Language Laws at Landel's
It's been asked. It's been questioned. It's been a confusing topic for mods and players alike, but finally, we have here the rules about just how languages work at Landel's.
BARE BASICS:
- Everyone can understand each others' main languages. A character whose main language is English would perceive someone whose main language is Japanese as speaking English, and vice versa.
- Second languages can only be understood by those who canonly understand that particular language.
- Characters perceive everything in the Institute as being written in their main language.
That's your refresher course, but for the full scoop, every player in the RP should read the behemoth underneath the below cut at least once for all the details.
---
Since this is a pretty confusing topic that took a while for even the mods to figure out, I'll be illustrating each point with Hiro from Heroes, Chad/Sado from Bleach, and Mal from Firefly. If you don't know who they are, it's okay; I'll explain what needs to be explained. (I'm choosing these three particular characters since they happen to know languages I'm familiar with on a basic level. ...Save for Chinese, but, you know. :X Sorry in advance if I bastardize anything and/or don't use kanji or a particular dialect or informality or... something. JUST TRYIN' TO ILLUSTRATE SOME POINTS HERE. D:)
Anyway, I'm praying that I explain all of this in a way that is logical and understandable, but feel free to ask us if you have questions because it's... pretty hard to get a hold of. (Also assume that all of this implausible language business is caused by LANDEL MAGICK or something.)
---
THE EXAMPLE CHARACTERS:
Hiro's main language is JAPANESE; he also knows some general ENGLISH.
Hiro comes from a show that's mainly ENGLISH.
Chad's main language is JAPANESE; he's also fluent in SPANISH.
Chad comes from a manga that's mainly JAPANESE.
Mal's main language is ENGLISH; he also knows a good amount of CHINESE and frequently curses in Chinese amongst his regular English in canon.
Mal comes from a show that's mainly ENGLISH.
---
MAIN LANGUAGE (DEFAULT):
Your character, no matter how many languages they might know, must have a language that they are most fluent in or speak the most in their canon. This, for the purposes of the RP, is their main language. (Yes, I know that tons of fictional characters are geniuses and know 700 languages off the tops of their heads, but in that case, you must declare either their native language or whatever they generally speak in their canon as their main language.) At Landel's, when your character speaks/writes in their main language, the other characters can understand it and perceive it as their own main language being spoken/written.
So, for example, Hiro, Chad, and Mal are all talking amongst each other in their respective main languages. They each think they're talking like this...
But the way it sounds (to Mal, at least) is this:
Obviously, it's all in English since the RP itself is written in English, but also notice how the honorific -san still stays in the way Mal perceives the exchange, whereas Chad's konnichiwa does not stay in the way Mal perceives the exchange. Why is this? It's because the honorific -san is a title being given whereas konnichiwa is a generic greeting. Thus, things like Señor and Monsieur would stay the same even when written in the English RP, whereas hola and bonjour and other regular phrases would get turned into "hello." We do this to keep a general flavor of the different languages without allowing people to fall too much into using unnecessary non-English phrases. We also want to make sure that players don't contradict the following rule:
Basically, when everyone communicates in their own main language, everyone can understand everyone else. Thus, if your character's main language is Japanese and they're trying to communicate with someone else who knows Japanese, passing notes written in Japanese on the bulletin board will not hide the exchange from non-Japanese speakers, as the non-Japanese speakers will perceive the notes as written in their own main language.
Additionally, your character will perceive all of the Landel's staff, books, notices, etc. as speaking/being written in their main language.
---
"But my character is bilingual!" You say. "What then, o confusing-rule-making mods?"
SECOND LANGUAGES:
So, your character is one of the many fictional and non-American entities who actually knows more than one language, eh? Well, no fear, because we'll explain how that works too!
Your character may have a variety of second languages they speak besides their first language, and that's fine! The thing is, unlike main languages, other characters at Landel's won't understand your character's second language(s) unless they canonly know that particular language as well.
For example, Hiro tries to speak English to Mal and Chad responds in Spanish.
Mal is able to understand Hiro's English, canonly being an English-speaker himself, but Chad is unable to understand Hiro's English, as he canonly does not know English (as far as I know). Neither Mal nor Hiro can understand Chad's Spanish, as neither of them canonly know Spanish.
Some further examples of situations, to cover all the bases: If someone's main language is Spanish and someone else has Spanish as a second language, the two of them can communicate in Spanish. (In this situation and this situation alone, someone overhearing the conversation who does not know Spanish would not understand the person who has Spanish as a main language.) If two characters have Dutch as a second language, they can understand each other in Dutch. If someone with Chinese as a second language tries to communicate with someone who canonly doesn't know Chinese at all, then that person won't understand the Chinese at all, but, they'd still be able to perceive it as Chinese if they know what Chinese generally sounds like.
