Garbled names.

[Freman Scum]

One thing that has always bugged me about learning another language is that the language filter garbles your name.

The newb dwarf says in horrible sirihish,
"Mj nrmz et Gtud.

The confused sergeant says,
"Gtud?"

Shaking his head the newb dwarf says,
"Gptb.

etc etc etc.

There was always the option in the past to put it all in caps (which is some circles is frowned upon) which I always did when saying my name.

Sure I might not know how to say "Where's the latreen" propory, but I -know- how to say my own name!

Now that the Imms have made capital letters garble too, poor non human non lingists can not comminicate their own friggen name.

This can be a problem when they are the third "tall muscular" "dark sinewy" "sandy haired green eyed" in the room.

What I suggest is a new symbol that put before me ($me) would put in your name.

This way you couldn't use it to comminicate other anything other than your name, which caps lock could.

Whatyathink?

I like it in more ways than I don't.

Though, I can imagine there'd be some names that are hard to pronounce, like all these teachers constantly has problems saying the names of my friends, "Vishal" or "Wojciech"

So.. umm... maybe the $me would have a much less chance of being garbled?

[X-D]

Agree, normaly I end up using the way or even going ooc because it annoys me so much.

Your name remains the same no matter what the language, I work with a bunch of greeks and Latins, I cannot speak greek and my spanish is poor at best, but I can still say Stavros, evangalose Angel, Jesus etc etc

[crymerci]

Along the same vein, if someone is talking about you in a foreign tongue, don't you think you'd still recognize your name?

[Bestatte]

Well I'm not sure if this still works, and it's definitely an OOC "fix" to a mechanical situation (in my opinion it's mechanical, and not an RP problem)..

But if you separate the letters of the name with periods, the name will show up correctly.

>You tell the green-eyed gal, in allundean, "B.e.s.t.a.t.t.e. is how I pronounce my name."

>The multi-hue-haired cowgirl says to you, in allundean, "B.e.s.t.a.t.t.e. ib jir U prlvuwncr zy niif."

Again, I have no idea if it still works, but it did at one point.

[Delerak]

Or a command called introduce that just echoes to the person.
the skinny, bald man introduces himself to you as FremanScum.

[Freman Scum]

heh, I'm neither skinny nor bald.

The burly, dark haired young man maybe....

[John]

Like the idea, don't like the introducing idea. Good point with you know when someone says your name, even if it's in another language. Good point with mis-pronouncing difficult names. So here is an idea of mine.

Here's my solution. When someone says something that you have as a keyword, you get it ungarbled. That way you'll recieve your name ungarbled, but other people won't (when someone says a name I don't know and they say it wrong, I don't realise, but the person whose name it is will realise they meant their name).

Yes you'll also recieve "short" or "man" ungarbled, but I'm sure that's not the end of the world considering people who try to speak a second language do get some words right. I know when I went to Japan I stayed with a family. The girl I was staying with could pronounce some words perfectly, but got "poor" wrong. Which was amusing because she kept saying "my english is pure" and because I'd only just met her I had no idea what she was saying. She also told me her father use to be a genie. To this day, I still have no idea what she meant.

Also, a sidenote for people who roleplay none humans. IMO it isn't considered poor roleplay to talk like "Me grog. Me hungry" if sirihish is your second language. In fact it makes perfect sense to me, I know only  a tiny little bit of japanese, so beside a few catch phrases (such as "anata wa baka desu which means your stupid) I can't speak japanese at all. Also, it's more then acceptable to get words wrong. For example in Japanese, kawai means cute however a word that is similar to kawai means a bad thing.

Just my 2 'sid.

[Swordsman]

The only problem I see with the "$me" idea is that you don't always want to use your character's real name. I guess you could have your IC real name be added as a keyword, but then there's a problem for people who use multiple names, because only one of them can ever be the real name that doesn't get garbled by the translation code. One easy way around this would be to just say that whatever word you type after the "$" doesn't get garbled, and trust people to not abuse it. If people did want to abuse it, they'd have to set up a macro or something to include "$" in front of every word. Not sure how this'd work out, but it's just an idea.

Swordsman

Maybe it should be something you can only do at Chargen.

Name: Bob

Extra Keywords: floppy, $Bob, $Smelly

say (Scratching his ass, then sniffing his finger) Hey, I'm $Bob, but some people call me $Smelly.

[Savak]

I think I understand the logic, but I don't think I agree with it.  A name is just like any other word, particularly when all those words are foreign.  In any series of twenty syllables, there's really no way to differentiate which ones are a "name."  I can't tell one spoken word from another, much less what any of them stands for.

For example, I can passingly -read- Latin, French, Spanish, and even some Italian.  But I'll be damned if I could listen to even a slow conversation and make any sense out of it, because to my ear native speakers (okay, maybe not Latin) tend to let their words blur together and get lost in their accent.

