Improvements in the new language system

JonySky · 2019-05-15 16:50:31

The new language system is great!
In my opinion it is a brilliant idea that I have not seen in any game
A unique experience is created and the learning unites you to that lineage in an indirect way

Anyway, I think we should solve 3 "small problems" to this system

1.- The simplest words (for example .... NO or YES, NORTH, SOUTH EAST OR WEST ...) should be learned at the time of being in a city automatically ...
2.- Maybe it would be a good time to implement simple gestures (for example, to point an object or address)
3.- The learning of words should be transmitted to our children automatically, the words that I have learned should know our children at birth

I think these simple options would facilitate coexistence and migrations to other cities

my last moves, have been exploring new cities and discovering new families

When I was a woman I left my sons and daughters in the cities I visited

I explained to my children where their hometown was and left them there to cross lineages

they have been the most incredible lives for a long time !!!

I love the new system to bring families and language closer

I am a player with many hours and I have created almost everything that can be crafted in OHOL .. and this has given me a new experience!

I recommend everyone to go out and explore new cities and relate to new families

Last edited by JonySky (2019-05-15 16:57:23)

MistressZues · 2019-05-15 17:08:45

OMG! yes love those three ideas!! pointing is a must now! and yea maybe being in close proximity to no relations for a few minutes allows you to learn key words like yes, no, hi, bye, north, west, east, south, go, and stay. the children system should be implemented by if you learn a word you could say "banana-tekeke" and now that word is no longer gibberish when you see no relations say it for you and any children you have and children they have!! With that system in place it would eventually be a realistic goal for two families to cohabit and understand one another from birth. It would allow alliances to form and the two families could effectively communicate without a new third family understanding them if a rival family decided to invade.

Amon · 2019-05-15 17:10:43

The learned words transmitted to children would be great.
If we bother to make a cultural melting pot, it should be a melting pot and perhaps in 3-4 generations of joint existance any language barrier should be eliminated.

Newcommers however should retain the 'foreigness'

Twisted · 2019-05-15 17:32:08

The point of the language update was to prevent different families becoming a melting pot, I doubt Jason would be interested in letting us eliminate the language barrier over time.

I think we could use a /nod and /nay emote, but I'm not sure if emotes can move the characters' heads

BladeWoods · 2019-05-15 17:39:13

There should be some way for families to learn eachothers' language and to even join together into one family.

DestinyCall · 2019-05-15 18:02:54

BladeWoods wrote:

There should be some way for families to learn eachothers' language and to even join together into one family.

You can, but it involves literally learning another language ... in an hour.

You need paper and someone who is willing to stand around chatting for a while. Put a series of common words on the page, then both of you pick up the paper. Write down what the other person says when they pick up the paper. It takes a little time, but you can learn the basics this way. At least enough to establish basic communication.

Personally, I would like to see each RACE have a shared language that remains consistant across time and lineage. Then you could spend one life learning to speak "Ginger" or "Brown" and in a future life, you could establish trade with your neighbors without spending twenty minutes learning their unique word for "Pie".

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-05-15 18:23:39)

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-15 18:16:11

Yeah, I'm not sure about this. I originally thought you'd auto-learn the language over time just by being around (kinda what you are suggesting, in a way) or over generations.

But that was before I discovered the bi-directional filter idea, which permits you (the human playing the game) to actually learn the language and start using it. Combined with writing as a teaching tool, this is actually possible, and pretty cool.

In my last life, SNASS was YES, FLORE was FRIEND, and WIE was NO. I learned these words, and I still know them now. I also used some written primers that I found in the other village, and I even made one of my own (for FRIEND, which is how I learned it, and taught it to everyone I met in the village). I died handing my clothes away while repeating the word FRIEND in their language.

Now, you could "learn" the language over time, which means that when they say FLORE, you stop seeing it through the filter... but I'm not sure how that would work with the bi-directional filter.

The filter isn't based on words, but is based on consonant and vowel clusters. So in this case, FL was mapping to FR. IE was mapping to O, ND was mapping to RE, etc.