Therefore, if you want your characters to sneakily contact each other on the bulletin board in their second languages, then yes, only people who also canonly understand that particular language will be able to read their messages.
As far as how you write the second languages in the RP: We'd rather that you guys write the "second language" in English so that all the players will understand what's going on (if not the characters), with some kind of indication that it's a different language; possibly brackets ({ insert text here }) in third-person prose and an OOC note for bulletin board posts.
---
"Well, that's all good," you say, "but doesn't Mal sometimes spout random Chinese even though he doesn't really speak it? Doesn't Chad refer to his grandfather as abuelo in the Japanese text? Isn't Hiro from an English show where almost everyone else is accustomed to not being able to understand his Japanese? How does all that work?"
THE EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE:
There are some exceptions to the above rule, and these exceptions are all meant to allow the characters easier communication and the ability to stay true to the canon in terms of word use. The exceptions are as follows:
- Names. All names are, of course, exactly the same as in their canon no matter what language they are spoken in. This goes for the names of people, places, etc.
- Untranslatable titles. Tons of anime/manga series have names for their locations, attacks, powers, weapons, forms, etc. that aren't easily translatable into English from the original Japanese. We know that, so while you may write these terms in English if you feel so inclined, you may also leave them as they are in their original Japanese form. (Note that this does not include generic, translatable titles such as specific military/company/social ranks, family relationships, etc., unless you can justify to us why such a title wouldn't translate well to English given the context of the canon.) As mentioned before, honorifics such as -san, -kun, -chan, and -sama, are allowed (though not obligatory), as they confer different levels of respect but aren't really translatable to any specific English-language words.
While the above is mostly in regards to anime/manga specifically, you can also use it as general guidelines if you're taking your character from any non-English work of fiction.
- Second language words/phrases the character says amongst their usual main language in the actual canon. You may use translatable non-English phrases/words in their full glory at Landel's given that your character uses those phrases/words in canon as a separate language interspersed with their normal speech. So, for example, Mal curses in Chinese in his canon amongst his English. Vash yells "danke" amongst his Japanese (which is technically English--more on that in the What If section). Both of these characters could continue to do this in the actual RP, as it's a valid carry-over from the canon rather than random non-English phrases.
---
"But what about the whole Hiro thing?"
THE WEIRD SIDE-EFFECTS OF THE NON-EXCEPTIONS:
(SKIP THIS SECTION UNLESS YOU'RE APPING A HEROES CHARACTER OR A CHARACTER IN HIRO'S RARE SITUATION. NO, REALLY.)
Okay, so Hiro in his entirety was part of the whole reason it took us such a long time to figure out all of this even before we'd ever seen Heroes. ("How do we deal with someone who's from an English canon who actually mainly speaks Japanese? What about other weird situations like that? We need to figure this out before it becomes an issue subject to... well, to subjectivity!")
And then we realized... hey! English is no more important than any other language, right? So someone who speaks English as a second language should adhere to the very same rules as everyone else, regardless of the fact that we, as players, write our RP posts in English.
For example: You have someone like Hiro at Landel's who, natively and in his canon, generally speaks a language different from the grand majority of his canon's characters. (Japanese) You then have that character's canonmates, the grand majority of whom speak a different language than him. (English) On top of all that, this character doesn't know that other language (English) fluently, and has already interacted with these other canonmates, who have already heard that this character's English isn't so great.
So, the weird part: At Landel's, a character like that would abide by the same rules as everyone else. His canonmates would perceive him as speaking perfect English, and Hiro would perceive them as speaking perfect Japanese.
Hiro could consciously try speaking English to his canonmates, and his actual English would come out just as broken as usual, in which case, when his canonmates responded, their English would, in fact, sound like English to him.
...Yeah, it's confusing. But hey, this is a RARE, RARE SITUATION, RIGHT? If your character is in a similar situation to this, don't hesitate to let us know so we can work stuff out with you.
---
"But what if..."
WHAT IFS:
What if my character is from a Japanese anime/manga, but, technically, the world the anime/manga is portraying is supposed to be using a language other than Japanese? (Examples: Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Trigun Maximum, One Piece, parts of Death Note.)
In this case, you would choose the canon's language as your character's main language, not the medium's language. So, for say, Trigun, you'd pin English as Wolfwood's main language rather than Japanese; if someone spoke Japanese as their second language to Wolfwood, he wouldn't understand it.
