Revise/Clarify the English-Only Rule

[UnknownMurder]

I bring this rule in question.

Speak only English
in the OOC chat, and try to stick to using the latin alphabet in IC. 

 

So, I have adminhelped the people in questioned for speaking in another language. Please notice this, this is not a staff complaint but the message was quite very aggressive.

 

So, I spoke to Garncanus for a clear understanding of the rules. He has informed me of somewhat policy that is not in the Server Rules that I had not been informed of this.

 

Again, not a staff complaint. I am not angry at you. I am pointing out what the staffs has interpreted the rules.

I wish to merely interpret the very explicit rule that says, "SPEAK ONLY ENGLISH". I also wish to point out that the language ICly that we are speaking is Tau Ceti Basic which is meant to be written in English as the general population of which the people are English-Speakers. I mean, I am here because I speak English and English is pretty much the default language. Please note that I am not trying to cross out other language common slang such as "Bon Appetite" because you pretty much know what it means.

Taking this for an example, Tau Ceti Basic is a supposed language that we all speak and understand each other. Server is a default English server and everyone has to understand English in order to play on this server. So, you start speaking Spanish in Tau Ceti Basic. No one will understand you and thus defeats the purpose of Tau Ceti Basic. Tajaran speaking Tajara Language is a different thing, you're not meant to understand that language as a human without a Universal Translator.

And to conclude the suggestion, you can't just mix a non-default (third-party) language that portion of the population doesn't understand through Tau Ceti Basic. Do you all see where I'm getting at? Can't just put a non-default language in a common language where you should be able to understand each other.

[Garnascus]

Taking this for an example, Tau Ceti Basic is a supposed language that we all speak and understand each other. Server is a default English server and everyone has to understand English in order to play on this server. So, you start speaking Spanish in Tau Ceti Basic. No one will understand you and thus defeats the purpose of Tau Ceti Basic. Tajaran speaking Tajara Language is a different thing, you're not meant to understand that language as a human without a Universal Translator.

And to conclude the suggestion, you can't just mix a non-default (third-party) language that portion of the population doesn't understand through Tau Ceti Basic. Do you all see where I'm getting at? Can't just put a non-default language in a common language where you should be able to understand each other.

 

No, it does not defeat the purpose of tau ceti basic. you keep getting so hung up on this "Spanish in tau ceti thing". Spanish has its own alphabet. its a single separate language. you are not hearing "Spanish in tau ceti" you are not hearing it in a language you should be able to understand. you are hearing SPANISH in SPANISH. if you know Spanish in real life then you can respond IN SPANISH. Its so silly to try to frame an argument over the arbitrary choices the devs of this game made about languages. There are mechanical means to speak in sign, siik, galactic, and lots of the other languages. There is no mechanical representation for Spanish so you just have to actually be able to understand it.

The policy for as long as i have been on this server has been that you can speak in Spanish, Russian, whatever you want IC so long as when needed you can communicate in English. outright forbidding people from speaking in other languages not represented by the game IC is unlikely to happen.

[Guest]

Hi, I'm a Spanish speaker, with Iberian ancestry and roots. In addition, I will be speaking (on part of lore opinion and personal interpretation) as the loremaster for humanity.

The problem with that round (which I was there for and I can say for certain I wasn't all that pleased) specifically was that a changeling was making everyone a single person due to the nature of permanent transformation stinging, thus some people decided to abuse this and make it demonstrably more difficult to enforce in terms of IC comms due to the fact that everyone is one person and they are all talking on a bounce radio so that nobody can discern their department, and not even the AI can track them properly. Thus, everyone decided to get some wewls and speak in variations of fluency in the Spanish language.

This stretched for close to 15-20 minutes without stopping, and it was all exercised in Tau Ceti basic, which is a standardized mix of several languages together and has very little roots to standardized Earth dialects.

Which, effectively, makes no real sense as to why people were speaking in varying fluencies of Spanish, as you would have to speak in the Sol Common dialect first as Spanish is strictly a human-centric language. Basically, a human would have no understanding of Sik'maas for all intents and purposes on our server. The Taj were not discovered that long ago, and learning a language, much less a non-human one, is incredibly taxing when you are not initially brought up with it.

I do not particularly wish for an over-use of non-Basic languages utilizing the Basic dialect. It would be immediately lost in translation not unlike trying to speak English to someone who only knows Russian in a Russian environment. The two languages are not the same in any sense. So, again, a human speaking Spanish in Tau Ceti Basic would literally be speaking incomprehensible gibberish.

