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Mondat

Allow foreign characters in dragon names

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There's another suggestion for "various" characters but as the OP doesn't mention foreign letters I opened a new thread. Please discuss if foreign characters (diacritical marks, other characters) should be allowed in dragon names.

 

Possible complications:

- people who do not know the language might not understand the meaning

- foreign characters not showing correctly for other users (they might see boxes)

 

--------------------------------

Personal opinion:

I would really like to give my dragons some fine Japanese or Chinese names with the correct Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana which is currently not possible. I have to use romanized letters...which, frankly said, make it look ugly to me. Also in case of other people using romanized Japanese on their dragons I have problems understanding the meaning of the names as there are Kanji where the reading is the same but the meaning of the Kanji differs. If I saw the Kanji, I would understand. I only used romanized words when I was a beginner in studying Japanese but now after living in Japan for over 7 years and having Japanese characters around me all the time I do not need it at all.

 

Then, there's also the matter of the length of the names. If you use Japanese or especially Chinese you can finish what you want to say with a few letters compared to English or German - wonderful languages, really.

Some examples (all dragons are on my scroll):

Xiao Mao Mi - Chinese for "little kitty" => could be 小猫咪 instead

Ryu Murakami - name of a Japanese writer (romanization should actually be "Ryuu or Ryū Murakami" but the double u looks terrible to me) => could be 村上龍

Minikui Oni - Japanese for "ugly troll/devil/demon" (Oni are creatures - Youkai - in Japanese folklore) => could be 醜い鬼

 

As a German I would also like to see German Umlauts äöü. I think it should be considered at least because we are players from around the world - please & thank you.

Edited by Mondat

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The issue is we'd need mods who knew all these languages. Otherwise people could be writing nasty things in them and no mod would be able to tell the difference.

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I'm going to wait a bit before forming an opinion but I just want to point out that, although we have players from many different regions and gladly welcome them, this site has always been English-based. We allow names in other languages (not descriptions or forum posts, though), but only if they are English alphanumerical characters. (If I'm unsure of a name, I use a translator, although that's not the best, so I do mostly depend on users who speak those other languages to report names if they find them.)

Edited by SockPuppet Strangler

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I'm personally chinese myself, and while this suggestion sounds tempting, I don't think it should be implemented. There are a lot of international users in DC, yet most of the mods are only fluent in English. Even on the forum, posts in another language are deleted because the mods can't understand them. Having things in another language means that swear words might be sneaked into a dragon's name, and it also complicates things.

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No for the two simple reasons that I don't want swearwords from other langiages to be put in game and because I would really, really hate to see butchered words in my language to come up in game.

 

So no.

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Perhaps we should have other mods who can handle that? Like maybe they can check the names and descriptions and translate it to the other mods...best to use Native speakers because then it will be easier to know the bad words, if one of the new mods spots a bad word then they can report it and it can be taken care of.

 

Can this be aimed to people who might use slightly different grammar? I have a friend who's Norwegian and she uses slightly different words, like for 'teach' she uses learn...it looks weird, but it's not bad or anything...it's not the lack of grammar in those cases...they just use different words.

Edited by Firebirdwyvern

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Perhaps we should have other mods who can handle that? Like maybe they can check the names and descriptions and translate it to the other mods...best to use Native speakers because then it will be easier to know the bad words, if one of the new mods spots a bad word then they can report it and it can be taken care of.

That would mean having at least one mod for each language... even with people speaking multiple languages that just creates too many moderators. That's not something you want; internal conflicts within moderating teams can cause websites do go down quicker than the Titanic.

 

No, I think the current system is fine, and I dislike seeing something and not knowing if it's something bad aimed at me or not. And sticking roman characters into a translator generally gives a more reliable translation than complicated characters like Kanji, which can have multiple meanings...

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I think roman letters with accent marks should be allowed, like the umlauts that the OP mentioned. However, I don't think we should stray outside of the english alphabet for reasons that have already been stated.

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I think roman letters with accent marks should be allowed, like the umlauts that the OP mentioned. However, I don't think we should stray outside of the english alphabet for reasons that have already been stated.

I agree with this. It's not only the translation and the bad lanuguage issue, it's the fonts issue. As it is, simply copypasting an apostrophe from Word gets you an incorrect character warning ! and there have been some posts on this forum where the words have disappeared into a fog of small squares and ^A^s and stuff

 

Mondat - I ran the third of yours through a translation programme and it came up as Scurvy ogre. Which immediately suggests to me that blink.gif there may be trouble when someone uses a translator...

The kitten just comes up as small cat; and the author as Murakami dragon, not as a tribute to him. So anyone wanting to know names you put up would not be seeing the names you intended anyway.

