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Dynaheir Feedback


tcdale

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Two notes I noticed, mostly over Dynaheir, although a few in general:

 

1) Both Dynaheir and Coran have horrible timing with lovetalks sometimes. I've had several instances where they start flirting / chatting me up 5 seconds after a battle, or flirting with "outside" dialogs when I'm underground, etc.

 

2) Dynaheir has some trouble with her thee's and thou's. I like that whoever wrote the Dynaheir dialog kept in mind the basics of the thee and thou rules and meaning, but there's at least one OH MY GOD glaring mistake. That is, when you're at the end of the game and running through the maze to find the Undercity and Sarevok, you run across what's his face (Wizit? Winzit?) who summons a demon to kill you. Dynaheir says she's going to take his belongings back and asks for the party's help. Everyone chimes in saying they'll help, and Dynaheir addresses them with something akin to this:

 

"I thank thee for thy aid." and goes on about promises.

 

Wrong. Totally, totally wrong.

 

In Middle English, as some of the flirt dialogs mention, "you" is the formal version of "thou." The proper declensions of them both are as follows:

 

Nominative (Subject): thou / you (ye)

Objective (Object): thee / you (ye)

Genitive (Possessive): thy (thine) / your

 

The difference between "thy" and "thine" isn't held throughout the dialogs. "Thy" is used before a consonant sound, usually including "h" (thy honor), although if she has an accent where you don't pronounce the "h" (or it's just a word that starts with a written "h" but isn't pronounced that way), then you'd not use "thy" (e.g. "thy hour of need" doesn't work).

 

"Thine" is used before a vowel-sound. "Thine hour of need" is right; "thine eye" is right. "Thine cat" is wrong.

 

However, the part about Dyna's dialog above that irked me so badly (I'm a linguist) is that she's using "thou" to address more than one person. That is not correct in Middle English.

 

"Thy" is the familiar/singular, whereas "you" is the formal singular OR the plural. Not the "formal plural", but any plural. The distinction is almost identical to the French tu / vous or the German Ihr / Sie.

 

So, Dynaheir would use "thou" to friends and intimates [when speaking to / about just one of them], "you" to strangers / non-friends [even when there's only one of them], and "you" for groups of people, regardless of whether they were friends or not.

 

 

BTW, I'm not there yet, but asking for a bit of a spoiler: I'm thinking that Dynaheir's final lovetalk is a big hint that she doesn't make it alive to BG2, even if she's alive at the end of BG1. Am I right?

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It wasn't supposed to sound like Middle English spoken in a gramatically correct way. It was supposed to sound like Middle English spoken by someone for whom it was a second language.

 

So, yes, it's wrong. And yes, it's supposed to be like that. It might drive you nuts. It drives me nuts. but it is what it is.

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Thanks for the feedback - Dynaheir has gone through about 4 official and unofficial Middle English discussions over time, including folks like you who are pros (professors, linguists, and at least one professional proofer for a publishing house) and she still has some oddities! We can poke about a bit again, but the best bet for her is to check to see if she consistently uses things rather than correctly usies things, because I remember reading back in the dev logs that Domi was using it as an approximation of a foreign (Rashemi) accent, rather than an attempt at true ME. Any places she is inconsistent, we can look at smoothing out, if we bribe Domi to check over before using. The good news for translators is this does not mean changes in already translated versions, because translators are taking meanings. Unless the folks went so far as to translate into Norman rather than french, and MA Spanish (Castillian? What did the Spanish use, - French, like the Russians and English?).

 

Spoiler:\

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(yep. BG2 starts with her dead, as BioWare clobbers two of the original party joinables and uses several others as NPCs. There is a mod on BGT that allows you to bring her over as a "silent NPC", but it does not change the storyline - the story expects her to toast out. Since you are on EasyTutu, running the Dy Romance, Domi does provide you with some cool stuff after Sarevok takes the Big Dirt Nap, though :crazyeyes: I sometimes dream of a "Keeping Dynaheir" mod, and then realize that I am not interested in rebuilding the entire game and resetting a bunch of Minsc's lines - plus, I could never do justice to Dy after Domi's work. So it will remain a pleasant and distant never-actuallized fantasy. At least from my end.)

 

 

Edit: darn, i type way slow - B posted same time as me!

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There is a mod on BGT that allows you to bring her over as a "silent NPC", but it does not change the storyline - the story expects her to toast out.

