Topic: How can you read a language but not speak it?

[Wolfwood]

Back to the OP's question, I must say that, yes, spoken and written language are usually taught together, so it should be pretty uncommon to bump into a character who only knows the written language. However, I'd blame the player for making a unrealistic character if they were to increase only written language and not at least a little bit of the spoken variant. I'd not allow them to speak the language at a penalty, but might ask them to redo some of the development phases of the character creation.

[jdale]

I don't think it's necessary to have a rule, just have the player justify it. For example a character with no spoken ranks learned the language from books with zero exposure to any speakers of the language. That's most sensible for ancient languages but could also happen with languages from very distant lands.

[Jengada]

I agree with Jdale and Wolfwood. I know a range of languages, but several I can only read - never had any resources to learn to speak them properly. I would also apply this to math, which is a language of symbols that we don't really pronounce.

For me as a GM, rather than a linguist, I would look at the type of character. If they're a scholar and can justify a lot of book-learning of the language, then written-only make sense. If the language is spoken around them at all, though, they should have at least a couple of ranks of spoken skill. Most civilians will have only spoken and no written, in fantasy/medieval cultures.

[Spectre771]

Back to the OP's question, I must say that, yes, spoken and written language are usually taught together, so it should be pretty uncommon to bump into a character who only knows the written language. However, I'd blame the player for making a unrealistic character if they were to increase only written language and not at least a little bit of the spoken variant. I'd not allow them to speak the language at a penalty, but might ask them to redo some of the development phases of the character creation.

I hold the PCs to the ranks they have in Spoken and Read/Written in given languages.  Buying a single ranks costs 1 DP.  At character creation, they could easily spend a point or two to get a little better at a given language.  As GM, I give the players some free ranks based on their starting languages (RM2) for their race.  Common speech is usually 5 ranks and the additional languages are 2 ranks.  The former being the language they have learned and have been using their whole life and the latter being what they've picked up and somewhat learned.  ChL&CaL has the descriptions for levels of knowledge at each rank and we based it off that chart many moons ago.  2 ranks in a language is hardly enough to get by, but enough that they can recognize words and maybe it's enough to encourage the PC to learn more.

[Mordenkainen]

Just chiming in to agree with others - I also studied Latin, and at my peak (it's been many years) I would say I could read it. I had a couple of ranks in it, I suppose. At no point could I have spoken it conversationally. If you had put me in ancient Rome, I could have greeted people awkwardly and maybe ordered something at a tavern in a very weird, unidiomatic and possibly unintelligible way.
People study Egyptian Hieroglyphics, and they are probably even less conversational in Ancient Egyptian than Latin students are in Latin.