Using OpenMW to learn other writing languages

[lysol]

I've been trying for a long time now to learn to read swedish medieval* runes fluently. I can read them without problem already, but it takes a looooong time to read since I have to read every single letter one at a time. It's like going back to first grade of school.

Since there are no texts anywhere I can practice on, I got an idea today. Use OpenMW! (And no, I can't really get any practice from reading runestones around in Sweden, mostly because it's written in Old Norse, which means I also have to concentrate to even undestand the language, and also because 99% of the runestones say this: "A and B let carve this stone after C, their father. God help his spirit".)

So here's how it looks:
http://imgur.com/fsteKv4 <- No problem, easy to read
http://imgur.com/zjIeVF0 <- Getting kinda small here. Crap.


It will probably take one or two extra years before I finish the main quest now, haha.

*Why medieval runes and not the futhark? Because the late viking age runes suck. They used the same runes for a lot of different sounds, which makes it REALLY annoying to read. That's why they invented the medieval runic alphabet. Because it doesn't suck. And if I learn the medieval runes, I can still read the late futhark since it's basically the same with more runes

Yes, I am a geek.

[Demose]

This is a pretty awesome idea. Do you mind if I steal it for Old English?

[lysol]

Why would I?

And by the way: It. is. painfully. annoying... to play the game like this. Just reading a sentence long as this one takes like 20 seconds. GAAH! But I hope that I'll get faster soon, haha.

The worst part is that I haven't got any memory of how words look yet. So if I'm supposed to look for someone with a strange dunmer name, I have to read it in the journal and really put into my memory how the name "sounds". Then I have to read the name of every NPC in the area out loud until I find the one that has the name that sounds as the name I tried to remember. Previously, with the latin alphabet, I realize now that I just read the name but didn't really put into memory how the name sounds, just how it "looks".

It's like I learn a lot of how the brain works by doing this, haha.

[Greywander]

This is pretty neat, and a good way to learn other writing systems. It does have a weakness, though; namely that the writing system in question needs to have a 1 to 1 ratio of letters with English. It might work for something like Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic, but probably not for something like Japanese Hiragana or Katakana.

What you might be able to do is use a script or program to edit the all the in-game text and replace it with your chosen writing system, which would add a lot of flexibility but also a lot more work.

I like this idea, though. Any chance you might post a .omwaddon for others to use?

[lysol]

That's true of course. The thing with runes is that old norse is a germanic language, so it translates easily to both latin alphabet and runes. During medieval times, the runic futhark evolved into a runic alphabet. It had almost all the letters in the standard latin alphabet. The few runes not present, for example X, is with this font simply written as KS. Z is written as S. It works.

Most other writing systems I fear you need to actually play the game in the language the writing system was made for. In other words, it's better to just read a book, unless you've got a russian/japanese/hebrew/whatever version of the game.

The reason I'm doing this is that there are no books, at least none worth reading, printed with runes. So I'm kinda limited to this.

There are no omwaddon file needed though. I just downloaded the Pelagiad font, installed it, put my rune *.ttf file in the mygui folder and edited an xml file. That's it basically. I'll post more detailed instructions later.