I've noticed that when using the private language groups, character names come through in the clear with "Known word" as the alt-text on mouseover.

How does that work?  It's pretty neat, and I'd like to add other "Known words" to the languages in my game.

Ideally I'd be able to specify that, say, Low and High gothic share a bunch of known words, while the rest are still incomprehensible.  That would be quite useful.

The language groups just work by randomising the text for any character who doesn't understand that language.  Character names in the game are automatically exempt from being scrambled.

You can make any other word exempt by enclosing it in curly brackets, {like so}, but it will only be exempt for that specific message, it isn't a permanent thing.  You will need  to mark the word as exempt for every message it is used in.

Right, I know how the base language group functionality works.  And I know about the curly braces.  I was just kinda hoping to be able to define a dictionary of shared words between languages.  If that's not possible, oh well, but it would be neat.

Short of putting a post in your game of words you would otherwise put curly brackets around I don't think so. And if you tried to make everyone just know known words I think putting it inside the first language would confuse the system and bork the functionality of it.

About what I expected.  I can think of a number of ways to implement a known-words/similar-words system, but I suspect they'd require a substantial amount of back end work.  (You'd be looking at each character having a dictionary somewhere in the game of which words they know in which languages, and another set of dictionaries for which languages know words from other languages.)

Another question though, for characters with spaces in their name e.g. "firstname lastname", it won't trigger as a known word if you just use the first or last name.  Easily worked around if you remember to {}, but it'd be convenient if it was automatic.

Well, you could always do it with a third language group. Manually, something like that while editing:
[ Language High-Goth: A text for high-Goth, but with a ] [ Language Commun-Goth: commun] [ Language High-Goth: word would like ] [ Language Commun-Goth: that...]

You could always make NPCs with the known words as their names.  Perhaps overkill for what you want, and annoying for many other places, but I think it would work.

In reply to Zag24 (msg # 7):

You might even be able to make the NPCs "invisible" so they don't appear in the Cast List.  But, yes, overkill... compared to just keeping a list and using curly brackets as required.