You know, Wolfwood brings up another good point: What if my character speaks a particular dialect in a different language, such as Kansai? What then?
Wolfwood's a good subject to use as an example for this, since Yasuhiro Nightow, Mr. Trigun himself, has addressed the issue in interviews: As Nightow intends for the Trigun world to be an English-speaking one, Wolfwood's Kansai dialect canonly should translate to some kind of equivalent English accent/dialect, and we feel that we should work with a similar mindset in Landel's. While we don't want people to go too overboard with trying to bring over the Kansai dialect (or whathaveyou) as weird English, a player of a dialect-speaking character should, depending on the importance of the dialect to their characterization, either choose phrasing a little different from the norm when they write their character's dialogue or ignore the dialect entirely.
Okay, what about someone like, say, L from Death Note or Mohinder from Heroes who generally speak a language in the canon different from their native language?
This is a situation where you could actually make a choice, though you'd have to stick to that choice once you declared it. L is British (English-speaking), but generally speaks Japanese in his canon. Mohinder is Indian (Hindi-speaking), but generally speaks English in his canon. Given the fact that Landel's ultimately is an English-speaking environment and the RP ultimately is an English RP, it'd be most practical to declare English as both L and Mohinder's main language even though they come from different backgrounds. (So basically, you can choose between your character's native language or the language they generally speak in canon as their main language in the RP. You cannot, however, choose a language your character is fluent in as their main language if the language meets neither of those criteria.)
What if you're not sure what the language of your character's canon is, just the medium's language? Like Kingdom Hearts?
Then the best idea is probably to make an educated guess and/or default to English.
Final question: Why did you guys decide to do all this instead of making it so everyone automatically understood English? That could have worked too!
1) TOO EASY FOR US LANDAMNED MODS HURRHURR.
2) In all seriousness, it's because we want as little separation between different canon groups as possible. (With the blanket English idea, as characters found their canonmates, they'd probably all start speaking in their original languages, which would barricade many non-canonmates from jumping into those conversations.) Also, seeing as probably the grand majority of the characters speak Japanese as their main language, we don't want players feeling they need to inject random Japanese into their posts amongst the English.
3) It'd make the characters more comfortable communicating with others (there'd be no discomfort that they'd need to breach by speaking a language that was up until now unfamiliar to them), while at the same time it would properly screw with their heads. ("You're speaking Klingon? WHAT?")
4) Erin will never learn what "concise" means. Ever.
BARE BASICS:
- Everyone can understand each others' main languages. A character whose main language is English would perceive someone whose main language is Japanese as speaking English, and vice versa.
- Second languages can only be understood by those who canonly understand that particular language.
- Characters perceive everything in the Institute as being written in their main language.
That's your refresher course, but for the full scoop, every player in the RP should read the behemoth underneath the below cut at least once for all the details.
---
Since this is a pretty confusing topic that took a while for even the mods to figure out, I'll be illustrating each point with Hiro from Heroes, Chad/Sado from Bleach, and Mal from Firefly. If you don't know who they are, it's okay; I'll explain what needs to be explained. (I'm choosing these three particular characters since they happen to know languages I'm familiar with on a basic level. ...Save for Chinese, but, you know. :X Sorry in advance if I bastardize anything and/or don't use kanji or a particular dialect or informality or... something. JUST TRYIN' TO ILLUSTRATE SOME POINTS HERE. D:)
Anyway, I'm praying that I explain all of this in a way that is logical and understandable, but feel free to ask us if you have questions because it's... pretty hard to get a hold of. (Also assume that all of this implausible language business is caused by LANDEL MAGICK or something.)
---
THE EXAMPLE CHARACTERS:
Hiro's main language is JAPANESE; he also knows some general ENGLISH.
Hiro comes from a show that's mainly ENGLISH.
Chad's main language is JAPANESE; he's also fluent in SPANISH.
Chad comes from a manga that's mainly JAPANESE.
Mal's main language is ENGLISH; he also knows a good amount of CHINESE and frequently curses in Chinese amongst his regular English in canon.
Mal comes from a show that's mainly ENGLISH.
---
MAIN LANGUAGE (DEFAULT):
Your character, no matter how many languages they might know, must have a language that they are most fluent in or speak the most in their canon. This, for the purposes of the RP, is their main language. (Yes, I know that tons of fictional characters are geniuses and know 700 languages off the tops of their heads, but in that case, you must declare either their native language or whatever they generally speak in their canon as their main language.) At Landel's, when your character speaks/writes in their main language, the other characters can understand it and perceive it as their own main language being spoken/written.
So, for example, Hiro, Chad, and Mal are all talking amongst each other in their respective main languages. They each think they're talking like this...
