UC MUD Languages

What languages exist?

• Different language for each sentient race? Or at least for each sentient racial group?
• Common language
• Guild languages
• Ancient languages

Language relationships

• degrees of separation between languages
• language family tree

How to learn

• speaking to other speakers
  • full immersion
  • teacher vs class
• studying
• steps to fluency
• Number of languages already known increases learning rate
• Number of sister/family tree languages already known increases learning rate, cumulative with number of languages known

Effects of fluency

• model fluency on a numeric scale (0-100?)
• unknown languages are a 0
• Hearing an unknown language spoken gets no details.
  • Character will not be able to identify exact language unless the character knows another language on the family tree.
  • Sister languages will count as low fluency
  • Unknown language may be generified as most common language in family tree, or as "racial" language
• Level of fluency determines how much of language is understood when spoken
• Spoken language is assumed to be plain English (with maybe some interesting idioms used) and parsed by an NLP
  • If character is not 100% fluent, words may be replaced by gobbledygook (exact sounds based on language) or phrases reordered, depending on level of fluency
  • Different languages will have different homophones that can be misinterpreted as a function of fluency. "There/they're/their" in English might be "Orange/story/his parakeet" in another.

UC_MUD_World_Planning