Matrix Games Forums

I thought I'd start this unique thread to laugh about what wives do when we play SPWaW and other strategy/war games.

My ex used to run in the room every once in awhile when I was playing SP1 and make machinegun sounds, then she'd say in an undertone "Three casualties" or whatever SP1 used to announce at the bottom of the screen (it was something different, I think). She would then sometimes throw up her fingers and make a little paranthesis to indicate the troop casualities. I couldn't help but fall off my chair laughing - she was a trip. Made me feel silly, but I guess it was all paybacks for my assinine joking at her stuff.

C'mon, there have got to be TONS of good stories. And I am sure there are bad ones, too.

Personnally, I've encountered my wife a day I was gone to a friend's home to play a boardgame (SPI "Blue and Gray - Gettysburg"). She was the sister of the wife of my friend.
More than 20 years laters, it's always a good history...

As a graduate student, I spend lots and lots of time sitting at the computer and staring into space. I have a ton of wargames on my computer, which are unfortunately just a mouse click away, so while I'm pondering some unfortunate anthropological dilemma (just what is the location of Malinowski in this narrative?) I'll often start up SPWAW or Combat Mission and lob a few shells at T-34's or Shermans.

My little Japanese wife will hear the CD drive spinning and say, "are you playing GAME?" Sometimes I'll just sit here and read this forum for a while, and she'll say something like, "why are you always either playing game or preparing to play game?" She also occasionally does machine gun or explosion noises, and once I slapped the headphones on her and she was rapt at the symphony of death coming from Combat Mission.

Hmmm. That's interesting. It makes me wonder if Japanese (and other Asian tongues) have "the" in their language. I can't even recall what type of word we call that in English (poor knowledge of prepositions and all those types of word categories). But my guess is that they don't as they often translate their own thinking into English and don't place "the" into sentences at times. Do you speak Japanese?

My wife just keeps pounding me over the head with the same old busted 2X4. I always thought I was gaining knowledge bumps. In reality, my wife is very congenial with me being on the computer with any historical game. I am very lucky in that respect. I did have to buy her her own computer so she could play with genealogy.

Richmond,
Believe you're looking for "articles". I'm no linguist but I think MOST non-Indo European languages don't use them. For that matter, Russian doesn't have 'em either. Which is why Russians speaking English sometimes sound brusque.

Regarding Japanese language...I watch anime a lot as well (hey whats wrong with looking at over developed girls with guns).

I have noticed that Japanese seems like French in that the sentence structure appears to make all the words seem to be in reverse order ie they place a word near the end of sentence where English would place the word near the front of the sentence.
They also have large gaps in word selection that we take for granted. They use words where we would employ symbols ie wa is their idea of a question mark. They dont use a large variety of our common minor bit words either.

Fortunately language isnt much trouble where computer games are concerned. The game works the way it works period. You can read the manual all you like, but the game will refuse to do anything but run the way it was designed. Alas this is n ot the case with board game wargames.

If you ever want to see endless questioning of a simple statement, go join the Advanced Third Reich mailing list. I was on it for a while till it became clear the list was 80% questions from persons that had a poor grasp of English (and a large portion were supposedly English speaking person too heheh). And alas board games are entirely vulnerable to "disagreements over what the rules actually mean to the reader".

But concerning my wife. Nah mary could care less if I played wargames 24/7. The most I get out of her is "can you turn down the war".

Before I got hooked on SPW@W I was on Silent Hunter and my Lady finally had enough and said "If I hear that Klaxon Horn and Dive, Dive one more time I'll........." I now have a headset and all's well on the Home front again. <img src="rolleyes.gif" border="0"> <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0"> <img src="cool.gif" border="0">

Originally posted by Grumble:
Richmond,
Believe you're looking for "articles". I'm no linguist but I think MOST non-Indo European languages don't use them. For that matter, Russian doesn't have 'em either. Which is why Russians speaking English sometimes sound brusque.

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I think it varies pretty wildly from language to language. For example, you're correct in saying that Russian doesn't have ANY articles- but Spanish is a member of the same Indo-European grouping and makes very extensive use of definite articles. I always felt sorry for all of those Cubans who must have had to study Russian during the Cold War- they must have felt lost without their articles!

As for other languages: I've briefly studied Quechua and Cantonese in addition to Spanish and Russian. Quechua didn't have articles, Cantonese did.

I don't have a wife, but I am living with my girlfriend.
She never comments much on the games, just asking sometimes what is that I am doing, and watching a lot.
The funniest part is coming home from work to find her having been playing Unreal Tournament for 3 hours. She just loves that game.
And she swears and yells and gets as pissed off as me when I play it. <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0"> <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

It sure helped me make her understand how I can spend hours just playing the computer.
<img src="wink.gif" border="0">

OTOH, the Spanish speakers often throw in 'the' where it don't belong. There's a lady up here at work, let's just say it's Microsoft, who has the following greeting on her vmail: Hello, this is Jane Doe of the Microsoft.

It think the problem is their being bi-lingual in that it's easy to forget in English to often drop the 'the', while in Spanish they're probably not putting them in where that language calls for them (therefore throwing English useage into Spanish and Spanish useage into English).

