Chinook Jargon and the Limits of Common

I stumbled recently into reading about the Chinook Jargon, a pidgin language formerly widely used for trade in the Pacific Northwest, which drew vocabulary from native Chinook and Nootka languages as well as English and Canadian French.  Nominally it has/had about 700 words. 

An 1889 Chinook Jargon dictionary from Project Gutenberg is an interesting skim.  Lots of concrete nouns for animals (including pests like lice vs fleas).  Body parts.  Colors.  Social relations (like one's brother).  Kinds of people (I particularly love that "Boston" is a noun meaning "An American").  Weather.  Objects like combs and guns and money.  Verbs like want, go, give, come, dance, tell, injure, and lie.  Numbers.  Time, days and weeks and seasons.

Lots and lots of overloaded meanings.  Tum-tum is both the literal heart and the figurative will or opinion.  Skookum is both strength and ghosts.

Lots of meanings from assembling other words.  Hyas is high or big.  Puss-puss is cat.  Hyas puss-puss is a panther.  Halo is none or without; halo wind is without breath, eg dead.  East is comes-sun, west is sits-sun.  Skunk is stink-tail; rattlesnake is rattle-tail.

The connection to gaming is probably obvious.  If Common is a trade pidgin, your players probably shouldn't be having philosophical conversations with captured goblins in it.  I'm not saying you should write a list of 700 allowed words that your players can use when speaking Common, but...  I'm not saying you shouldn't do that either.  A limited vocabulary creating a need for figurative language could create lots of room for amusing miscommunications.

It could be pretty funny, and not entirely unprecedented - I seem to recall a caveman RPG that restricted the number of words that players had access to (Og, perhaps?). 

(Obviously, the reasonable thing to do would be to stop players when they try to use Common for abstract conversations, but where would be the fun in that?)

Natural Language and Causality

Does it strike anyone else as strange that all natural languages (that I have met so far) are built around cause, effect, and intentionality?  The whole separation of subjects, verbs, and objects necessarily injects causal inference into every statement - verb happened to object as a consequence of subject's nature.

Contrast this with the nature of raw experience, where causal relations are never explicit in any single action, and can only be extracted from prolonged observation.  The causal information density of language is much higher than that of sensory experience, but at the expense of accuracy and nuance.

Contract this also with the mathematical formalism of the function, where we relate a 'cause' and an 'effect' through enumeration of all causes and all effects which follow from a certain 'law', and none of which are really actions.  Here there is no inference - only truth, of a sort.

What does this have to do with RPGs?  Not sure.  Am tired.  Maybe relevant to players forming causal inferences about sandbox settings, and the value of providing NPC adventureres and rumors to inform them of some of the details of the universe's operation (like "Wait, you killed a bunch of wyverns out in the wilderness?  I bet they had a lair and it's full of unguarded treasure...").  Causal information density there is evidently much higher than traipsing around in the woods for a couple of months...  and the mathematical formalism corresponds to letting them read the encounter tables.

Maybe also relevant to learning new games, which is a topic I have been considering lately (coworkers desire one-shot).

I suspect that this will not be the last philosophical, maybe-but-probably-not-relevant-to-gaming post in the queue.

Scaled Tongues

Setting work on Scaled Continent continues.  Start date of campaign at FLGS is set for 3 November, so I have just over two more weeks.  Running a game for a group of complete strangers will be...  interesting (provided I can get any to sign up).  If not, well, I've heard good things about Roll20...

Been working on mapping, custom treasure, and custom spells.  Not Joe Orcs these beastmen - Player's Companion and custom spells for their witch doctors and shamans.  Got to thinking about language and the importance thereof in dealing with natives recently.  I like the assumption that the various beast species have their own languages (crocodileman, viperman, toadman,...), along with a general 'Thrassian' pidgin from the Imperial days and a religious / court / high language, probably Draconic.  Common is the language of slaves and former slave races, who also have their own racial languages (Elven, Dwarven, Auran).

The plethora of languages suggests some fun complications to me which are typically glossed over.  First off, how many languages do beastmen speak?  Off-the-cuff heuristic says that the higher up the chain of command they are, the smarter and better travelled they are.  Normal beastmen speak only their tribal language, while champions speak two languages (tribal + pidgin or rival tribal), subchiefs three (tribal + two pidgins or rival tribals), and chieftains, shamans, and witch-doctors four or five (tribal + two pidgins or rival tribals + Draconic, typically).

Entertainingly, this means that the guys you're most likely to capture to interrogate for intelligence (the grunts) are the least likely to be able to communicate with you.  Hi-larious!  Also, the Comprehend / Read Languages / Tongues / Telepathy / ESP spells are much more useful when language barriers crop up reliably than in a game where you occasionally meet a dead script in some guy's tomb but all the beastmen speak Common.  As are the Thief ability to read languages and the late-binding +Int language slots.  ACKS provides plenty of ways to work around this problem, but it could still get in the way occasionally and entertainingly.

The other side of the coin is that the language you're speaking may effect your reaction rolls.  Choose wisely; an armed band of demihumans addressing a lizardman in Common comes off as a slave revolt, while the same armed band of demihumans speaking Thrassian is more likely to be perceived as Voltari mercenaries.  Speaking the tribal tongue of those you are addressing is liable to get a bonus, while speaking the tribal tongue of an enemy group may net a penalty.  Common sense applies, but a plus or minus one bonus to reaction rolls from language might be utilized to good effect by canny PCs.