[Idea] National Animal Type

[Ayaroko]

Hi there!

I have a suggestion for the settings of your nation. Instead of detecting which type of animal your national animal is by key words, e.g. "Shark" or "Deer", you could have a small drop-down list, with the options of Aerial, Land, or Sea animal. This would allow people to use foreign words for animals. For example, my current national animal is the Greater Ayarokese Jinbeizame, a Jinbeizame being the Japanese word for Whale Shark.

Hopefully this could clear up some issues regarding national animals and grammar, thank you for your time!

[Maljaratas]

Personally, I think this is a good idea presuming the coding isn't to hard. It might be helpful to stick [idea] in the thread title so people look at it as well.

[Europe and Oceania]

Hi there!

I have a suggestion for the settings of your nation. Instead of detecting which type of animal your national animal is by key words, e.g. "Shark" or "Deer", you could have a small drop-down list, with the options of Aerial, Land, or Sea animal. This would allow people to use foreign words for animals. For example, my current national animal is the Greater Ayarokese Jinbeizame, a Jinbeizame being the Japanese word for Whale Shark.

Hopefully this could clear up some issues regarding national animals and grammar, thank you for your time!

Sounds good. They should do this.

[SchutteGod]

Yup, might be a good thing. My main nation uses "Loch Ness Monster"; I doubt the game engine can detect that it is sea-based.

[DP Country]

Hi there!

I have a suggestion for the settings of your nation. Instead of detecting which type of animal your national animal is by key words, e.g. "Shark" or "Deer", you could have a small drop-down list, with the options of Aerial, Land, or Sea animal. This would allow people to use foreign words for animals. For example, my current national animal is the Greater Ayarokese Jinbeizame, a Jinbeizame being the Japanese word for Whale Shark.

Hopefully this could clear up some issues regarding national animals and grammar, thank you for your time!

Actually, I think it is great the way it is now, you can typenin what ever animal you want, you could even make up an animal.

[Corindia]

I was scrolling through the forums for exactly this. I think this is a fantastic idea.

[Ayaroko]

Hi there!

I have a suggestion for the settings of your nation. Instead of detecting which type of animal your national animal is by key words, e.g. "Shark" or "Deer", you could have a small drop-down list, with the options of Aerial, Land, or Sea animal. This would allow people to use foreign words for animals. For example, my current national animal is the Greater Ayarokese Jinbeizame, a Jinbeizame being the Japanese word for Whale Shark.

Hopefully this could clear up some issues regarding national animals and grammar, thank you for your time!

Actually, I think it is great the way it is now, you can typenin what ever animal you want, you could even make up an animal.

To clarify, this would /not/ override your national animal! You would simply be able to write in the name for it, and have a dropdown list that you could choose whether it was a swimming, flying, or walking animal!

[Valrifell]

Game already keeps track of what animal should go where, or at least most of them. I'm 89% sure I've seen, more than once, an Admin fix an animal-location problem to avoid pelicans running in the woods.

At least on the Nation page, and (I think) a few issues, if memory serves correctly. Though there is no such system for fictional creatures.

EDIT: It works for common fantasy ones, just checked a puppet, Saarcadia, "Saarcadia's national animal is the Dragon, which can occasionally be seen dodging aircraft in the nation's cities."

[Trotterdam]

This would allow people to use foreign words for animals.

I don't think that's something we want to encourage.

It's one thing to use a loanword of foreign origin to describe an animal that doesn't have a native English name, but then that makes it effectively an English word now.

But using a foreign word for an animal that has a perfectly serviceable English name just sounds pretentious, and most people would have no clue what it means.

[Bruination]

This would allow people to use foreign words for animals.

I don't think that's something we want to encourage.

Consider that there are currently over 37,000 different national animals on NS, over 30,000 of which are unique (used by a single nation each). Another 20,000 nations have a national animal used by fewer than a dozen other nations. And a huge sum of these 50,000+ nations are using fictional words, foreign words, or simply words NS is unlikely to recognize as animals (people's names or inanimate objects seem fairly common) -- in other words, people are using their imaginations, as they do with the names of their nations, capital cities, leaders, and religions.

I would argue that NS either consistently does encourage the use of imagination in all of these fields, or it neither encourages nor discourages such. But taking the latter view: Given that foreign words (and fictional and non-animal words) are already fully allowed but neither encouraged nor discouraged, it's arguable that a drop-down list to set the land, sea, or air category would be perfectly able to do the same -- allow but neither encourage nor discourage.