So you could imagine learning clusters over time. So the more you hear FLORE used by others, the clusters are replaced one by one:

FL-O--RE
FL-IE-RE
FL-IE-ND
FR-IE-ND

The problem is this.... what if you, the human player, has already learned FLORE and started using it? As your filter evolves, you will need to gradually stop speaking the other language yourself, as a human player. So if you start saying FLORE at the very beginning, they will see it as FRIEND and understand you. But as your filter evolves, if you keep saying FLORE, by the end, they will see it as FLORE and not FRIEND.

Unless only the hearing portion of the filter evolves? So you have to keep sing FLORE for them to understand you, but as they say FRIEND enough (which you initially hear as FLORE), eventually you start seeing it as FRIEND. The problem, then, is if you assume the filter is gone and start saying FRIEND back to them. That will only be understandable if their hearing filter has evolved enough.

Maybe this is okay...

It would definitely undercut and complicate the actual "human player learning the language," which at least right now, is pretty cool. Instead of actually struggling to learn and repeat words, you'd just wait, and "learn the language by osmosis." I mean, unless it was REALLY slow.... like a trans-generational process.

Maybe if you have heard a language in your lifetime, your baby will have 50% of their remaining filter for that language cleared. So you would hear FLORE for your entire life, but your baby would start hearing FLIEND. And then their baby would have 50% of the remaining filter cleared, and so on, asymptotically approaching a non-filter over many generations.

That would keep the language that you're learning and using stable for you, during your lifetime...

Or maybe it could be that you have to hear the language as a baby a certain amount to learn it... or just hear it at all. So if you migrate, you never learn. But if you have a baby there, the baby will automatically learn it, and then help translate for you later in your life.

After all, it would be pretty weird to be born in a place and never speak the language. I have heard some player stories about this, and it seems pretty off. Yes, your mother could teach you what she has learned so far, but that's a pretty painful and fruitless process.

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-15 18:30:15

I think the asymptotic filter clearing for each generation would be good, assuming that someone within earshot of you speaks the other language when you are < 3 years old.

We have frequencies for all clusters already, so we can flip some kind of weighted coin for each filtered cluster and clear the filter at random. Then next generation, we can repeat that process for the remaining filters that are left, etc.

This will allow "accents" that fade over time, across generations.

The other option is to clear the filters for clusters you actually hear as a baby.... but this would motivate some very unnatural player speech behavior, going up to the foreign baby and trying to recite phrases that use every possible cluster, "HEY BABY, THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG." and so on. Maybe this is cool? Kinda like school, or an early-intervention ESL program.

Anything you actually hear as a baby could "stick" in your brain, and you'd be able to understand similar words forever. But if you never hear weird words like "CZAR," you won't ever understand them during your lifetime. Not sure what happens to the children in the next generation. Do they start with their parent's partial filter and go from there? Most likely, no more of their filter would be cleared, though I guess over the long haul, it would eventually all get cleared, just by chance, across generations.

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-05-15 18:34:45

jasonrohrer wrote:

I think the asymptotic filter clearing for each generation would be good, assuming that someone within earshot of you speaks the other language when you are < 3 years old.
We have frequencies for all clusters already, so we can flip some kind of weighted coin for each filtered cluster and clear the filter at random. Then next generation, we can repeat that process for the remaining filters that are left, etc.
This will allow "accents" that fade over time, across generations.

The other option is to clear the filters for clusters you actually hear as a baby.... but this would motivate some very unnatural player speech behavior, going up to the foreign baby and trying to recite phrases that use every possible cluster, "HEY BABY, THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG." and so on. Maybe this is cool? Kinda like school, or an early-intervention ESL program.
Anything you actually hear as a baby could "stick" in your brain, and you'd be able to understand similar words forever. But if you never hear weird words like "CZAR," you won't ever understand them during your lifetime. Not sure what happens to the children in the next generation. Do they start with their parent's partial filter and go from there? Most likely, no more of their filter would be cleared, though I guess over the long haul, it would eventually all get cleared, just by chance, across generations.

This is an amazing idea!! Either really but I lean towards accents. Was this up your sleve the whole time? It fits very well if you can pull it off.

Joseph Stalin · 2019-05-15 18:41:53

wait you can "learn" words and make them no longer gibberish? I thought you had to remember it yourself

paulof · 2019-05-15 19:00:23

Joseph Stalin wrote:

I thought you had to remember it yourself

that would be nice if we had a limited number of languages, i would love to learn all. I actually think this could happens and the big amount of dialects would become common languages.