Garn, I'm sorry to say, but you're wrong. People literally are speaking Spanish in its respective Tau Ceti language set. You can't go around making that same argument, in, for instance, complaining that people are making fun of you because you were speaking Klingon in an English environment. Spanish is not a Tau Ceti dialect. It is a Sol Common one. I would literally not have an issue with this if people were speaking it in Sol Common.

I'm not necessarily putting my foot down here or anything, especially considering this is a human-centric issue that holds a fair deal of water when considering Quality of Roleplay aspects, but I would really appreciate it if it were understood by the regulars that this is not a small thing you can just handwave and pretend it isn't an issue.

I think the policy is certainly subject to change. As much as I do not want to enforce standards for the only unwhitelisted starter race on the server, it may be necessary for me to poke admins to poke human players to look at the lore and understand what expectations are in store for them. We're a heavy RP server, et cetera, but I do want to go through the effort of making our lore important and engaging for the rest of the playerbase to -- I mean, engage in. No better phrasing for it.

[Dreamix]

t.

Does this mean, no stupid German or Russian accents over basic?

Das ist kinda gut. But also kinda nicht.

[Mofo1995]

I'm also curious about this. When I speak transliterated Russian, I always do it so such that an English reader will read it and be able to sound out how it sounded, even if they don't know or understand it. Essentially, I say it how it sounds with the understanding that the person I'm saying it to is OOCly and English speaker, and will have a fair shot at sounding it out or even understand what I'm saying if they know the language. Is this bad and should be done in Sol Common instead? If so, it will just broadcast the language as the standardized Sol Common pack of syllables, and to non-sol common speakers, the pronunciations of it will just be a garbled mess nothing like how it might actually sound. Or, would it be better to emote it instead of speaking at all such that you can be absolutely certain that you're conveying how it sounds rather than getting tangled up in dialects and lore languages?

[Nanako]

I've tried to talk in german a bit, and i'm upset that we don't have support for many of the special letters. Especially ß and ü i believe

[Guest]

t.

Does this mean, no stupid German or Russian accents over basic?

Das ist kinda gut. But also kinda nicht.

 

I don't mind the occasional "Ja, sure!" It's cute in doses.

Overdoing it will make me cry. Flavor text can be easily modified to say "this guy has a thick russian accent" and you can simulate it further by speaking in broken English (or, ICly, broken basic).

Bottom line, do it in Sol common. I'll open a discussion later this week as to whether we want to change how Sol Common sounds or not.

Also, only way you can support cyrillic characters is if you modify your BYOND config to accept certain characters. And at that point, it's merely user-oriented, so anyone else who doesn't have the plug-in will just see "aeaoeoe".

[Taintedglory]

I look at it like Garn looks at it, because of mechanical limitations of the game

Sol Common is this weird fucking miss-mass of earth words that make no fucking sense. If you read it from another races point of view it sounds like crazy people talk. Literally sounds like crazy people.

In Tau Ceti, when you speak spanish, you're just literally injecting spanish into your words. You're not speaking tau ceti at that point, you are speaking spanish in your Tau Ceti sentence.

Going "Dios mio my friend." In Tau ceti, to a none tau ceti speaker, should sound like "Dios mios jea farafarara" Or whatever noises Tau Ceti makes to represent its differential language

Its the same like in real life. Going "Dios mio mein furher" Is an injection into German. Just because Im speaking german doesn't mean I can not inject spanish into it. THe same can be applied to Tau Ceti Basic.

[Pyrociraptor]

I feel concerned about this suggestion because... Germans character.

However, "supression of accent" is kinda... stupid?

I mean, if you were to throw someone (well, for example,) German that recently learned to speak English, you'll still hear his german accent, and the words that are either "hard" to say for him, or that he isn't used to, will be replaced by either a mix of german and english, or just replaced by the german word.

[UnknownMurder]

PURE CONTRADICTORY!

So, I'm hearing several people commenting on revises and clarification of English. I am going to, once again, tell you how languages are actually used in this SS13.

As a human, go to your panel, see the "Check-Known-Languages". You see that? Sol Common, Tau Ceti Basic, and Gutter/Sign Language/Tradeband. Okay. Those are the languages you speak, and to do that. We all speak English as it is A. The Rules B. General Population

 

I am not suppressing accents nor do I plan to, I don't care about other language slangs. What I care is people speaking French when they shouldn't be in-character.

[Skull132]

I'm confused here. What exactly is the issue, because the original post fails to word a it.

"This is an English only server," very plainly refers to the fact that you will use English as your primary means of communication both IC and OOC. I do not care, nor should the rules, for the semantics that exist IC around the made-up languages. If you are given a prompt into which you can enter words which may be heard by other players, you will, 9/10 times, enter those words in English. That is what the rule mandates.

Accenting IC speech is permitted as a universally understood mechanic of displaying an accent for the character.