[MUD-Dev] Internationalisation: The effect of Tongues in virtualsocietes

[David Kennerly]

Peter "Pietro" Rossmann wrote:

> he has never met words like grinding, threadmilling [if he don't
> goes to gym] and such.

Neither have 99.9% of all English speakers. :)

> So, i am wondering - would the VW (virtual worlds, not volkswagen)
> help to unite us by usage of english? Or will it be dedicated only
> to those speeking (writing) english?

There's plenty of subcommunities in virtual and real communities
that don't speak the language of the home developers.  They use
their own language, even if only by transliterating the alphabet
that the client supports.  It's nothing special about virtual
worlds. In San Francisco, for example, I hear a dozen different
languages, sometimes in one day.

And there's more MMOs in the non-English speaking world than in the
English; maybe in Korea alone.  In ten years--who knows--maybe in
China alone.

Michael Chui wrote:

> Now, there's another idea floating around. Chris Crawford, in his
> essay History of Thinking 4, predicts that /programming languages/
> will be the next universal language. That the only thing missing
> is an alphabet.

Even if you could speak perfect C++ who would care to parse it?

Programming languages themselves are built on very specific
semantics and cultural constructs.  They are languages, but their
native speakers are artificial, by definition.  It is with ardor
that humans learn to read and type it at a snail's pace; whereas,
even an ancient desktop can fluently discourse a thousand times
faster.  But they're just different.  How do you say, in any
programming language, "I love you"?

> Global unity is a nice ideal.

It is?  Why would the world want to become that boring?  Separate
languages are founded on separate cultures that have separate
ideologies.  The only times history has known unity (now is
definitely on the upside of that curve) it has been called an
empire, and in empires the emperor's language spread.

I enjoy traveling exactly because the rest of the world is
different.  I don't have an ear for languages, but that's my
problem, not the rest of the world's.

David
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