Twenty Five Words

[eilandesq]

The only sad thing about Elan's new Crowning Moment of Awesome--where he throws off his past of inspirational (mostly) failures to inspire a legendary hero to risk all in a way that any bard (or motivational speaker) would be proud to call their own--is that we only see it in flashback, hours after it actually happened. It's a symptom of Tarquin's hopelessly twisted psyche that he will never realize--not if he lives to a thousand--that while Elan is not the leader of the party, he is already a fully qualified hero in his own right, and if it fell to him to end Tarquin's tyranny I believe he would do the job admirably, though with regret--and this is as it should be. :smallsmile:

[Gnome Alone]

I like how "if'n" counts as one word.

[Nimrod's Son]

I like how "if'n" counts as one word.
Gramatically, it takes the place of the word "if". Really, having "wanna" count is more of a cheat.

[littlebum2002]

Yeah, that's one problem of creating fictional rules for a fictional world. How does the world know what counts as a word and what doesn't?

If you just slurred everything into one word, would that trick the sending into letting you send a novel?

How common does a contraction have to be for the Sending to accept it as one word?

If Durkon has referred to him as "Elan-the-Bard" would it count as 1 word or 3?

[KillianHawkeye]

The only sad thing about Elan's new Crowning Moment of Awesome--where he throws off his past of inspirational (mostly) failures to inspire a legendary hero to risk all in a way that any bard (or motivational speaker) would be proud to call their own--is that we only see it in flashback, hours after it actually happened. It's a symptom of Tarquin's hopelessly twisted psyche that he will never realize--not if he lives to a thousand--that while Elan is not the leader of the party, he is already a fully qualified hero in his own right, and if it fell to him to end Tarquin's tyranny I believe he would do the job admirably, though with regret--and this is as it should be. :smallsmile:

What's this got to do with the number of words in a Sending? :smallconfused:

[Ridry]

Yeah, that's one problem of creating fictional rules for a fictional world. How does the world know what counts as a word and what doesn't?

If you just slurred everything into one word, would that trick the sending into letting you send a novel?

Would you like to accept a collect call from Bob Wehadababyitsaboy?
No.
Who was it?
Bob. They had a baby. It's a boy.

[TriForce]

i find it funny that altough sending is 25 words or less, ALL sendings in the oots are 25 words exactly, always:smallsmile:

[Kornaki]

i find it funny that altough sending is 25 words or less, ALL sendings in the oots are 25 words exactly, always:smallsmile:

Only because Nale doesn't know how to cut his losses.

[Roland Itiative]

The only sad thing about Elan's new Crowning Moment of Awesome--where he throws off his past of inspirational (mostly) failures to inspire a legendary hero to risk all in a way that any bard (or motivational speaker) would be proud to call their own--is that we only see it in flashback, hours after it actually happened. It's a symptom of Tarquin's hopelessly twisted psyche that he will never realize--not if he lives to a thousand--that while Elan is not the leader of the party, he is already a fully qualified hero in his own right, and if it fell to him to end Tarquin's tyranny I believe he would do the job admirably, though with regret--and this is as it should be. :smallsmile:

Knowing Tarquin, he'd probably take it as a personal victory that Elan managed such a feat. It's better if he never finds out, and thinks Julio just happened to show up by chance. Assuming he'll die here, he'll do so thinking his only surviving son is just a comic-relief buffoon, adding a little salt to the wound.

[Kurald Galain]

I like how "if'n" counts as one word.

So does "resurrection(s)" :smalltongue:

[sr123]

Yeah, that's one problem of creating fictional rules for a fictional world. How does the world know what counts as a word and what doesn't?

It's the spirit of the r.a.w. as opposed to the letter. Sending must be extremely terse.

That said, magic is quirky by definition. If you want a formal explanation (and I love coming up with formal physics for fantasy magic), I'd say the spell limits the amount of information (calculated thermodynamically) transferred. Basically a couple nouns/verbs and some grammar is all that can be shown unambiguously, without any extraneous body language or voice subtlety to qualify it. That's exceptionally hard to calculate, so 25 words is a good rule of thumb.

[Silverionmox]

Speakers of agglutinating languages certainly make good use of sending :)

A better way to do it would be to limit the number of syllables.

[Greatmoustache]

what i'm curious about is, does sending work with sign language?

and how does sign itself language work? (drow sign language in particular, since it's the only one known to exist in ootsverse.) do they just jest the words in the same order they would speak them out? or is it more... essence based? like a single sign for a whole sentence. if it is, and if sign language does work with sending (and i see no reason why not) how does 25 word rule apply?

