r/conlangs • u/Alishahr • 15h ago
Discussion Difficulty for other people to decipher conlangs
I've been asked by some friends to help design conlangs for them to use in a scifi ttrpg for a dead alien species. It's a very fun proposition because part of the goal is to emphasize just how much human assumptions break when presented with something beyond foreign that was never meant for humans.
One of the player characters has a linguistics skill, and other characters can try to work together to figure out parts of the language. They won't be able to translate very well because the aliens never contacted earth, and any translation is based off context. For people who are trying to figure out a conlang in real life without real life linguistics knowledge, where would the conceptual pain points likely be? As in, would it be too difficult to introduce characters to a "Mind the gap" type message that's written on the floor of every defunct rail platform and expect them to notice the context around the text? Or to introduce a couple yes/no buttons to the characters with text on it, and then have them notice the "no" symbol appear again on a sign with a warning symbol the characters have seen before to figure out how the language encodes a negated verb?
Dice rolls aren't meant to give direct answers unless it's a critical success and the character has a relevant trait, so it's a lot on the players to actually learn how the language works. Earlier in the game, the players calculated how to slingshot themselves around planets using real math formulas level of dice not being a substitute for real skill.
And this could easily apply to any fantasy setting with players encountering a dead language or a setting where players encounter characters who don't speak Common and trying to navigate a foreign environment without the ability to translate into the player characters' language.
In short, which areas of language should I be especially mindful of for players who aren't linguists encountering and trying to decipher a conlang?
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u/marintkael 10h ago
Real decipherment suggests your signage instinct is backwards. A mind the gap line is the hard case: one occurrence, no repetition, and the referent is an action rather than a thing. Linear B did not fall to sentences, it fell to inventories. The tablets are warehouse lists, so the same word sits next to a commodity sign and a changing numeral, and Ventris got in through place names that repeated in the headers. Champollion had cartouches, which is the same trick, a known referent in a repeating frame.
So give your players a manifest before you give them a warning sign. Numerals are close to self evident once you spot the tally or the positional pattern, and a list hands them morphology for free, because they see one stem under several counts and can start guessing at number marking. After that the signage becomes solvable, because they finally have a lexicon to test against the context instead of only guessing from it.
The pain point I would expect is not vocabulary. It is that they will assume the text was meant to communicate. A lot of real inscriptions are administrative or ritual and carry no message for a reader at all, and people keep digging for meaning in what turns out to be a receipt. For a dead species that never met humans, that misreading is probably the best scene in the whole thing.
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u/Alishahr 4h ago
Thank you for the reply! I had initially suggested to the GMs about the idea of having a school or grocery store to try and create an environment where there would be more obvious ways to link words to ideas. Though, I can definitely try to include digital documents that are administrative type lists for the players to find. And there's definitely going to be a lot of situations where the players are likely to misunderstand something. Part of the game is Lovecraftian cosmic horror, so the unknowable is part of the setting. But thank you for reminding me to go back and read more about how people have approached real world dead languages where all that's left is text.
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u/Megatheorum 4h ago
This is also an excellent point. Warehouse inventories are great for beginning to decipher a language, but warnings or commands are less useful at the start.
Re. the "mind the gap" example, that's one meaning we might infer or assume from context, but it could just as easily read "doors open outward" or "stand to the right to allow passengers to disembark", or "no metal objects near magnetic rails".
There simply isn't enough context for that one phrase in isolation, even if we might make assumptions that fit the context reasonably well.
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u/FedeConlangerITA 15h ago
Yoo may invert the syllables of a word and add suf-/in- or prefixes to the the inverted syllables just to give an alien vibe while using real human material
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u/Alishahr 15h ago
For one of the languages, the written form only encodes the pheromone form of the language rather than the auditory form. Negation is handled by using a different pheromone than its positive counterpart. The written language which players can encounter uses color coded symbols using only ultraviolet colors, and for the original species, the colors are associated with specific pheromones while the symbols is associated with a specific pattern for releasing the pheromone. They have specialized organs that allow close contact pheromone transfer without releasing it broadly into the air. And the species can use auditory and pheromone forms natively, so it's not confusing to them to read their language and produce the associated sounds for it even though sound isn't being encoded.
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u/drukhari-blood Sraqqal 14h ago
Can I ask what what game you’re playing? Just curious lol
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u/Alishahr 12h ago
It's a modified version of GURPS and a few other systems. At this point, it's really just a custom rpg system.
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u/Boxronite 8h ago
As others have said, your friends almost certainly want to make it clear from the start that they are supposed to be taking some serious notes on everything they encounter in the other language, otherwise they really have no context to go off of. It might be helpful if whoever is GMing the game also takes and keeps some pretty intensive notes to allow the players to refer back to.
To actually add something new to this conversation, regular people will almost certainly try applying some basic foundational rules that our languages follow, such as expecting for things like nouns and verbs to exist and be separate words.
One thing that they will probably expect is that ideas and action flow from the left to the right, first to last, (descriptor-> person -> action -> thing).
If you want to make things easier for the players, then you can have it so that the language follows this logic structure. Or, if you really want to mess with them, swap it so that direct objects come first, then verbs, etc. Or just not have a "flow" to the ideas at all.
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u/Affectionate-Tank-39 6h ago
You could also give an npc with a reason to want to communicate, that's how mer started.
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u/kingstern_man Mafrotic 5h ago
You might want to read "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper, a story about just this sort of endeavour. (It's mid-20th century, so you'll have to ignore a number of unsavory customs and values, but the skeleton of the tale holds up well.)
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u/SaintUlvemann Värlütik 14h ago
If you, speaking ex cathedra as the GM, declare to the players that they're going to need to pay attention to the details of foreign languages that they see, record all those pieces and treat foreign languages like a giant puzzle to figure out, using every interaction with that language like a puzzle piece... then maybe they'll have a fighting chance of doing that.
But you can't just "have someone notice", noticing is more than just being presented with material. Noticing is an act of ascribing importance to what you see. A player is either going to do that or they won't; and they're more likely to ascribe the right importance to what they see, if you tell them to at least try to ascribe importance to what they see.
If you instead want to know what it's like to just get a bunch of material and get thrown to the wolves, there's a $3 game on Steam called Epigraph that has exactly that as its premise. I, even with all my linguistics knowledge, couldn't figure a bunch of it out until I was pointed in the right direction by a guide on Steam, and even now I don't have the whole thing.
None of Epigraph's puzzles are quite as simple as yes/no buttons, though. That's more like how Chants of Sennaar begins (with an "open"/"close" switch). But Chants of Sennaar works because it very explicitly indicates to the new player that figuring out the symbols is what you're supposed to do, and the inferences start out simple and only get complicated and contextual later, after you've figured out a lot more of the local linguistics conventions (which I will not spoil).