Besides, i think a baby should know the language it is been spoken near him, so if his mom abandoned him in some town and never talked to him he couldn't understand her in a future moment.

The babies absorv the culture near them. So in the case he was born in a town and his mom is near him, talking to him, and he "hears" strangers talking he would "learn" both languages and help his mom, but never teach her, because he actually never saw the foreign language, only if there was a button to change filters so changing languages that the others would "hear" him saying, meanwhile he is only typing english

Last edited by paulof (2019-05-15 19:00:43)

Spoonwood · 2019-05-15 19:02:27

Do the OHOL languages have any cognate words with any other OHOL language?

For me, the language system been awkward on s7 and s12, since you get born to some lady who later Eve chains back and you can no longer understand a single thing she has to say, though admittedly that's a different animal than bs2, so it's no indication that the language system is bad for bs2.

I find it good to hear that the language system has promise for bs2, even if it can use some refinement.

Edit: I like the idea of language differences fading over generations for families that live together also.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-05-15 19:04:45)

DestinyCall · 2019-05-15 19:16:42

I really like the idea that foriegn languages must be learned by the player, rather than just being given to you over time. It is like learning how to build a plane or newcomen pump. A skill that you aquire through experience and real effort. But the problem is that if every lineage has a unique language, there are too many languages to learn and not enough time in one life.

I really like the idea of a shared language for each race. So you might encounter a nice brown family in one life and learn to speak their language. Now you know a little bit of "Brown" so you can speak a few words if you meet another person from the whole race, even if it is in a different life and the nice family you met is long dead. Also if you are a ginger and you travel around, you could have a chance of stumbling upon a new ginger village that will speak the same language as you. And if you live in a Bell town, you can talk to other families that share your race. So if you arrive as an Eve, you are not completely isolated, perhaps.

Learning hundreds of languages is daunting. But learning a few words in five or six languages is reasonable. Some people won't bother, but enough people will rise to the challenge to make "translator" a vaulable position, especially in a multi-cultural village.

Amon · 2019-05-15 19:20:31

Those are some great musings there on automated language learning. While I love the language thing as an overall concept, being able to play around with a language only for 1 hour in a lifetime really isn't all that conventional.

Those solutions also sound very good and natural. With many imigrants, as how it was, the parents usualyl had some trouble speaking or didn't even bother speaking the local language at all while children are bilingular ez.

I as a small child initially learned english and german from cartoons. It's super easy at that age period.
Then come memories from my recent visit in prague, where us the younger generation could freely converse wth eachother while the older generation had one parent that scarcely knew english, and each side one parent only knowing their native tongue, with my brother and hid girlfriend easily conversing with eachother in czech.
Aside from a few cognates and similair words, that was it. It was weird having a conversation and hopping languages on regular basis. But after you sufficiently know a language you just 'automatically' shift from your native to another.

Last edited by Amon (2019-05-15 19:21:44)

paulof · 2019-05-15 19:24:37

DestinyCall wrote:

I really like the idea that foriegn languages must be learned by the player, rather than just being given to you over time. it is like learning how to build a plane or newcomen pump. A skill that you aquire through experience and real effort.

I agree a 100% with that and i would accept the challenge of learning all the languages if they were in a limited number. I really think all this dialects we have now could be turned into permanent languages in future updates.

WalrusesConquer · 2019-05-15 19:25:31

So far language highlights:
Once we managed to (almost) be able to translate complete phrases! Tried to pass it onto kids aswell!

Also another highlight:
An eve spawned near our camp and got bit, we nursed her back to health but she ran away
As she ran she had a daughter who she left behind.
The baby had no idea what was going on! They just /blushed and responded in ?? But I think it went ok, considering we had no resources to teach her properly

As always there is room for improvement but I think this update pretty much hit the head on the nail

JonySky · 2019-05-15 19:28:37

in Catalonia where I live, we have 2 native languages (Catalan and Spanish)
at home I speak the 2 languages interchangeably and my daughters also speak it naturally
at an early age the language is learned if the family speaks naturally

my wife is Argentina and she had to learn Catalan expressly, to listen to him help, but she does not teach you a language when you are already an adult

I think that implementing something similar in OHOL would be great

the problem that in real life, we live an average of 90 years and we have time to learn a language

in OHOL, we lived 60 minutes and spent about 20 looking for a new family to talk to

Last edited by JonySky (2019-05-15 19:31:27)

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-15 19:34:52

Yeah, destiny, that's an interesting idea.