[GreyHound]

You can opt to have a sign language interpreter in the bottom right corner of your sending. :smalltongue:

[Hbgplayer]

and how does sign itself language work? (drow sign language in particular, since it's the only one known to exist in ootsverse.) do they just jest the words in the same order they would speak them out? or is it more... essence based? like a single sign for a whole sentence. if it is, and if sign language does work with sending (and i see no reason why not) how does 25 word rule apply?

Well, speaking from two and a half semesters of American Sign Language, each sign is usually a whole word or portion of a word. Grammatically, it is similar to Spanish/most languages other than English, in that the object comes before adjective.
Anything that has gender, like children, has a separate sign depending on the gender. For example, to say "My child is wearing a blue shirt," the sentence structure would be "MY [BOY/GIRL] CHILD WEAR SHIRT, BLUE"
To ask a question, the interrogative word (who, what, etc.) always goes at the end of the phrase, i.e. "COLOR YOUR CHILD SHIRT, WHAT?"

*And that concludes today's fun-fact lesson, everybody.
**Anyone with more experience in ASL please feel free to correct anything that is wrong.

[GreenCatCo]

Speaking as a third year ASL-English interpreter student I'd say that qualifying a 'word' in ASL is a bit tricky. The morphology of ASL has linguistic features that are absent from spoken languages due to the modality of the language. Also I'd like to qualify that it's not just word-sign equivalence of a spoken language but rather a separate signed language.

Certain parts of a signed utterance are absent from spoken or written languages, including non-manual grammar, 3-dimensional localization and directional verb agreement.

For example the verb TO HELP, formed by raising a closed fist placed on a flat hand, would be signed from the position of the person rendering the help towards the person receiving the help.

Thus "I help you" is accomplished with one sign, but has expressed three words.

But if this utterance is signed with the eyebrows raised, the equivalent becomes
"Can I help you?" and now we have expressed four words and the concept of an interrogative.

Further, if you signed this utterance with furrowed brows or a puzzled look on your face, the equivalent becomes
"Can I help you or something?" and now we've expressed 6 words.

Quite honestly, if DrowSL works for sending you could probably get most of a speech across with 25 signs.

Addendum:@Hbgplayer good to see other ASL users around :)
You're mostly correct, but those sign combinations of (girl+child) = daughter aren't really compound words so much as lexical roots. The two signs were once separate but are now sort of combined into one sign.
In the same way you can find Latin or Greek roots in English words, you can see some signs in other signs.

For example, the sign for HOME originally came from the signs for FOOD and BED, now stylized as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS226FWfxJA

[Kurald Galain]

what i'm curious about is, does sending work with sign language?

I don't see why not - the spell has both vocal and somatic components, after all.

[GreenCatCo]

I'm actually tempted to try to develop a 25 sign speech for the Drow.
Note: Items in brackets are technically not signs but rather classifiers, but given they encompass a single idea they're as good as 'signed words'
Note 2: The written gloss below doesn't do much justice to what the signed utterance looks like.

ATTENTION-YOU-ALL TODAY WE DROW PROUD
TODAY SUN SURFACE (WE-ASCEND-AND-SPREAD-LIKE-A-PLAGUE)
SUN-PEOPLE THEY FINISH THEIR SOCIETY (CRUMBLE TO RUINS AND NOTHINGNESS)
NOW NIGHT SUN DISSAPPEAR FOREVER
SPIDER-GOD SHE (WEAVE WEB OF EVIL THAT COVERS THE WORLD)
EVERAFTER FOREVER NIGHT
Translation:
My people... Today is a proud day for the Drow.
Today we ascend to the surface and spread across it like a plague.
The age of the sun dwellers is at an end, their civilization will be annihilated.
Tonight the sun will be forever extinguished as Lolth weaves he web of evil binding this world in eternal night.

[Rakoa]

They cast sending, then just articulate a vowel for as long as their lungs will last twenty five times while rapidly signing out their intentions. Thus they must take the Perform: Opera Singer skill to make optimal use of sending.

[martianmister]

Whait is an If'n?

[Amphiox]

The implications of the word-limit for Sending are interesting to speculate on.

In the real world, a hard limit on a communication method usually inspires changes to the language, often specific to that activity, to condense as much information as possible into the format.

Think of the code that's developed for use in tweets, for example.

So, it would seem to me that one could anticipate that spellcasters who use Sending a lot will eventually develop a shorthand, whereby certain commonly used sentences and phrases get replaced by just one word. Or they would gravitate to using languages that tend to pack complex ideas into single words.

For example, when using Sending to report on weather conditions in a northerly country, perhaps the spellcasters will prefer to use Inuit, with its many different single words for "snow" in different weather conditions.

And languages with grammatical rules that involve putting suffixes/prefixes onto single words (say for example in verb conjugation) will be preferred over languages that do the same task by adding short words to the text.

