Text errors and suggestions

[markzaku]

On 5/25/2022 at 12:56 PM, Andrea C. said:

If you side with the Sirine Queen on the werewolf island in TotSC, she will answer, "Well-spoken, land-dweller." I don't think "Well-spoken" should be hyphenated in this case.

I don't necessarily agree with this being a grammatical error. Compound adjectives like "well-spoken" are generally hyphenated in American English, especially when they precede a noun.

* a well-dressed noble

* an eight-hour rest

* a green-eyed rogue

StrRef	DLG	Game	Text
21537	ISLSIR	BG:EE	Well-spoken, land-dweller.
21416	DUSHAI	BG:EE	Well spoken.
67042	BDRUMOR3	BG:SOD	Well-spoken for a half-orc, they say, but still a half-orc—as vicious as they come.
62100	BDDENELD	BG:SOD	Well spoken, crusader.
79195	WILSON	BG2:EE	I really don't think I'm ready to have a wild animal join my party, even one as cultured and well-spoken as you.
21441	BKELDOR	BG2:EE	Well spoken, Valygar.
36639	HAERDA	BG2:EE	Well spoken, my dark and rescuing raven.
21441	MAZZYJ	BG2:EE	Well spoken, gypsy woman.

Unfortunately, both Bioware and Beamdog were inconsistent in whether or not to hyphenate "well-spoken," as you can see in the above table.

11 hours ago, Andrea C. said:

The game text sometimes makes use of the expression "from whence [subject] came". In some cases, this is voiced and I suggest leaving those untouched. In unvoiced lines, however, I would correct it to just "whence [subject] came" since "whence" already means "from where."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-from-whence-wrong

I don't think this is an issue or one that requires correcting. "From whence" has been in use since Shakespeare's time and is commonly used today. 

Edited May 31, 2022 by markzaku

[Salk]

Hello!

6 hours ago, markzaku said:

I don't necessarily agree with this being a grammatical error.

I do believe Andrea is right here. The hyphen in the case above is a mistake. Of course "well-spoken" can be correct but only if it precedes a subject or an object (ex. a well-spoken young woman: see here) but this does not apply to the line Andrea spoke of. In that case there should be no hyphenation.

And so when it comes to the game's strings you are menioning:

21537: Wrong

21416: Right

67042: Wrong

62100: Right

79195: Right

21441: Right

36639: Right

21441: Right

Edited June 1, 2022 by Salk

[Andrea C.]

^ what Salk said

Fair enough about “from whence.” I personally find it pedantic and awkward, but I’m also not a native speaker and my personal preference does not constitute grounds for what is or is not a typo.

[Salk]

For what it is worth, I agree with Andrea about the "from whence" issue as well. 

But MW says it is acceptable so there is no real need to change it (I did, in my own BG2 GTU revision)

[Salk]

I'm trying to figure what kind of standard the BG 2 (EE) text is adopting when it comes to spelling numbers.

It seems that any amount of gold is very rarely spelled so I have followed this principle. Numbers seem to be quite consistently used for statistics and percentages as well.

The rest (including measurement of time and distance) does not seem to follow a clear-cut pattern.

What is the best course of action here?

 

Edited June 1, 2022 by Salk

[CamDawg]

A lot of style guides generally set a quantity below which you use longhand so I'd suggest looking for a pattern there. The general style you see in e.g. most news reports is that numbers below 10 get written out, whereas 10 and above are expressed numerically: "There were three only pineapples left after the carnage" vs. "More than 400 apricots are unaccounted for." There are exceptions ("police are searching for 3 apples and 15 bananas" would be preferred over "police are searching for three apples and 15 bananas") but maybe this will give you a starting point.

As for the 'well spoken' discussion above: my English classes are long behind me, so I welcome input. The hyphenated form is an adjective, so it gets used when modifying a noun, whereas "well spoken" is a little less clear (an adverb/verb combo). My understanding was that in something like "That was well spoken", well is modifying the verb speak (conjugated to spoken), so no hyphen. OTOH, in "That's a well-spoken orc", well-spoken is being applied as an adjective to orc, hence the hyphen.