But the way it sounds (to Mal, at least) is this:
Obviously, it's all in English since the RP itself is written in English, but also notice how the honorific -san still stays in the way Mal perceives the exchange, whereas Chad's konnichiwa does not stay in the way Mal perceives the exchange. Why is this? It's because the honorific -san is a title being given whereas konnichiwa is a generic greeting. Thus, things like Señor and Monsieur would stay the same even when written in the English RP, whereas hola and bonjour and other regular phrases would get turned into "hello." We do this to keep a general flavor of the different languages without allowing people to fall too much into using unnecessary non-English phrases. We also want to make sure that players don't contradict the following rule:
Basically, when everyone communicates in their own main language, everyone can understand everyone else. Thus, if your character's main language is Japanese and they're trying to communicate with someone else who knows Japanese, passing notes written in Japanese on the bulletin board will not hide the exchange from non-Japanese speakers, as the non-Japanese speakers will perceive the notes as written in their own main language.
Additionally, your character will perceive all of the Landel's staff, books, notices, etc. as speaking/being written in their main language.
---
"But my character is bilingual!" You say. "What then, o confusing-rule-making mods?"
SECOND LANGUAGES:
So, your character is one of the many fictional and non-American entities who actually knows more than one language, eh? Well, no fear, because we'll explain how that works too!
Your character may have a variety of second languages they speak besides their first language, and that's fine! The thing is, unlike main languages, other characters at Landel's won't understand your character's second language(s) unless they canonly know that particular language as well.
For example, Hiro tries to speak English to Mal and Chad responds in Spanish.
Mal is able to understand Hiro's English, canonly being an English-speaker himself, but Chad is unable to understand Hiro's English, as he canonly does not know English (as far as I know). Neither Mal nor Hiro can understand Chad's Spanish, as neither of them canonly know Spanish.
Some further examples of situations, to cover all the bases: If someone's main language is Spanish and someone else has Spanish as a second language, the two of them can communicate in Spanish. (In this situation and this situation alone, someone overhearing the conversation who does not know Spanish would not understand the person who has Spanish as a main language.) If two characters have Dutch as a second language, they can understand each other in Dutch. If someone with Chinese as a second language tries to communicate with someone who canonly doesn't know Chinese at all, then that person won't understand the Chinese at all, but, they'd still be able to perceive it as Chinese if they know what Chinese generally sounds like.
Therefore, if you want your characters to sneakily contact each other on the bulletin board in their second languages, then yes, only people who also canonly understand that particular language will be able to read their messages.
As far as how you write the second languages in the RP: We'd rather that you guys write the "second language" in English so that all the players will understand what's going on (if not the characters), with some kind of indication that it's a different language; possibly brackets ({ insert text here }) in third-person prose and an OOC note for bulletin board posts.
---
"Well, that's all good," you say, "but doesn't Mal sometimes spout random Chinese even though he doesn't really speak it? Doesn't Chad refer to his grandfather as abuelo in the Japanese text? Isn't Hiro from an English show where almost everyone else is accustomed to not being able to understand his Japanese? How does all that work?"
THE EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE:
There are some exceptions to the above rule, and these exceptions are all meant to allow the characters easier communication and the ability to stay true to the canon in terms of word use. The exceptions are as follows:
- Names. All names are, of course, exactly the same as in their canon no matter what language they are spoken in. This goes for the names of people, places, etc.
- Untranslatable titles. Tons of anime/manga series have names for their locations, attacks, powers, weapons, forms, etc. that aren't easily translatable into English from the original Japanese. We know that, so while you may write these terms in English if you feel so inclined, you may also leave them as they are in their original Japanese form. (Note that this does not include generic, translatable titles such as specific military/company/social ranks, family relationships, etc., unless you can justify to us why such a title wouldn't translate well to English given the context of the canon.) As mentioned before, honorifics such as -san, -kun, -chan, and -sama, are allowed (though not obligatory), as they confer different levels of respect but aren't really translatable to any specific English-language words.
While the above is mostly in regards to anime/manga specifically, you can also use it as general guidelines if you're taking your character from any non-English work of fiction.
- Second language words/phrases the character says amongst their usual main language in the actual canon. You may use translatable non-English phrases/words in their full glory at Landel's given that your character uses those phrases/words in canon as a separate language interspersed with their normal speech. So, for example, Mal curses in Chinese in his canon amongst his English. Vash yells "danke" amongst his Japanese (which is technically English--more on that in the What If section). Both of these characters could continue to do this in the actual RP, as it's a valid carry-over from the canon rather than random non-English phrases.
