" and "wine" don't exist, so Tolkien invented the Westron word "Bralda-him," which meant "strong ale" and which Tolkien dutifully "translated" for his English-speaking readers. He also, as you said, gives the "real" names of a few of the Hobbits in their archaic form of Westron and explains how he translated them into archaic Old English names. TL;DR Tolkien was a huge honking nerd and I find his linguistic obsessiveness fascinating and endearing.
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Oct 15, 2019 08:23
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Banazîr Galpsi and Maura Labingi is the one true pairing, but Kalimac and Razanur had cooler names.
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Oct 15, 2019 08:37
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Xiahou Dun posted:No because this doesn't make any sense. Grimm's Law isn't a magic process that happens to languages. It's a specific thing that happened to one group of languages once. It's pure technobabble and isn't even a meaningful statement. You can't just "apply Grimm's Law to something". That's just running regex on something. It has nothing to do with how sound change actually works and makes zero sense. I made that physics analogy for a reason ; it makes that little sense. But it is a meaningful statement? The statement "applied Grimm's law to Sumerian", like... has a meaning? And that meaning is "applied the set of consonant/sound changes that occurred in proto-Germanic languages to Ancient Sumerian as if it, too, were a proto-Germanic language (even though it isn't), in order to transform it into a new, fictional language". And sure, doing that might be idiotic garbage, linguistically speaking, but, like, it describes a thing that a person making up a language could do? It'd be entirely the *wrong* thing to do if you wanted your resulting words to be accurate to the way that sound change actually works, but, like, that's what White Wolf apparently actually did. I think the reason that some people were kind of bristling at you is that when someone - not even the person who did it - used the phrase "applied Grimm's Law to Sumerian" to (accurately if loosely) describe White Wolf's actions you came in guns blazing about how that was a completely nonsensical statement, I don't even know what that process could even mean, that's just technobabble? it comes off as either hostile to White Wolf's lack of linguistic understanding (which is fine) or like... self-righteously taking to task the bumbling neophyte who dared darken your desk with an insufficiently rigorous report (which is less fine). personally I can read your post either way, and I think it was intended the former way!
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Oct 15, 2019 13:08
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Xiahou Dun posted:This is just bizarrely Eurocentric as gently caress. And not in a way that even makes sense cause I guarantee you have no idea what PIE sounds like. Not accusing you of nothing cause you're generally a good poster that I enjoy, but you do know this is like straight up Nazi rhetoric, right? That whole appeal to a great Aryan past and all that. Meanwhile from a linguistic standpoint I could point out dozens of other languages. Until somebody finds the audio recording of the meeting in the yurt where they made up PIE, nobody knows what it sounded like. I am not interested in a mythical Aryan past. I am speaking of the fact that most players in my games (1) speak English, and (2) learned another PIE language in school, if they learned another language at all. This increases the chance that they will recognize cognates in the made-up language. This would be on top of any other correct inferences they'd make without recognizing cognates. Xiahou Dun posted:No because this doesn't make any sense. Grimm's Law isn't a magic process that happens to languages. It's a specific thing that happened to one group of languages once. It's pure technobabble and isn't even a meaningful statement. You can't just "apply Grimm's Law to something". That's just running regex on something. It has nothing to do with how sound change actually works and makes zero sense. I made that physics analogy for a reason ; it makes that little sense.
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Oct 15, 2019 17:36
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homullus posted:I am really surprised you're doubling down on this. You are the only one struggling to make sense of the statement, and it's not because you know that Grimm's Law is an observation about Proto-Germanic.
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Oct 16, 2019 01:37
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I think you’ve got who looks like an rear end in a top hat in this exchange pretty throughly reversed. I dunno, authoritatively declaring others ignorant because you yourself were missing something is a bad look. If you're going to be pedantic, you had better be right. But Homullus also came in a bit hot. I think it'd go a long way if XD actually admitted what they got wrong - that Grimm's law does in fact make sense as a thing to apply to non-Germanic languages if your goal is to have a made-up fake language for a game played by the 99.999% of the world who are not professional historical linguists. I can't speak for him, but I'd bet Homullus would have no issues after that. (Edit: maybe also the Nazi comment - calling someone a Nazi for being more familiar with one group of languages than others is absolutely uncalled for). And I understand the annoyance. Like when people authoritatively say that a d20 just has so much more variance than a d6... when the discussion is in the context of a binary pass/fail skill system. But people can post about math and I'm glad they are trying to think of things mathematically - I just wish they were a bit less sure of themselves while they got stuff wrong. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Oct 16, 2019 |
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Oct 16, 2019 02:51
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I think you’ve got who looks like an rear end in a top hat in this exchange pretty throughly reversed. I dunno, I’d say the one who is willfully misunderstanding statements to play the “im an expert” card is probably the rear end in a top hat here. Not to mention calling someone a nazi for playing primarily with people who speak English.
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Oct 16, 2019 05:21
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This thread’s been real spicy lately. Lotta people making the least generous reading of other people’s posts
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Oct 16, 2019 09:11
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| # ? May 25, 2024 17:02 |
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This conversation sucks rear end. Why don't we talk about ah.... *runs finger down Ettin's twitter* https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hoard/dungeon-hoard/description The game was just straight up lifted from here: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/dungeon-hoard1 The funding's been cancelled already, but if you were a fan of that genre of tough guy internet comments in the vein of insane extra-piece chess man putting out a bounty on Kai Tave, the comments are worth perusing. Actually, speaking of chess man, how's he doing now?
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Oct 16, 2019 12:43
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