I think not, that such a mod exist or I don't know about it. In the past "Tortured Souls" introduces Dynaheir and it could be that the TS-BP version has her still included, but in the recent TS version Dynaheir was taken out.

 

Greetings Leomar

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By all means, fix the Old English. Yes, there were the rules we were trying to follow, but things slipped through, and I don't even remember whom she is adressing in that sentence, if it's one or many or whatever.... :crazyeyes: As Cmorgan said, she was proofed numerous times (4 is actually an understatement, lol!). her language is not a real form of anything though, of course. Just a bit of stylization.

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Guest Marceror
tcdale, will you be able to provide us with a fixed version of the Dynaheir files?

 

Um, would the modding team really want her to do this? A poster on the board with 21 posts total, with an opinion about something in the mod, would be expected to actually mod her desired changes for inclusion in the mod?? :(

 

She may know plenty about linguistics, but that doesn't mean she's a competent modder, and it certainly doesn't mean that the modding team necessarily agrees with her requested changes.

 

Mr/Mrs/Miss Anonymous, was that a serious post? Are you part of the modding team of BG1 NPC Project, or just a random poster who likes to ask odd questions? Just curious.

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tcdale, will you be able to provide us with a fixed version of the Dynaheir files?

 

Um, would the modding team really want her to do this? A poster on the board with 21 posts total, with an opinion about something in the mod, would be expected to actually mod her desired changes for inclusion in the mod?? :(

 

She may know plenty about linguistics, but that doesn't mean she's a competent modder, and it certainly doesn't mean that the modding team necessarily agrees with her requested changes.

 

Mr/Mrs/Miss Anonymous, was that a serious post? Are you part of the modding team of BG1 NPC Project, or just a random poster who likes to ask odd questions? Just curious.

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Folks, please, don't turn it into some OMG power struggle issue of the day. I doubt Dynaheir's speech will ever satsify everyone. If an error is noticed, it will eventually get corrected as maintenance is done. I think this particular one was left singular because of the higher possibility she could have been addressing just one char with an interjection, since not many of the 25 NPCs reply to her there. Maybe. Maybe not. If the possibility is higher that she addresses more than one, go for plurial.

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I thought that Domi's "By all means, fix the Old English" was giving the go-ahead for tcdale to make some alterations. My post was serious and I'm not part of the modding team of BG1 NPC Project.

 

Also, I shall only post this once.

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Linguistics is not a requirement of being able to mod, just as you do not need to know how to mod to report and fix these sorts of bug. It is a text error, and can we all not type?

 

Icen

 

Wow, lots of responses. I certainly wasn't trying to turn this into a big "OMG" sort of discussion. Admittedly, I was surprised by a poster's comment, and was curious as to where that poster was coming from. But I wasn't trying to start a big debate, or anything.

 

I will quickly respond to Icendoan's post, however. Regarding the above quote, wouldn't someone need to know what files to open and modify to do this? And while I haven't looked at these files before (I'm a confirmed non-modder, as I posted a few days ago), I'll go out on a limb that the file(s) in which this text is contained would have to be made up of more than simply plain text. Seems like someone who doesn't know what they're doing could easily mess up the formatting and "break" the file, and so you wouldn't want just anyone off the street doing this for you.

 

At any rate, the anonymous person to whom I posed the question responded, and answered me. So it would seem that my little side-bar into the discussion should be concluding right about now.

 

Regards

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What you do is you say:

 

"blah blah blah" ought to be "blah blah blah blah", and then any modders looking after it update and rerelease when it is worth the effort to do so.

 

And, as a matter of fact, most WeiDU things are purely text! A 'hardcoded' .D file (which is compiled to make a .dlg which the game can read) looks like this:

BEGIN myDialog

IF ~True~
SAY ~Hello!~
IF  ~~ THEN REPLY ~Hello!~ EXIT
END

list of similarly structured blocks

 

And, since we have translations, it is even easier, with .TRA files, which are simply lines of text:

@0 = "String"
@1 = "String 2"

WeiDU automatically fills in the strings referenced by the @X and you have translations without having to rewrite everything!

 

It's OK that you made the assumption that it is harder than it seems, and doing it properly is, but for this, it is actually very easy, as the .D are compiled at install time and not a moment before! It is mainly that we all like to make things very easy for ourselves, and when you have a large work added to by many people, such as this, it is extremely organized. I imagine (I haven't checked) that you would have BG1NPC/english/dynaheir.tra and it would contain all the strings you need. :(

 

Icen

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