A common language for two characters of different languages?

[Estaar]

This topic has to do with languages and the CR, but I did not want to post it under Capital Rule Breaches, since the situation I am describing has not arisen. If you find it is in the wrong place in this thread, please put it somewhere else.

Imagine the following situation:

A player, native speaker of language A, but with a fluent knowledge of language C (but none other), has a character spawned in language A who ends up in a village where language B is spoken. In this village lives a character spawned in language B but who belongs to a player, native speaker of B, but also with a fluent knowledge of C. For whatever reason, both characters have dictionaries for their respective languages and the language C. So A has a dictionary A-C/C-A and B has one B-C/C-B.

Since C would be the only language that these two characters could ever successfully communicate in, what would be the conditions for them to do so? What length of time would they need to be in each other's presence (with dictionaries exchanged, of course), would they have to limit themselves to the words in the dictionaries, would they have to go on speaking some kind of 'pidgin' C or could they eventually speak it as fluently as their respective players are able to, etc.?

Allowing this would permit players of different mother tongues but a working knowledge of English have their characters communicate in English after they spent some time together. If one of them has to learn the other's mother tongue in order to speak, communication will never happen, or at least be a lot more difficult.

[Addicted]

It does and has happened. I think it's still a one ingame year where effort is made to learn the 'new' language.

[Ronja Rotschopf]

http://wiki.cantr.net/index.php/Game_Ru ... guage_Rule

At least two ingame years and active learning (at least when I was in PD only learning from dictionaries was considered as not sufficient to know more about a language than the content of the dictionaries). According to that rule the characters would not be allowed to speak fluently in language C. But for the sake of the communication of people of different language groups in my opinion it should be allowed that they communicate in language C at least on a very basic level which makes trading possible. And the reality is, that players usually don't complain about breaches of the language learning rule, even if there was never any language learning process. Switching to English is for many players a (too) simple solution.

Another (and imo better) possibility would be to roleplay language learning of language A and/or B and to use online translators after those two years. If as a result of that any misunderstandings occur it just makes it more realistic.

With dictionaries for A-C and B-C it is easy enough to create a dictionary A-B

[Doug R.]

And the reality is, that players usually don't complain about breaches of the language learning rule, even if there was never any language learning process.

In my experience, it's a common complaint, though, perhaps the only people complaining are those that have been busted for violating it in the past.

[Greek]

My characters are not using foreign language until I personally learn enough to use it (except checking some words in dictionaries).