Daniel Blackworth

Oddly enough, the poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" is the exact opposite of this. In it, the narrator admits that he isn't the star of his own story, and is more of a comic relief or supporting character.

Really? I'll look it up after I get some sleep. I prefer the interpretation that everyone's the hero of their own story though.

The guy is pretty much a depressed old man out trying to get some ladies, but that line stuck with me. Especially since he was comparing himself to Hamlet. (And I read it twice this year for two different courses,)

Yes, that was what I asked. Sorry if it came out in a hard to understand way. 

Could you perhaps describe what the exact differences between it and English are? 

For one making nouns plural, works out by adding 'mga' before the word. For example, 'tao' the word for person is singular; to make it plural, you add mga and make it 'mga tao'

For past tenses, you change the word, and most of the time the word becomes placed with an 'um' (active voice) or 'in' (passive voice). For example, 'kain' the root verb for eat becomes 'kumain' or 'kinain' in past tense while 'gawa' the root verb for make or do becomes 'gumawa' or 'ginawa'.

For other tenses, other syllables are added or changed, but it's not always constant since it could be changed in the beginning, middle, or ending. Like if you made 'kumain' to present tense, it'd be 'kumakain' while future tense would be 'kakain' and 'gumawa' would be 'gumagawa' and 'gagawa' respectively.

There are simple nouns though, like 'gamot' for medicine, 'sabon' for soap, 'damit' for dress, but other than that, most other words are typically long and there aren't much short words as far as I know other than pronouns and certain words.

That's why it would be harder to do since pluralizing a word would not be simply done by adding s or es or ies to a word, while extending the word by adding 'er', 'ed', 'ing' is not feasible as well. You'd require different letters to fulfill what you want and in Filipino, there is a need for more letters due to the words and usage there is.

And if you're interested to know, the original Filipino is mostly only used in the National Capital Region; other provinces in the country have different dialects with completely different words (given that my country is an archipelago) which we use more, but still, it's something we learn in school and we use as a 'unified' language.

Anyway, sorry if it was too much of an information dump, I probably got carried away. Haha

I suppose you're right, that it wouldn't translate well if there are so few short words as you claim. 

It's interesting how the structure of a language can dictate which games can be played in the language. 

This reminds me of a currently quite popular board game is called Codenames which involves a 5x5 grid with random words placed in it, and two teams. Each team has a Spymaster who gives clues to his team, which have a word and a number. Every word on the grid belongs to a team, and only the spymaster can see the placement of that team's words, and tries to give clues that help your team find the words belonging to your team, while avoiding those of your opponent. 

Example: Bicycle-3 which means, that 3 words on the grid from your team have something to do with the word bicycle. 

The game has been translated to various different languages including Danish.

But Danish has a few interesting quirks which fundamentally change the game. One is that you combine words under certain circumstances which in theory allow you to make very long words. Say a "survey questionaire guide" is a called spørgeskemaudfyldningsvejledning or a person who hands out public survey questionnaire guides is called a spørgeskemaudfyldningsvejledningsudleverer. And this allows for some words of potentially insane sizes. So they had to expressly make a rule so that you couldn't combine words in this manner (unless the combined word is commonly used) for the game to function correctly. So you couldn't tie 3 cards like "dragon" "triangle" and "ballerina" into "a triangle made of dragon balerinas" or drageballerinatrekant. 

Another quirk of the danish language is that words typically have a lot more meanings than in English. So while each English words from the game had 2-3 definitions, Danish words typically have 5-6 definitions in the game, which sometimes makes for fun situations where people when guessing words thought about the different definition of the given word. 

This is an example where the game is played fundamentally differently in the two languages, which has actually made me prefer the Danish version to the English one. 

Well, she certainly is a curious Sand Witch.