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Clash of the Cantrians

Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 11:37 pm
by wichita
The different language groups are getting closer together every day, it seems. I have noticed it most with my German characters, as the Spanish keep appearing more and more every day. With the mixing comes interesting issues, both realistically and Cantrealistically. Me being a language nut, this is more exciting than about any other development in the game. We have discussed it a bit before. I am curious to see how far it has come, not in terms of numbers or geography, but in terms of how it has actually come to affect the societies where the mixing is happening.

Are the characters tending to trade languages, figure out base level communication and trade?

Do they tend to ignore each other and just form independent subcommunities in a town? I have noticed this happening in my German town. The initial German population inhabits the indoors, with the steelworks and machinery, cooking meat, etc. Outside are the Spaniards, who are growing and developing. Before them it was the army of Dutch explorers that had landed, forged a bunch of iron and then left to find unsettled land.

I hear the Swedes and Turks are trying to kill each other for the most part, and there are a few English speakers exploring the Polish Zone and getting along quite nicely, trading wirds and grunts here and there.


What does it all mean for Cantr? Will this ethnic diversity finally present us with a way to simulate some deeper social issues to a greater extent?

Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 11:45 pm
by Zanthos
I have always wanted to lead an expidetion to the polish zone. I have seen a polish map of the area and it seems to be rich in resources, and I want to map it with an english character from one of the english islands. (I feel it wrong to map it in english by a character from polish zone going to english zone... it removes the whole of finding the islands.

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:11 am
by Nalaris
I can't wait to hear the culture clash...you know, someone should keep an OOC history of Cantr, which is, of course, always four (if not more) days behind at all times.

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:15 am
by The Sociologist
The were Poles in Seatown just recently, weren't there?

Speaking of which, how does one get Firefox to make sense of the text without munging up everything else? What encoding?

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:21 am
by saztronic
I've got a Pole on an exploring expedition with me. He speaks English, but we're RP'ing it pretty straight. We are through with basic vocabularly and are moving on to grammar.

I will say that I've learned some other languages IRL, but it's hard to do this via Cantr. It's not like I'm going to dedicate an hour a day to memorizing vocab and drilling myself with phrases. But with any luck we'll at least cobble together an English-Polish guide that will help people do more than grunt and point and establish viable if limited relationships.

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 1:15 am
by Zanthos
yes, there were pols in Seatown, but one of the origional two died of heart attack. The other never said a word.

The second group weren't there very long, and I never got to ask them to take me with them.

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 2:31 am
by Pie
LOL!!!
"Take me with you" That sounds like me when Those aliens visited...

I have noticed this also. I curretnly have a caricter on a rusian/english/polish island. It's very... interesting. Although were I am, It's mostly English, Polish people and Rusian people do come along and start international incedints sometimes. :P

But I must say, the majority of English caricters are all on the main islands, and have little or no contact with other languages. I have also noticed that news is spreading verry slowly. It is always that the explorer gathers his wood, and then goes along his way, never to return. This is a BIG problem. We, in Cantr, need to create nationality. Also, we need to create a need for political power. Make it so that only people with influence get to go exploring.

And how to do this is to make it so that symple ships cannot explor into really REALLY deap waters. That they have to stay in sight of land, and cannot go out of sight, or something. YES!!! MAKE IT SO THAT IT TAKES OLDER CARIES TO DO ANY TRAVVELING!!! OLD PEOPLE RULE!!!(Sarcasim :P ) But it is a necisary evil. I want to restrict the gathering rates of everything exept food... maby even food... Causing a need for cooperation and tools and spetial mine thingys, so that you need to be "In" to do anything. HURAY IN PEOPLE!!

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 6:49 am
by wichita
The Sociologist wrote:The were Poles in Seatown just recently, weren't there?

Speaking of which, how does one get Firefox to make sense of the text without munging up everything else? What encoding?

Cycle through the Western encodings under the View menu. One of them will eventually work. I am having to do that a lot lately to get my chinese characters to work.

saztronic wrote:I will say that I've learned some other languages IRL, but it's hard to do this via Cantr. It's not like I'm going to dedicate an hour a day to memorizing vocab and drilling myself with phrases. But with any luck we'll at least cobble together an English-Polish guide that will help people do more than grunt and point and establish viable if limited relationships.

I have discovered that it is a bit harder to do in Cantr than in real life, if for no other reason but the lack of ability to point to resources and items. I find it very hard at times to not break into English emotes with my German character, not that it would be totally wrong, per se, but I try to keep my character's language as pure as I can.

My oldest German character that I was talking about above actually has a rather weird mix of German and Spanish happening right now that I am personally very pleased about. :) One other character is taking him up on his offer to trade languages and seems to be understanding my gibberish reasonably well.

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 6:56 am
by Chris Johnson
The Sociologist wrote:The were Poles in Seatown just recently, weren't there?

Speaking of which, how does one get Firefox to make sense of the text without munging up everything else? What encoding?


Unicode UTF-8 encoding should work - This should handle all languages currently live in Cantr except for possibly Russian and Chinese
If that desn't work then someone more knowledgable will have to chime in

( remember I'm English, so the concept of foreign tongues and scripts just fills me with horror :wink: ... including that American thingy which tries to pass for English :lol: )

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 7:06 am
by johntsai
Unicode UTF-8 should also work for Chinese, to see the things in the game, that is. I translated all the Chinese while using the 'western ISO-8859-1' encoding.

However, if the person talking is using a Chinese font encoding, then you'll have to start jumping through the encoding yourself...

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 8:47 am
by Surly
I saw a Russian once. He didn't say much. Are there any Russians left now?

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 8:55 am
by wichita
I wish I was better at typing in cyrillic or I would have given it a try long ago. Speaking of russians, is Savanik still around?

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 12:59 pm
by SekoETC
I once met a Russian but that's all. My Swedish character has a map that marks the areas of the Turks, Esperanto, German and was there still something? Anyway, he landed on this huge island, assuming it was the Turkish island the notes had mentioned, but the first people he ran into told that there's only Swedes on the island. That and mammoths. I guess the inlands are unpopulated.

Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 3:17 am
by nateflory
I've had one char meet up with someone who spoke both Russian and emoted english. (I say they spoke something called "Rushing' in-game :roll: )
Otherwise, I've actually got a few characters furiously boat-building to set sail and discover strange new tongues! I'm excited to hear there is a bit of mixing going on already.

Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 3:24 am
by Zanthos
I can vouch for the fact that there are russians on Rus. One of my charries spawned there, though I have only seen like 3 russians, and two spoke english when they realized I had no idea what they were saying.