 

Few here can read other alphabets, to be honest.

Edited by fuzzbucket

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As much as I'd like to see accents on letters (including ä,ö,ü), as well as things as the Spanish ñ, French ç, German ß, French œ and a number of other things I'm probably not even aware of, I have a problem with the Asian "letters". Many different of them look all the same to me, which might make it hard for me to discern whether a dragon is inbred or not, if the names have any meaning, much less what the names sound like.

 

Using Asian (Kyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic...) letterson DC would be like putting up painted letters for the blind - at least for most of us.

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I agree with the people here. Adding new characters such as accents, the umlauts (is that what these are called? My language uses them too but we call them "dieresis"), and the spanish Ñ, would be ok. But going straight to kanjis, I'm not against it but it'd be very complicated no only to implement, but to control.

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Yes, for some reason, English uses the German-based term "umlaut" for vowels with points above them, like Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö and ü ...

 

While I sometimes would like to use some of those, being German myself, I'd prefer stuff left as it is now. Any umlaut can be transcribed easily: Ä => Ae, Ö => Oe, Ü => Ue, ä => ae, ö => oe, ü => ue and ß => ss

Personally, I wince at the sight of abused umlauts like in Mötley Crüe or Motörhead; I really wouldn't want to see that on dragon names. Those who use German words that would originally contain an umlaut but don't transcribe them properly (like "grün" => "grun" instead of "gruen" as it should be) probably won't have an easy way to put the actual umlaut there anyway since they are lacking the keys on their keyboard, and those who know the language can transcribe.

So I agree with ylangylang there.

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As much as I'd like to see accents on letters (including ä,ö,ü), as well as things as the Spanish ñ, French ç, German ß, French œ and a number of other things I'm probably not even aware of, I have a problem with the Asian "letters". Many different of them look all the same to me, which might make it hard for me to discern whether a dragon is inbred or not, if the names have any meaning, much less what the names sound like.

 

Using Asian (Kyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic...) letterson DC would be like putting up painted letters for the blind - at least for most of us.

Never thought of that - a VERY good point !

 

@ rubyeyes

Actually - I speak German, and I am not at all happy with transliteration of ä, ö and ü into ae, oe, ue and so on. We DO have at least some of these spellings in English words - ae in particular - aesthete is not pronounced at all the same as ästhete would be.

 

Umlauted words in German are single sounds; transliterated into English, they need to remain as unitary diphthongs, but are often spoken - weirdly. I heard it only recently when I told someone I'd been to Köln in an email. My email changed it to Koeln (I now have my spellchecker change every instance of Koln to the PROPER spelling !) and when she told someone verbally where I'd been, they couldn't GET it, the sound she brought out was so strange !

 

A small point ? Not to me sad.gif

Edited by fuzzbucket

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Oh, special characters are easy to get. Just look on wikipedia... Then, you can copy and paste them. smile.gif

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Oh, special characters are easy to get. Just look on wikipedia... Then, you can copy and paste them. smile.gif

But they may well not work OK in the boxes here. Because - except for umlauts and accents - the kanji ones etc are not single alphabet letters.

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I have the Windows character map on my QS tool bar (yes, I do still insist on one even on W7! tongue.gif) for if I need a special character; it's useful for my work. (Can be found in the System Tools folder, of all places, if you need it.)

 

I wouldn't mind accented roman letters and I can quite understand why people would like non-roman characters available, but I can also see the problems such might bring. sad.gif

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In addition to reasons already stated by others, this is the way my browser displays your post, Mondat.

 

user posted image

 

I assume I need to download some other font to display it correctly, but frankly that is more trouble than I want to go to and I find this very annoying whenever I come across it. I would not like to see it in dragon names!

Edited by purplehaze

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Yes, for some reason, English uses the German-based term "umlaut" for vowels with points above them, like Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö and ü ...

 

While I sometimes would like to use some of those, being German myself, I'd prefer stuff left as it is now. Any umlaut can be transcribed easily: Ä => Ae, Ö => Oe, Ü => Ue, ä => ae, ö => oe, ü => ue and ß => ss

Personally, I wince at the sight of abused umlauts like in Mötley Crüe or Motörhead; I really wouldn't want to see that on dragon names. Those who use German words that would originally contain an umlaut but don't transcribe them properly (like "grün" => "grun" instead of "gruen" as it should be) probably won't have an easy way to put the actual umlaut there anyway since they are lacking the keys on their keyboard, and those who know the language can transcribe.

So I agree with ylangylang there.

In spanish we use them differently. In my language, when you have a G+e/i together, such as in Genova (for example) or Gibraltar, it is pronounced like "Henova" and "Hibraltar", whether if we put a U between the G and the E, as in Guepardo, the sound is like the G in toGether.

