Foreigners

[frenchfisher]

I'm sure this topic has been posted out a thousand times before, and it's lurking somewhere on the Wiki, but... eh.

One of my characters has met a foreign character for the first time. It's also a first for any of my characters.

First off... lots of the characters don't seem to be formatting properly. Is there some "cheat sheet" which turns the characters that appear into the characters as they actually are? It's rather disconcerting, to be sure

Second... how does interaction work, exactly? In real life, whenever I hear some language I don't know (and feel reasonably comfortable with the speakers), I try to jabber back a few of the random words I hear to try to make some sense of them. Usually I'm able to say one or two words in any context that make said speaker amused, and over time I've amassed a bit of a vocabulary (for instance, I can say "hello", "you're correct", "I'm weird", and "your mother scolds my horse" in Chinese; "hello", "goodbye", "I can't speak French", "I'm cheese", and "I don't know" in French; "hello", "You are a tank-woman", and "I am a child-highway" in German... etc.).

How does linguistic acquisition exactly work in Cantr? Do people know the languages right away? Or do they have to learn them? From past threads, I've gathered there comes a point when people can use online translators. When is that point? I also see you can use other languages in emotes. Is it okay to jabber in that other language like I do in real life, or must you strictly use emotes/grunts/attempting to convince them to speak English until that magical point when you can use a translator?

In any case, I'm looking forward to hopefully learning more about the language one of my characters has run into... it's one I know nothing about IRL. And as a budding linguist I am so very fascinated with the principles of language acquisition

[BarbaricAvatar]

I think what's generally acceptable for communication purposes is that you speak in the language that you spawned, but can emote in the other char's language (if you can identify it).

[sanchez]

Your chars know the language they spawned with, and must learn new ones in game through an active process of interacting with speakers of that language. So, lots of pointing, etc.. is entailed. However, emotes are meant to be visual and should be used a lot for language learning. And emotes can be written in any mutually understood language, most commonly English in Cantr. You are never allowed to use an OOC translator for your char's speech, but again, for emotes there's no problem. If your chars are trying to learn languages you as a player already know, you still must go through an active process with your char for a minumum of three cantr years before they can reasonably start gaining fluency. This is of course true for creating in-game dictionaries, too. No OOC sources are allowed. The thing you should try hardest to avoid is having your chars know words for things in a new language that they have never heard in game. But allowing them to absorb grammar, and particularly inflection in languages like Polish or Lithuanian, fairly quickly is not unreasonable.

[Cherize]

1. You meet someone who speaks a foreign language.
2. They speak to you in their native tongue.
3. You jabber back trying to imitate the other person.
4. They become offended because they think you are mocking them.
5. They hack you into little pieces with their sabre.
6. Unless they're Polish, then skip steps 1 through 4.

[Voltenion]

(u think polish are evil? hahaha)

I have met lots of foreign chars...Emotes are everything on those times...
You'll probably have to use inglish in emotes...If you know the other language your char can slowly learn it, but if you don't you can try to speak it but probably wont make any sense...

it really hard if the other player doesn't understand your emotes ( i had one char killed for that ) and normally the interacting won't go far but who knows....

[SekoETC]

If you can draw, using pictures has turned out to be very useful for one of my characters. Although some abstract concepts can be difficult, but I have managed to learn things like another, tomorrow, yesterday and help. Although I can't remember them right now but I have written a dictionary ingame.

Russians use encoding Windows-1251. I don't remember what the Polish use but you can find out by trying different options until it starts to look about right. Also in Polish since there are only a few letters different from English, you can learn to remember how they are represented in Western encoding. There are pretty good Polish dictionaries floating around and some Swedish-Turkish and Swedish-Esperanto on some islands.

[sanchez]

Seems you're really unlucky, Cherize, to encounter that segment of the majority, unless your chars show the same attitude you've done which would render it perfectly understandable.

ISO-8859-2 works pretty well for Polish.

[Doug R.]

There may be (slightly) more Polish players, but there are over 300 more English characters.

Pirates and criminals (and the easily annoyed) will of course prey on those who don't speak their language. There's no one to report them to their own people, and they can also more easily objectify their victims due to the language barrier. I wouldn't be surprised if half of all cross-language encounters involving any languages ended in violence. Additionally, with the increasing contact and hence increasing inter-language violence, preying upon foreigners may even be seen as an applaudable action (no one goes around spreading the news of how they traded maps and dictionaries with this nice foreign man, but everyone will know if some foreign ship lands and pillages a town).

[Sekar]

There may be (slightly) more Polish players, but there are over 300 more English characters.

Wouldn't that be because they are simply newer players and havn't gotten use to the game enough to decide to take on all fifteen available slots?

[sanchez]

That's absurd, Doug. Most of my chars have met foreigners and over half travel in foreign islands meeting Spanish, Swedish, Polish, etc., but the only ones to attack them were Lithuanian pirates, and that battle ended without death. The only Polish pirates I've met were not violent. They kidnapped someone and rp'd their demands, but were then slaughtered wordlessly by pirate hunters. Maybe you just need to try a little harder on introduction.

It's also clear that many players from all zones try at least one English char.

[Cherize]

Seems you're really unlucky, Cherize, to encounter that segment of the majority, unless your chars show the same attitude you've done which would render it perfectly understandable.

ISO-8859-2 works pretty well for Polish.

Attitude? Moi? Whatyou talkin bout Willis?

[I_am]

I have several characters who have interacted with foreign language speaking characters, and none of those encounters escalated into violence. One of my characters did witness a “hate crime” but my character happened to speak the same language of the hate monger and therefore wasn’t attacked.

[SekoETC]

This one town got looted around the same time when Polish ships were seen on the region, and we started suspecting it was most likely them, although later I started wondering if it were my Russian friends who did it. They have quite a collection of boats docked to their raker which points towards breaking locks, and if you're ready to break into abbandoned ships, there's not a big step to moving into "abbandoned" buildings.

[frenchfisher]

Thanks, everyone. I guess I'm just glad the foreigner doesn't appear to be aggressive, and that my charrie thinks she's some sort of divine emissary (->she has lots of patience)

[Doug R.]

That's absurd, Doug.

Well, when I turn on the news every night and see people butchering each other because of differences in politics, ethnicity, and religion, it doesn't take a mental leap to presume that such human ugliness would occur in the game as well.

Recently the game has seen Turk on Swede genocide, and if what was said in the "Depression" thread is true, the Lithuanians are purging an island also. I'm not an idealist; I'm a realist, and if I learned one thing in Cantr, it's that life is very, very cheap.