There are currently 4 skin tones in the game, so you could imagine each having a unique language that remains stable forever.

The problem with this is the way bidirectional filters work, and I don't think it's possible for each race to have its own language.

In fact, there is currently a unique 2-way filter for each PAIR of families.

Say we have three families, JONES, SMITH, and FLETCHER.

When Jones say FRIEND to Smith, it gets mapped to FLORE. When Smith says FLORE back to Jones, it maps back through to FRIEND. And if Smith says FRIEND, Jones sees FLORE too (it's a bi-directional filter).

When Jones says FRIEND to Fletcher, it gets mapped to MAB. When Fletcher says MAB back, it gets mapped to FRIEND.

But we still haven't covered Smith and Fletcher yet.

When Smith says FRIEND, Fletcher sees STORT. This allows Fletcher to talk back to Smith and repeat words that Smith can understand (Fletcher says STORT, and Smith sees FRIEND.)

Okay, now imagine that all three are standing there, and they all type FRIEND.

Smith sees:
--
Smith says FRIEND
Jones says FLORE
Fletcher says STORT

But Jones sees:
--
Smith says FLORE
Jones says Friend
Fletcher says MAB

And Fletcher sees:
--
Smith says STORT
Jones says MAB
Fletcher says FRIEND

So you can see the problem here. Fletcher doesn't have one consistent language. It depends on who's listening.

And you could say: Why not just have one filter per family, instead of one filter per pair of families. If you think it through, though, it doesn't work.

When Fetcher speaks, you apply filter F. That's great, which means both Jones and Smith see Fletcher say the same thing. But now what happens if Smith speaks? Well, we apply filter S. But if Smith is trying to mimic Fletcher's words, it will get garbled by filter S. And then what? We apply filter F so that Fletcher can hear it? Well, it won't map back into English then.

F(F(word)) = word

But:

F(S(F(word))) != word

And if you apply both filters when Fletcher speaks to Smith, you've just crafted unique pairwise filters again. I.e, when Fletcher speaks to Smith, you do

S(F(word))

And when smith speaks back to Fletcher, you do:

F(S(word))

But if each one is bidirectional, we also have:

F(S(S(F(word) = word

Which is what would happen if Smith tried to repeat words back to Fletcher.

The only thing that would work is to have ONE filter for all foreigners. So there's only one language to learn, game-wide, and you use that language to talk to all foreigners. But that's not very interesting.

You could also have pairwise filters for all skin tones, which would mean that if you're born as a Ginger, you have three languages to learn, but those same languages wouldn't work if you're born with brown skin, even if you're talking to the same people you were talking to before as a Ginger....

Keyin · 2019-05-15 20:20:54

Why not just simply the bi-directional filter cypher to individual letters rather than clusters? I mean sure, once you get the hang of it learning a new language would be pretty trivial. But each life you would still have to memorize what each letter is. Learning a new language would take only a few minutes rather than hours. Which I think is fair, since a few minutes represents a few years, and you will only use the information you learned for as long as the two lineages exist.

Or maybe just narrow down the consonant clusters affected to only affect two letters representing one sound?(TH,CH,SH,PH,NG) and dipthong vowels as well(A->EI), since there are only AEIOU available.

But yeah, I like the current system but with the number of consonant clusters being mapped, it just takes WAY too long to learn another languages. Cutting down on those would really help you learn the other language much quicker. I am just not sure how many clusters would be needed to stop it from being too easy.

jasonrohrer · 2019-05-15 21:52:15

Because a single-letter cipher makes horrible-looking language. The existing language filter is very good at making the other languages actually pronounceable and language-like.

Example:

FRIEND -> FLORE
vs
FRIEND -> VGOBI

VG is not pronounceable. Also, note that we've added an extra syllable here, where in the "smart" filter, the number of syllables is preserved ("re" is an ending consonant cluster, and the "e" isn't actually a vowel there).