How do I let someone else know my name?  I thump my chest and say it -- ONLY it.  Then they try to repeat it, almost always incorrectly (particularly if they are not familiar with the name, not at all uncommon when we speak different languages), and we do the name-pronounciation dance.  I may meet a Spanish lass named Maria and understand her name right away, true -- or I may meet an Arab-Indian named Mustafagawa Sundararaman and have some trouble deciding whether he's calling me something rude or telling me his name (much less learning to pronounce it back to him). (Names falsely created to show my ignorance.)

My point is, the name-dance of "Gtab," "What?", "Gulb," "WHAT??", "Goob"..  etc., is probably longer in Armageddon, but should still exist.  A name is just another word in a new language, and can take time to recognize and pronounce -- the main two parts you're skipping by it being a "name" instead of some other part of the language is what it -means- and how it grammatically fits into a sentence (although in some languages a name can arguably be changed depending on grammatical structure).  The only downside is KEYWORD targeting; if I have trouble pronouncing someone's name in RL I can just make it up or create a nickname (many non-English speakers have a simplified Westernised name, at least around here), but in Arm that only works as an RP device.

-Savak

[Eclipse]

In relation to dwarves, I've always liked to (though this hasn't actually been RPed much that I can tell) work around the fact that dwarves understand Sirihish pretty well. The reason why it comes out garbled is because the dwarven tongue is so heavily gutteral and different from Sirihish that the accent presents problems. This is similar to my Chem TA who's Chinese but he has a very amazing understanding of english however, when he goes to speak to the class, people understand his writing with utter ease but when they go to listen to him, it's kind of a guessing game as to the meaning as some sounds aren't pronouncable to him yet due to the accent. In my Psychology courses, it was even written that in studies, they'd found that the best time to learn another language would be before the late teens (I think) due to the fact that after this time, you would have a native accent which would offset your speech patterns. The reason I use sometimes for why dwarves become better at speaking and hearing Sirihish is that they are hearing more of the language being spoken and as they are, their accent kind of alters and becomes more like that for Sirihish while retaining the dwarven qualities so the net result is speech that is still heavily accented but understandable enough to pick up without difficulty.

[John]

Savak has a good point. Another example is Japanese names. Some are really easy (e.g. Sayaka) whereas others are just downright difficult (Tsaiganakai), hell people have difficulty whenever I tell them my name cause of my english accent. I get all sorts of names like Jarn.

Also, the one time I played a dwarf, whenever someone said a word that sounded like my name (cause of the garbling) I'd look up, and if they were at the same table I'd start talking to them. So have fun with that.

[Swordsman]

I guess part of the issue is being able to refer to someone, and not just pronouncing the name. If you get a dwarf introducing himself, you might not be able to pronounce his name properly but you should ideally still be able to refer to him other than by using a keyword (which may be more likely to overlap with someone else's keyword in the room or whatever). But I guess this could all be filed away as OOC code issues that we all understand and will work around if we run into it IC (i.e., the classic situation where you're talking to someone and then someone else with the same keyword comes into the room and you say/whisper it to them instead).

Swordsman

[John]

you whisper to the brown-eyed men "listen up. this is the plan"
the evil-eyed, brown templar walks in
you whisper to evil-eyed, brown templar "when that evil-eyed templar walks in, we're going to kill him".
Welcome to ArmageddonMud.

[Callisto]

I'm with Scummy on this one, it gets annoying as hell when you meet someone with common key-words like green, muscular, tall and you can't understand their name due to language barrier.

If I'm speaking french and I say my name is Callisto, its still going to be Callisto to hear it. Theres no french word for it, a name is a name and no matter how you slice it, Callisto is still Callisto.

Can you imagine what its like being a Byn Sergeant? All those dwarves, all with similar key-words, all speaking with a horrible accent, all of whom can't speak Sirihish to save them from being beaten with a sack full of marbles? Good god people, won't someone think of the Byn?!  :shock:

I like the idea and I hope it gets added soon.

[Peabody]

I'm all for not having my name ungarbled.. I lived in non-english speaking countries for a better part of 2 years, and Im pretty damn sure that even if the person could not pronounce my name they at least heard me pronounce it correctly (unless I was drunk).  Also Im sure they understood that the word I was saying was my name and not me refering to some common object.   I personaly would like to see me be able to pronounce, and have heard properly, my own name -ungarbled- to whomever Im talking to, and having them know the noise associated with me.  Hey, I know english and french.. but that dont mean my ears dont work.. I can hear what someone is saying in swahili.

Tho I dont really think that the person would necisarily be able to pronounce my name, especially if it was a long and complicated one.  I dont know how I feel about them being able to automatically get my name right away tho.  There would have to be some rp involved in the person actually getting your name's pronunciation right.

The only realistic solution I can think of would be the @me thing someone said and an @<someone else's name> thing that didnt garble the word after it iff it was actually a name of a person.   So you and everyone else would recieve the phrase spoken with an ungarbled name and a garbled or ungarbled phrase(depending on if they knew the language or not).  Seeing as the person would be saying your name in whatever language you speak, and not thier own.

Me