---
"But what about the whole Hiro thing?"
THE WEIRD SIDE-EFFECTS OF THE NON-EXCEPTIONS:
(SKIP THIS SECTION UNLESS YOU'RE APPING A HEROES CHARACTER OR A CHARACTER IN HIRO'S RARE SITUATION. NO, REALLY.)
Okay, so Hiro in his entirety was part of the whole reason it took us such a long time to figure out all of this even before we'd ever seen Heroes. ("How do we deal with someone who's from an English canon who actually mainly speaks Japanese? What about other weird situations like that? We need to figure this out before it becomes an issue subject to... well, to subjectivity!")
And then we realized... hey! English is no more important than any other language, right? So someone who speaks English as a second language should adhere to the very same rules as everyone else, regardless of the fact that we, as players, write our RP posts in English.
For example: You have someone like Hiro at Landel's who, natively and in his canon, generally speaks a language different from the grand majority of his canon's characters. (Japanese) You then have that character's canonmates, the grand majority of whom speak a different language than him. (English) On top of all that, this character doesn't know that other language (English) fluently, and has already interacted with these other canonmates, who have already heard that this character's English isn't so great.
So, the weird part: At Landel's, a character like that would abide by the same rules as everyone else. His canonmates would perceive him as speaking perfect English, and Hiro would perceive them as speaking perfect Japanese.
Hiro could consciously try speaking English to his canonmates, and his actual English would come out just as broken as usual, in which case, when his canonmates responded, their English would, in fact, sound like English to him.
...Yeah, it's confusing. But hey, this is a RARE, RARE SITUATION, RIGHT? If your character is in a similar situation to this, don't hesitate to let us know so we can work stuff out with you.
---
"But what if..."
WHAT IFS:
What if my character is from a Japanese anime/manga, but, technically, the world the anime/manga is portraying is supposed to be using a language other than Japanese? (Examples: Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Trigun Maximum, One Piece, parts of Death Note.)
In this case, you would choose the canon's language as your character's main language, not the medium's language. So, for say, Trigun, you'd pin English as Wolfwood's main language rather than Japanese; if someone spoke Japanese as their second language to Wolfwood, he wouldn't understand it.
You know, Wolfwood brings up another good point: What if my character speaks a particular dialect in a different language, such as Kansai? What then?
Wolfwood's a good subject to use as an example for this, since Yasuhiro Nightow, Mr. Trigun himself, has addressed the issue in interviews: As Nightow intends for the Trigun world to be an English-speaking one, Wolfwood's Kansai dialect canonly should translate to some kind of equivalent English accent/dialect, and we feel that we should work with a similar mindset in Landel's. While we don't want people to go too overboard with trying to bring over the Kansai dialect (or whathaveyou) as weird English, a player of a dialect-speaking character should, depending on the importance of the dialect to their characterization, either choose phrasing a little different from the norm when they write their character's dialogue or ignore the dialect entirely.
Okay, what about someone like, say, L from Death Note or Mohinder from Heroes who generally speak a language in the canon different from their native language?
This is a situation where you could actually make a choice, though you'd have to stick to that choice once you declared it. L is British (English-speaking), but generally speaks Japanese in his canon. Mohinder is Indian (Hindi-speaking), but generally speaks English in his canon. Given the fact that Landel's ultimately is an English-speaking environment and the RP ultimately is an English RP, it'd be most practical to declare English as both L and Mohinder's main language even though they come from different backgrounds. (So basically, you can choose between your character's native language or the language they generally speak in canon as their main language in the RP. You cannot, however, choose a language your character is fluent in as their main language if the language meets neither of those criteria.)
What if you're not sure what the language of your character's canon is, just the medium's language? Like Kingdom Hearts?
Then the best idea is probably to make an educated guess and/or default to English.
Final question: Why did you guys decide to do all this instead of making it so everyone automatically understood English? That could have worked too!
1) TOO EASY FOR US LANDAMNED MODS HURRHURR.
2) In all seriousness, it's because we want as little separation between different canon groups as possible. (With the blanket English idea, as characters found their canonmates, they'd probably all start speaking in their original languages, which would barricade many non-canonmates from jumping into those conversations.) Also, seeing as probably the grand majority of the characters speak Japanese as their main language, we don't want players feeling they need to inject random Japanese into their posts amongst the English.
3) It'd make the characters more comfortable communicating with others (there'd be no discomfort that they'd need to breach by speaking a language that was up until now unfamiliar to them), while at the same time it would properly screw with their heads. ("You're speaking Klingon? WHAT?")
4) Erin will never learn what "concise" means. Ever.