As you pointed out, you'd want to get some 2-cluster mapping going to fix this, but then you're up against ght and other 3-letter clusters, and what to do about them? And if you fix those, then you're up against four-letter clusters, etc. And you have false clusters too, from compound words, like nightshift. "ghtsh" isn't a real cluster.

The real way to do this is to break words down by syllables and then look for pronounceable clusters, and treat each one individually, which is what I did.

futurebird · 2019-05-15 22:05:05

Jason your filter tends to make words longer. Some of the time you should replace clusters with *nothing* (or perhaps an apostropy) since dropping sounds happens in the development of languages:

Park in the car parking lot ---> ark in he ar arking lot

GreatShawn · 2019-05-15 22:09:02

maybe instead of that family name in front of the garbler you can have another variable for different skin tones (unless the game cannot detect what skin color each player have), and use the skin tone on the garbler. So when someone from a different skin tone speaks to you, its goin to look like this:

Skin tone ( filter ( "hello") )

so the main difficult part is for the game to detect which skin tone the player has.

futurebird · 2019-05-15 22:12:47

Don't like the "different skin tones have different languages" idea much. I would like it if there were like 8 or so languages at a time and it was random what each eve got. So some families could talk to each other others could not, and languages would last a bit longer and might be worth learning more about.

As it is now I just use actions to get past language barriers.

GreatShawn · 2019-05-15 22:23:23

another of my idea is when you're born you are assigned a random language, and other people can speak that language, though it is more likely that people of your own skin tone speak that language. Maybe people of your own skintone can also speak another language, but the word scrambler will make the word spoken form these people easily reconisable. This way you can learn languages from people your own skintones easier

DestinyCall · 2019-05-15 22:26:38

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, destiny, that's an interesting idea.
There are currently 4 skin tones in the game, so you could imagine each having a unique language that remains stable forever.
The problem with this is the way bidirectional filters work, and I don't think it's possible for each race to have its own language.
In fact, there is currently a unique 2-way filter for each PAIR of families.
Say we have three families, JONES, SMITH, and FLETCHER.
....

So you can see the problem here. Fletcher doesn't have one consistent language. It depends on who's listening.

And you could say: Why not just have one filter per family, instead of one filter per pair of families. If you think it through, though, it doesn't work.
When Fetcher speaks, you apply filter F. That's great, which means both Jones and Smith see Fletcher say the same thing. But now what happens if Smith speaks? Well, we apply filter S. But if Smith is trying to mimic Fletcher's words, it will get garbled by filter S. And then what? We apply filter F so that Fletcher can hear it? Well, it won't map back into English then.
...
The only thing that would work is to have ONE filter for all foreigners. So there's only one language to learn, game-wide, and you use that language to talk to all foreigners. But that's not very interesting.
You could also have pairwise filters for all skin tones, which would mean that if you're born as a Ginger, you have three languages to learn, but those same languages wouldn't work if you're born with brown skin, even if you're talking to the same people you were talking to before as a Ginger....

Okay, thank you very much for this explaination. I had no idea the language parser worked like that. I assumed that each family was speaking a unique language, so if you were in a Bell Town or had multiple adjacent villages, the Smiths would speak one language to outsiders and the Fletchers would speak a different language to outsiders, but the words would always be the same. So if I was a Jones, I could learn how to speak a few words in the "Fletcher" language and teach those words to a villager from the Smith family so we could all talk together using a common language. I would say "Bort" and Smith would see "Bort" but Fletcher would see "Hello". Smith would need to know the Fletcher word for "Hello" to understand what I was saying, but Fletcher would understand automatically, because I'm "speaking his language".

However, I can see why that would be terribly complicated to program, since the parser has no way to recognize when I am trying to speak a Smith word or a Fletcher word. It would try to encrypt my words and create a new word in my language when I try to speak a foreign language. Bi-directional works with two families in isolation, but not three (or four) different languages at the same time. Hmmm, I wish knew more about programming. This is really tricky.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-05-15 22:29:13)

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-05-15 16:50:31

Improvements in the new language system

#2 2019-05-15 17:08:45

Re: Improvements in the new language system

#3 2019-05-15 17:10:43

Re: Improvements in the new language system

#4 2019-05-15 17:32:08

Re: Improvements in the new language system

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Re: Improvements in the new language system

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