However, when using these umlauts such as in Pingüino or Cigüeña, you pronounce the G like in "together" and also pronounce the U.

 

Either way, I wouldn't really mind if this is implemented or not, such as I wouldn't mind if the spanish Ñ is included. Most of my dragon names are either made up gibberish or english based names, with the exceptions of a few which are spanish such as Brisa which means breeze.

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@ rubyeyes

Actually - I speak German, and I am not at all happy with transliteration of ä, ö and ü into ae, oe, ue and so on. We DO have at least some of these spellings in English words - ae in particular - aesthete is not pronounced at all the same as ästhete would be.

 

Umlauted words in German are single sounds; transliterated into English, they need to remain as unitary diphthongs, but are often spoken - weirdly. I heard it only recently when I told someone I'd been to Köln in an email. My email changed it to Koeln (I now have my spellchecker change every instance of Koln to the PROPER spelling !) and when she told someone verbally where I'd been, they couldn't GET it, the sound she brought out was so strange !

Bringing ENGLISH pronunciations as an argument for German words seems funny to me, considering how many different ways English has for its own words to pronounce the same thing! xd.png E.g. "row" like a line of things? "row" like in a bar fight? Same word, 2 pronunciations. Or the same pronunciation for 2 different words: "night" and "knight" ...

 

Either way, there is no need to mix grammar rules of languages. English has no umlaut, so it doesn't need those transcriptions, so it can use these letter combos for other things.

German HAS those umlauts, and it has transcription rules for them. You don't like these rules, and I don't like spellings like "ght" when you just mean to say "t" - different languages, different specialties.

 

Sorry, I know that was offtopic, it just amused me. smile.gif

 

Also, there is indeed that font issue, too.

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Bringing ENGLISH pronunciations as an argument for German words seems funny to me, considering how many different ways English has for its own words to pronounce the same thing! xd.png E.g. "row" like a line of things? "row" like in a bar fight? Same word, 2 pronunciations. Or the same pronunciation for 2 different words: "night" and "knight" ...

<snip>

 

Sorry, I know that was offtopic, it just amused me. smile.gif

Sure. We all know what ghoti spells. xd.png

 

But why make it even worse ?

 

And why pretend that German is English, as you might say. They have MUCH more sensible rules of pronunciation/spelling; the more we see smart, sensible ways to write a sound, the sooner English spelling might fall into line with common sense. xd.png Homonyms are the work of the devil, invented to make small children suffer mad.gif.

 

(Before anyone says it, I have always had 100% spelling scores, to the extent that when I DID end up spelling one single word wrong for about 6 years, no teacher ever noticed to correct it ! It wasn't till I corrected someone else that I realised... - she was indignant, we got out the dictionary - and I felt very let down by my teachers !)

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The issue is we'd need mods who knew all these languages. Otherwise people could be writing nasty things in them and no mod would be able to tell the difference.

You can already do that by using Mandarin Chinese Pinyin, Japanese Romaji, any other "Romanization" of langauges and non-English latin alphabet-based languages.

 

While I'm all for quality control the point is a bit moot.

 

Still, even though I'm a Chinese speaker myself I disagree with the use of non-Latin characters on the site. Diacritic-marked Latin characters don't mess up the feeling of the site on a whole, but if you start mixing in Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and whatnot, it will be a colossal mess.

Edited by CNR4806

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I'm in favor of this. I named a few of my dragons in Polish but without the: ę ą ć ś ż ó ń ł, they look wrong.

 

As for swear words, it's not like it is impossible to write them now. If I wanted to I could put a Polish curse in the dragon's name, the only problem is that now it would have bad spelling on top of it being rude lol

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I'm in favor of this. I named a few of my dragons in Polish but without the: ę ą ć ś ż ó ń ł, they look wrong.

 

As for swear words, it's not like it is impossible to write them now. If I wanted to I could put a Polish curse in the dragon's name, the only problem is that now it would have bad spelling on top of it being rude lol

It's even funnier than that. I know a curse word in croatian that, in spanish, it means curve. It is exactly the same word, written the same, but with completely different meanings in two separated languages (one slavic one romantic). I'm sure that's not an exception.

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I don't really think it's needed. Some of my dragons have portuguese names but I can read portuguese perfectly well without accented words ("Coração" and "Coracao"), just the same way you can read japanese perfectly well even if it's romanized. Besides, if you start adding in foreign characters, you can bet people WILL butcher up languages using the faithful google translator. They already do it with tattoos.

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People do that anyway, though. I for one would like to see at least accents available. If I want to name my dragon Frühstück, just to pick a random word (I can never think of good examples when I need them), I don't want to spell it Fruehstueck, it just looks tacky, imo.

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