Chants of Sennaar teaches more than just language...

Comments · 89

• MR

  @MrJoah · 2 years ago (edited) · pinned

  It&apos;s a really fascinating puzzle adventure game that captures the power of language through its well-designed cultures, turning the art of translation into an addictive piece of gameplay. <br>The way it explores the relationships between different groups of people using language as gameplay is really exciting as a game. With language at its core, it highlights both the differences and similarities between people and cultures. <br>It features linguisstic gameplay that is easy to understand but can be complex to solve. The overall message about culturally divided people, communication and understanding is simple but completely universal aswell in today&apos;s world. <br> <br> <br>As someone who is also learning a foreign language, it was fascinating to see how the game manages to represent the learning process of acquiring foreign words through context (input hypothesis) in a very small framework. Since it works similarly for me in reality, but of course only superficially, because like you commented the languages ​​in the game are too simple and primitive compared to Human languages ​​and the auditory level is completely missing. However, the game doesn&apos;t have to be as complex and complicated as a real languages ​​(the game would probably no longer be as fun if it would) to simulate a fascination and a certain model of language äcquisition. <br> <br> <br>The few points of criticism would be, the paths to walk being quite too monotonous after a while and a bit of repetition towards the end of the game when it comes to the structure of the puzzles. <br>The stealth segment seemed out of place andalthough I found the panoramas beautiful and impressive, I found the aesthetics to be sometimes a little bland. <br> <br> But if you are interested in language-based puzzles or intellectual adventure games like Tunic and Outer Wilds or to some extent Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol,you should give Chants Of Sennar a try. <br> <br>-Thanks for your insight and perspective on the game. <br>Watching your videos since your Sifu review. Your discussions of the medium are really remarkably good. So even when you don&apos;t have a lot of comments (and i am someone who also don&apos;t comment often, except when i really want to write something) &nbsp;keep it up as long as you enjoy it. <br>Cheers<br>(and you probably would say 얼큰하네요 or 얼큰하죠~)

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• EI

  @eibriel · 1 year ago

  Watching this video just after learning that Duolingo fired their translators and linguists to replace them with statistical generative models is heartbreaking.

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• DK

  @DKannji · 1 year ago

  The thing that made this game extremely fun for me was that once you reach the bards, you&apos;re being confronted with a new way of structuring the language as they, among the rest of the denizens, are the only ones using a very unintuitive ancient theatrical Shakespearian sentence structure.

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• QU

  @QuakDucc · 2 years ago

  Chants of Sennaar was such an amazing game, as someone with a hobbiest interest in linguistics. It&apos;s a real Rosetta&apos;s Stone experience that I&apos;m glad cought other people&apos;s eye as well.

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• AL

  @alessandrodebonis4888 · 1 year ago

  Playing this game after taking my master&apos;s general linguistics exam really made me appreaciate the knowledge I had accumulated without the stress of the test (fun fact, linguistic relativism was one of the main topics of the course).<br><br>While I certaintly understand that this game&apos;s playerbase doesn&apos;t have a lot of fundametals in linguistic, I kinda wish more languages were like the Bard&apos;s forcing you to think out of the box, play around with word order and morphemes, or even create new characters by mixing up the ones you already have. There is so much that we, as western indoeuropean speakers, take for granted, and we don&apos;t even realise that most languages in the world actally put the verb at the end of the sentence, have different numerals for different classes of nouns, have words for things that we have always considered the same thing, and so much more.<br><br>Even then, this was definitely one of the best games I played recently, and just hearing the music makes me feel nostalgic. Also, congrats for trying to learn italian, which I think is a much harder language than English! (your pronounciation of &quot;opzioni&quot; was very good 😊)

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• DA

  @Daybreak_System · 9 months ago

  The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was misinterpreted, language actually affects they way you sink, this is because cursing underwater when you see a shark will deplete a different amount of air from your lungs based on language.

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• OU

  @Ouro-boros7 · 3 months ago

  When I went through the game, one of my favorite elements is how you assume how the language might sound, and that all depends upon how you see the culture, for example, I thought that the devotees would be &nbsp;a lot like Romance languages mainly Italian or Spanish, the knights would be very harsh, and out right, the bards would also have romance influences, but more of the French-like influence, the alchemists i immediately thought would have a nasalized D at the start of words, and the anchored would have more simplified grammar or spelling from their older counterpart

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• LI

  @liammccoskrie · 9 months ago

  One thing I love about having a world with multiple languages is that learning someone&apos;s elses&apos; language is an easy way of showing you clearly want to make friends since learning any language is quite the endeavour.<br>Also since it is such an endeavour, it makes people think hard about where they want to travel.

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• PO

  @Pomodorosan · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rspMb3L2RHo&amp;t=264">4:24</a> &quot;you&apos;ll say *silence*&quot;

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• ZE

  @zephyr733 · 9 months ago

  bro im hardly 20 seconds in and you just hyped me to the max for a game i didnt yet hear of omg thank you babai

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• 1Z

  @1zippy · 2 years ago

  enjoyed the vid. surprised it doesn&apos;t have thousands of views! glad youtube recc&apos;d it to me

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• CA

  @Cantfindabettername · 10 months ago

  What a great review and essay! It reminded me if the time that I realized just how many languages double up on verbs or adjectives instead of saying &quot;very&quot;. Although, some old English did both (&quot;verily, verily&quot; 😂). It&apos;s called reduplication, and many languages utilize this all over the world. <br><br>Hawai&apos;ian word of &quot;strong&quot; is &quot;Mahi&quot;, so what do they call a challenging to catch relative of the sword fish? Mah-Mahi! Wiki means &quot;fast&quot; so to communicate &quot;hurry&quot;, you say &quot;wiki-wiki&quot;! <br><br>Hebrew does similar things in their poetry/linguistic structure by repeating a statement in a slightly altered phrasing to emphasize something. I can&apos;t remember off the top of my head exact words and phrases, but I ran into that doubling pattern in a several African languages, Japanese has partial form of it where they may only repeat one or two syllables in a larger word, some indoeuropean languages do this too, and we have some echos of it in English (chit-chat, pitter-patter, etc.)

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