[The Oni]

So in the Tippyverse you'll be able to recognize hip young spellcasterly types because nothing they say will make a damn bit of sense. Awesome.

[Taelas]

For example, when using Sending to report on weather conditions in a northerly country, perhaps the spellcasters will prefer to use Inuit, with its many different single words for "snow" in different weather conditions.

Eh. That's not quite how the language works. It's polysynthetic -- it combines root words with suffixes to form sentences. This includes snow. So they have a word which essentially translates to "soft snow", with the word for "snow" as the root and the word for "soft" as the suffix.

Technically it is a "new" word, but that's just a quirk of the language. It isn't really that different, and in my mind, a sending would account for the differences.

Besides, English has a lot of words for snow as well: sleet, hail, slush, flurry, avalanche, etc.

Really, if the Inuit "word-sentences" each count as a word, you should just always use Inuit for sending; in that case, they have thousands of words for essentially everything.

[The Oni]

^ Yeah. German is similar in this respect, they have many, many words that are really just long strings of the same words, which is why their language includes stuff like panzerkampfwagen and geschwindigkeitsbegrenzungent. Which means, if you wanna maximize your Sending with RAW, learn German.

[Kurald Galain]

^ Yeah. German is similar in this respect, they have many, many words that are really just long strings of the same words, which is why their language includes stuff like panzerkampfwagen and geschwindigkeitsbegrenzungent. Which means, if you wanna maximize your Sending with RAW, learn German.

I've always figured Dwarvish sounds like German...

[Taelas]

Tolkien wrote Dwarvish as Semitic, but I don't really think that fits. Whether or not German is better, though... perhaps I am biased here, but I like Old Norse as Dwarvish, for obvious reasons. (Closest modern equivalent being Icelandic.)

German isn't really in the same league regarding compound words as the Inuit languages; you can have entire sentences that are just one word (though it isn't common). That isn't possible in German.

By the way, for the benefit of those who do not speak German, what Lord Smeagle said was 'armored car' and 'speed limits'. (Though Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzungen doesn't have a T at the end.)

[The Oni]

My apologies. I transposed the T from "unterseeboot," as most of my knowledge on Germany comes from WWII documentaries.

[BobTheDog]

My apologies. I transposed the T from "unterseeboot," as most of my knowledge on Germany comes from WWII documentaries.

Wait. What WWII documentary is titled "speed limits"? :smallconfused:

[Rakoa]

Wait. What WWII documentary is titled "speed limits"? :smallconfused:

I don't believe it was titled "Speed Limits" so much as speed limits where mentioned in the documentary at some point...

[BobTheDog]

I don't believe it was titled "Speed Limits" so much as speed limits where mentioned in the documentary at some point...

That was what I was (clumsily) trying to ask. When did people start discussing speed limits in WWII documentaries? Or is that one of the factors that stopped the Germans' invasion of the USSR?

[Bavarian itP]

That was what I was (clumsily) trying to ask. When did people start discussing speed limits in WWII documentaries? Or is that one of the factors that stopped the Germans' invasion of the USSR?

The speed limit of submarines certainly was not.

[AstralFire]

So you'd say that they weren't Russian anywhere?

If I were to try and develop a general rule for Sending that extends to multiple languages, I would say that you can express anything which can be done in 20 seconds or less.

[BobTheDog]

So you'd say that they weren't Russian anywhere?

I'm sure they would have succeeded if the seeds of the Russian resistance hadn't had time to Germanate.

Anyway, these belong in the Julioteers thread. :D

[SteveDJ]

What's with this thread's title? I'm disappointed. I came here expecting to see it filled with only posts consisting of exactly twenty five words each.

[astralmeson]

What's with this thread's title? I'm disappointed. I came here expecting to see it filled with only posts consisting of exactly twenty five words each.

I'd need to blame you for having high expectations. Not everyone is open to trying something so constrictive, and I doubt the humor would last.

[Rogar Demonblud]

{insert 25 cheers}

[Benthesquid]

How Oulipo of you. What will follow- writing of posts lacking a particular symbol commonly found in a primary form of communication in this forum?

[Taelas]

Merely omitting the letter E is shockingly common. Trying something different--like other vowels, for once, or even more of them--seems better, to me.

[Benthesquid]

Challenge accepted.

Supposing willingness; seeking untrodden communication whittling pressures; possibilities seem countless.

Speech's clearness lessened, admittedly.

Utterances' patterns' allure added, too?

Assess, appraise, esteemed correspondent.

[snikrept]

In a more advanced magic-using society, your Warforged with a modem has infinite range with it thanks to Sending.

"EEEEEEKKKKKKRRRSHSHSHSSSSSSSKKK" probably counts as a single word.