The Chained Watcher

Languages

~~~

Grian slumped back in his chair with a sigh, letting the hand holding his communicator flop to the side.

He'd kinda forgotten just how time consuming it could be to learn a language from scratch, even with a translator partially finished. Proper sentence structure, which formalities to use when, verb conjugality... He's honestly quite tempted to use magic to shortcut the process, but a translation spell could be sensed, and he can't leech off of someone else's understanding to jump ahead.

For one, he's been doing his best to not sense or project thoughts or emotions between himself and other players, and besides. It's been so long since he's tried borrowing someone else's vocabulary understanding, he's not confident that he'd be subtle with it. Something as benign as just borrowing someone's comprehension isn't really that hard or dangerous, it's just a bit disconcerting for the recipient if not done with much subtlety or skill.

No, he'll have to learn it himself, just like all the other players.

Rubbing at his eyes, he contemplates going back to reading through the dictionary before dismissing it. He might have been able to sink weeks into a single task back before his imprisonment, but his current mentality lets him get quite bored with monotonous tasks like this. The intriguing nature of Minecraft has spoiled him, and he quite honestly can't bear to stare at the dictionary any longer.

Should he enchant something to pass the time? No, this isn't Minecraft, and the level of strength he can afford to put into an enchant without sacrificing subtlety is minimal at best. Sure, he could make another self-scribing quill, but that's not really all that useful right now. Although... it might be funny to enchant some stuff without recoloring it, once he's back on Hermitcraft.

What, did you think all items enchanted with Watcher magic had to be purple? Maybe for a beginner it would feel that way, but it's not too hard to stain stuff with a different color once you know how to do it.

So then what could he do? Scar should be busy for a while with his new shield spell, and most of the other Hermits are probably also going over dictionaries to try to learn this world's language. Well at least there should only be one major language here, seeing as the local civilization is tech-based. Easily accessed world-wide communication tended to lead to that, after all.

Eh, he can just help out with building the structures for now, and spend a couple minutes every now and then on the dictionary when he recovers enough patience.

~~~

You know, being able to adjust your vocal cords pretty much at will makes speaking different languages so much easier.

About a week has passed, and the translator function has finally been refined enough to be used in actual conversation. Obviously, knowing the language yourself is more effective, but for most interactions the speech-to-text-to-text-to-speech thing should work fine.

Although Grian will probably have to tweak his pronunciation a bit after holding an actual conversation with a local, any weird accents can probably be explained off pretty easily. Most of the other players are having a bit of difficulty with some of the more exotic syllables, so the text-to-speech part of the translator is probably going to be seeing some heavy use at first.

On another note, that military base that had been under attack from the wyvern riders managed to scrape by, so extra long tunnels are being dug to keep the actual location of the portal hidden. It hadn't taken very long for most people to come to the same conclusion, agreeing that, while interacting with the local population is going to happen one way or another, maybe having a fallback plan for if hostilities break out is a good idea.