Tinytalk Episode 002: Parlez-vous?

I'm awed by this podcast, THANK YOU. I'm not really a MUSHer, but I'm well into text-based virtual worlds: I'm the only developer of the only two still maintained and developed talker servers, and a advocate for this kind of virtual worlds, including how they should evolve, and maintaining the Portuguese talkers community.

It's awsome to have a podcast that tells what are the developments and thoughts of the MUSH community, specially because IMHO MUD variants communities are way too segregated, making efforts to evolve preety hard...

Anyway, congratulations for the show, keep doing it!

Intro

Welcome to Tinytalk, a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds. I'm your host, Javelin, and this episode focuses on language in mushing – natural languages, not the programming kind. We're going to look at three different language topics: softcoded language systems for RP MUSHes, the new Unicode support in the Tinymux server, and using MUSH as a vehicle for teaching and learning languages.

Language systems

In many roleplaying settings, characters come from different cultures, and language forms an important basis of culture difference. By providing a language system, an RP mush provides another means by which characters can identify with their culture and with other characters from the same culture. At the same time, they also provide a means for allied characters to speak without outsiders understanding them. Think about the importance of Chakobsa battle language in the Dune setting, or Klingon in the Star Trek milieu.

MUSH language systems vary in complexity. A very basic system might send the speaker's words to all the others in the room who know the language, and shows the non-speakers random gibberish. More sophisticated systems make some effort to do one or more other things. These include:

* Partial fluency. Some speakers and listeners may only understand the language partially, so some of the message will come through, and some won't.

* Language learning. The ability for players to teach each other better language skills.

* Speaker-specific accents: Some speakers may have characteristic ways of speaking that flavor all their utterances. This could involve sound changes – different pronunciation of vowels – or changes in where stresses are placed in words. These might be individual, but are more likely regional or cultural – maybe all humans who try to speak Klingon have a characteristic human accent. Well, in that case, the variation is probably physiological, but you get the idea.

One interesting area for building language systems that hasn't received a lot of attention is modeling language comprehension with real linguistic principles. For example, human accents and mispronunciations are not really arbitrary – certain kinds of sound features of one's native language tend to get overlaid onto the spoken language. For example, if you speak a language which doesn't have a native "F" sound, like Tagalog, it's natural to swap "F" and "P" sounds when speaking a language that does, like English. In an RP MUSH where there are a limited number of languages, it would be quite feasible to consider, for each language, how a native speaker of that language would pronounce each of the other languages. And modeling this would add a new dimension to intrigue; the sharp-eared character (or their sharp-eyed player) could do a Sherlock Holmes and discern someone's background from how they speak.

And that's just phonetics. Linguistics is much broader. Think about what you could do if you could model morphology – characteristic errors in the choice of words or other meaningful syllabus units, or syntax or grammar – word order, for example. With a grammar parser, you could replace natural-sound constructions like "John's dog" with "a dog of John". You might want some hardcode support for that, but even a parser on the level of the famous Eliza program could probably pull that off.

And then there's semantics. We have some common metaphors in English for very basic things. Great emotion, for example, is understood as heat, so we get the fires of passion, the heat of the moment, the pressure of anger, and so forth. That's sensible for people, because we do flush when we're worked up, and we're only really cold when we're dead. But a race of snowmen might express things quite differently.

Has anyone not seen the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Darmok", also called "Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra"? This is Episode 2 in Season 5, back in 1991, and Picard has to communicate with a people whose language is primarily metaphorical and based on their history and mythology epics. The phrase "Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra" expresses the idea that by facing a common enemy, people become friends – because that's what Darmok and Jelad did in their mythology.

Of course, players can choose the way they express things, and great roleplayers will often maintain distinctive ways of speaking for their characters. Is it too much for someone to try to capture more of this in a coded language system? I’d like to hear what you think about that.

Interview with Brazil

Stephen Dennis, better known to many as Brazil, is the developer maintainer of the Tinymux server. The latest alpha release, TinyMUX 2.7.0.4 Alpha, is the first mush server to support Unicode, a standard for representing all the world's language's characters. Brazil and I spoke about the implications of Unicode in mush.

(No transcript for interview)

Visit to Intermush

For this episode's visit to a MUSH, I spent a little time at Intermush, a multilingual MUSH that's all about language learning. It's got two goals:
1. To be usable by anyone, no matter what language the user speaks.
2. To be a place where one can learn any language.

The most dramatic thing about intermush is that the whole MUSH – including the messages generated by the server, most of the commands, the room descriptions, and the interaction with objects, like a little Hangman game I found, can be done in your choice of seven languages: English, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Dutch.

Not only can you experience and extend the world in several languages, InterMUSH has been scheduling live language lectures with players and staff volunteering to teach Spanish and Croatian so far. These lectures are archived on the MUSH, so you can catch up if you're coming in in the middle of a series.

They're in the process of setting up "virtual countries", with air travel between them, to enhance the language learning with other cultural learning experiences. The Head Wiz there, Jurica Palijan, is the leading Croatian translator for the Pennmush server, and has a really well-defined vision going on here.

News and notes
* It'll be a few weeks between this episode and episode 3, as I'm about to take a trip to the Philippines for a couple of weeks and really immerse myself in Tagalog. I'll keep my eyes and ears open for anything that might be interesting to the mush community while I'm there.