I'll tell you about something that's really goofy, which not too many people have, and you might not even notice people like me doing it, or indeed why we do it, but I'm talking about people who often immitate other accents, or make a lot of silly voices. For example, I could be talking completely regularly about any given subject and once in a blue moon I will pronounce one solitary word in another accent, completely against my will. I think what happens, in the background, is that those who suffer from this sort of thing, run into a word, even a word they usually have no trouble with, which presents some difficulty in pronouncing it, so that involuntarily another accent will come forth which has no trouble at all pronouncing it at thyat moment. For me anyway, what's stranger yet, is that my involuntary accent for one lousy word, often comes across sounding like Mr. Checkov, an accent I've almost never done (except for the line in The Wrath of Kahn : They put creatures into our Boodies (he's actually saying bodies).

[ December 04, 2001: Message edited by: Charles_22 ]</p>

Les the Sarge 9-1 --> yeah, I was *shocked* at the abundant illiteracy of the American public when I started online with email and various groups. Not just typos, which can be rampant at times. I am talking about kids who have grown up in the computer age and never learned to spell properly. It freaks me out. No long math, no writing skills. What's left?!?

Fidel --> Are you saying Russian is a member of the romantic language family? I didn't think that was the case. I know they have their unique alphabet.

When I hear people in the USA who can speak two languages somewhat fluently, I have alot of respect for that. Being a white American, I just babble a few words in French, German, and Russian. Granted, there aren't a whole lot of people who speak those languages in any random 10 square mile plot in the USA, so it's hard to practice. But I look at it like this - if I moved to another country, I'd *sure* learn that native language. To not do so hampers lifestyles and it's disrespectful to indigenous peoples.

Originally posted by Grumble:
Richmond,
Believe you're looking for "articles". I'm no linguist but I think MOST non-Indo European languages don't use them. For that matter, Russian doesn't have 'em either. Which is why Russians speaking English sometimes sound brusque.

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Funny thing, Scandinavic languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic) altough being Germanic ones, does NOT have a definite article like "the" in eg "the gun". We use case endings instead. Example:

English: A ball - the ball

Swedish: En boll - bollen

see? Swedish has three case endings; -en -et or none at all. In Finland they have 15 or something <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

What complicates things ofcourse is that we do have a definite article for specific objects.

Eng: That ball

Swedish: Den bollen

Eh.. kinda forgot why I was posting this, but somebody might find it amusing (or hopelessy boring <img src="wink.gif" border="0"> )

STill not married...
Rarely when my mother randomly walk through my room and sees me with head phones attached to my monitor then she comes next to me and kidding me , she says : "Strip Pallers , uh ? "
(you can read it as "Streep Pullers" if you want italian pronunciation...)
She has a mind uneasy to wargames and english <img src="smile.gif" border="0"> but she understands I love SPWAW !
<font color=#898888>

[ December 04, 2001: Message edited by: ruxius ]</p>

When the baby was only a few weeks old and the computer was in the bedroom, I knocked out a tank or something and started jumping and yelling - this was around 2am. My wife woke up and said "If you wake up the baby - you'll be breast feeding him". I was REAL quiet after that.

<img src="biggrin.gif" border="0"> My long suffering wife has looked upon my wargame activities with dismay for some years now,
but I have to admit she has the patience of a saint. She would at bed time advise me to cut the
"bombs bursting in air." At this point it was advisable to don the headset. As I have upgraded to a somwhat healthier sound system, great care is now taken after bedtime. During one rather dramatic performance, (it may have been nebelwerfers) she came charging up from the parlor in which she was entertaining two female friends. She flew through the den door, bug-eyed and pointed out the urgency of the need to reduce power input, not only for the benefit of the guests, but to stop those little puffs of sheetrock dust then poofing through the base of the lighting fixture on the ceiling below. I think she was exaggerating, but one of the cats couldn't be found for an hour. I try not to allow this to happen too often.

[ December 04, 2001: Message edited by: Greg McCarty ]</p>

Beth keeps chattering while I keep screaming, sobbing and shouting. She never misses a beat.

Wild Bill

I'm lucky in that my wife loves football, and I HATE to watch football (except the Army Navy game-
even though I'm a former Marine I always cheer for Army). So while my wife watches football, I play Steel!!

Yeah,

My Japanese wife often sticks "the" in where there shouldn't be one. "So does soldier go up to the heaven?" she'll ask innocently.

And then there's the old reversing of R and L sounds. "I'd rearry rike to jump in that liver," she says, as we drive by the Connecticut on a hot day. Actually, she's learned to differentiate them pretty well lately.

Oh, and to address an earlier question, no, I don't yet speak Japanese, but I'm learning. From what I've gleaned so far the sentence structure is kind of the reverse of what we're used to. For example,

watashi wa ie ni ikimas

that would be "I go to the house." Literally,

I (wa is a subject identifer) house to am going.

or

inu wa neko wo tabemas
the dog eats the cat.
dog (subj.) cat (obj.) eats (or is eaten).

Well, that's about the limit of my Japanese knowledge right now.

G'night

Originally posted by Belisarius:

Swedish has three case endings; -en -et or none at all. In Finland they have 15 or something <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

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There are 16 case endings in Finnish. And nouns are easy in Finnish, compared to verb conjugation: one verb can have up to 1600 conjugated forms. But we have no articles and only a couple of prepositions, everything you do in English by using prepositions is done in Finnish by conjugating verbs. This language of ours is very easy to learn, isn't it <img src="biggrin.gif" border="0">

And, yes. My wife. We have reached an agreement: after our son is put to bed in the evening, I start to play wargames and Svetlana reads or watches television. I don't disturb her and she doesn't disturb me. Except when she sees something interesting in TV and calls me to come and see, or when I see or hear a russian term, which goes beyond my knowledge of Russian language, in a game and call her to translate - she's russian. Works fine for us. <img src="wink.gif" border="0">