Posts belonging to Category Language and Linguistics
Posted by Ravyn on March 5, 2013
Yesterday, I talked about narrative uses of weather. When I discussed this with my mother the linguist, she didn’t hesitate to point out another—the interesting things that weather does to a cultural vocabulary.
There’s an Old English word, wederian. It means ‘to be good weather.’ Think about this a bit. What does it say about that [...]
Categories: Language and Linguistics, World-building |
Tags: language, roleplaying, weather, World-building, writing | 
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Posted by Ravyn on October 2, 2012
One of the things I like seeing in a work in which most of the characters are coming from different places is an understanding that they’re going to have somewhat different dialects. That’s awesome; it makes it clear to me that the author/GM knows that people sound different, and can fake the distinctive features of [...]
Categories: Characterization, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Technique, Voice and Style, World-building |
Tags: dialect, dialogue, roleplaying, text, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on March 4, 2011
In response to my riff yesterday on discovering a character through one of her interests, UZ pointed out that there was a certain universal symbolism about tea.
“A villain who drinks tea is a civilized villain. A murderer who drinks tea is an urbane murderer. There is no such thing as a tea drinking contest. In [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: roleplaying, symbolism, World-building, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on July 5, 2010
In-jokes. The secret language of people who’ve known each other or been part of the same subset of a subculture for a while, they serve a writer or roleplayer as a way of illustrating a strong shared history between one or more characters. But for people going a little more meta, they’re also an excellent [...]
Categories: Characterization, Cultures, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Player Advice, Technique, Voice and Style, World-building |
Tags: in-jokes, Language and Linguistics, processes, roleplaying, slang, World-building, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on May 17, 2010
It sometimes seems like a character’s name (or occasionally lack thereof) is one of her most important features; not only can it occasionally serve as a hint about the character’s purpose, background or abilities, but it’s also the fastest, most concise way to sum up a whole mess of qualities in as few syllables as [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Names, Player Advice, Technique, World-building |
Tags: emphasizing change, names, role-playing, slang, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 21, 2010
Yesterday, I talked about situations in which one person just wouldn’t understand what another was explaining because they just didn’t have the mindset for it. But as UZ pointed out in a comment to that post, sometimes, it’s not the mindset that gets in the way: instead, it’s the vocabulary. Here, language barrier plays a [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Language and Linguistics, World-building |
Tags: communication, details, gaming, language, misunderstandings, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 14, 2008
Here I am, back to getting across fluency issues. I consider these tricks to be a more advanced set than Friday’s assortment; some of them require linguistic elements that don’t show up in English, some work better with an understanding of grammar and word order, some work a lot better if you’ve taken the time [...]
Categories: Character creation, Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Player Advice, Technique, World-building |
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Posted by Ravyn on December 12, 2008
Just about everyone has at some point met or read someone who is not a native speaker of the surrounding language. They can be hard to characterize properly, particularly in a face to face game where you can’t think through the dialogue first, and it’s easy to slip and not sound quite right. So how [...]
Categories: Character creation, Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Player Advice, Technique, World-building |
Tags: original posts | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on November 6, 2008
Badly chosen names are practically a correlary to Murphy’s Law; if there is a way a name can get mangled, mispronounced, misinterpreted or otherwise stepped on, the audience is going to find it. Haven’t we all (okay, mostly) had experiences of the sort with our own names in elementary school? Sometimes it’s accidental; emphasis in [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Language and Linguistics, Names, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: original posts | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 4, 2008
Naming characters is easy. Naming places is harder, or at least can seem pretty daunting. The best way to work around this is to let art imitate life—just look at all the ways people name places as it stands!
The easiest approach is the explorer-name route—[Person’s] [Population Center Term/Landmark]. It’s concise, it’s straightforward, and there’s room [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, Language and Linguistics, Names, Technique |
Tags: original posts | No Comments »