However, the few style guides I can find on this are not necessarily in agreement, though the rule presented by @markzaku seems fairly prevalent (with a few disagreement here and there).

[Salk]

Thanks for the suggestion, Cam.

I had investigated before posting of course and I knew about the general rule you mentioned. Unfortunately from a cursory glance, it does not seem like it applies here. I will check again tomorrow and see if I can identify a pattern but I am not very hopeful.

[markzaku]

4 hours ago, CamDawg said:

However, the few style guides I can find on this are not necessarily in agreement, though the rule presented by @markzaku seems fairly prevalent (with a few disagreement here and there).

Thanks -- this touches upon an important point in that rules of grammar are frequently controversial and disputed. The Oxford comma is probably the most well-known example of this. If one style guide supports using the Oxford comma and another doesn't, that doesn't mean one guide is "right" and the other is "wrong"; the key thing is that any documentation using that guide is consistent in its usage on the Oxford comma or lack thereof. That's what I was trying to get at with the compound adjective comment.

It's relatively easy to identify and correct misspelled words in the EE games, but identifying a style guide to adopt is much harder, as is I imagine identifying what's in scope and what's not to be corrected by this mod. I think it's generally accepted that all of the EE games adopted American English standards for grammar (e.g., punctuation within quotation marks) and spelling (e.g., "armor" instead of "armour"). But these rules weren't consistently applied.  

For example, British English often includes double consonants when a verb ends in a single vowel followed by a consonant, as can be seen in "travelled" or "traveller." In American English, the extra consonant is removed, so "traveled" and "traveler" are used instead. This is adopted inconsistently in the EE games. 

You can test this by opening up BG:EE in Near Infinity, then doing a DLG search for "travel" and "travell." The American spelling will get many results while the British one won't return any. However, if you repeat that same step while searching for "worshipp" instead, you'll get a ton of results for "worshipped" and "worshipper," even though the American spelling of those words only includes a single letter P. (You can type in "worshipped" and "worshipper" in Google Docs to see them get flagged as being misspelled, and even Firefox's spellchecker flags them as needing corrected to "worshiped" and "worshiper.")

Is that something that would be considered a text error by this mod? I admittedly have no idea.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'll shut up now and try to contribute something more meaningful.

The item description for Blazing Glory +3 (bdblun09.ITM) in BG:SOD contains the following sentence: This glittering morningstar was crafted by weaponsmiths in the Temple of Tempus in Waterdeep.

However, "morning star" should be two words instead of one. You can verify this by looking up the name of the weapon proficiency at character creation or by reading the item descriptions for other morning star weapons.

Edited June 2, 2022 by markzaku

[Salk]

Hello again!

There is something that puzzles me a bit and it is the single space that we find after ~ at the beginning of a string when the first character is '.  

Ex. #2024 ~ 'Tis a hurt of the mind. Only one rich in such powers can heal her.~

This is a consistent occurrence and made me wonder what the reason for needing the initial blank space is.

Does anyone know?

 

[Andrea C.]

9 hours ago, markzaku said:

Is that something that would be considered a text error by this mod? I admittedly have no idea.

In my opinion, yes.

A choice for American English was made early on during the development of the Enhanced Editions and it was wilful and deliberate. Copy editors adopted the standards of American English under the supervision of Dave Gross, and volunteers adopted guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style when Dave Gross left Beamdog and it befell volunteer teams to continue the copy-editing work. Any British-isms in the text are leftovers that weren't caught by the copy editors more so than anything else.

[Andrea C.]

On 6/1/2022 at 12:15 AM, markzaku said:

StrRef	DLG	Game	Text
21537	ISLSIR	BG:EE	Well-spoken, land-dweller.
21416	DUSHAI	BG:EE	Well spoken.
67042	BDRUMOR3	BG:SOD	Well-spoken for a half-orc, they say, but still a half-orc—as vicious as they come.
62100	BDDENELD	BG:SOD	Well spoken, crusader.
79195	WILSON	BG2:EE	I really don't think I'm ready to have a wild animal join my party, even one as cultured and well-spoken as you.
21441	BKELDOR	BG2:EE	Well spoken, Valygar.
36639	HAERDA	BG2:EE	Well spoken, my dark and rescuing raven.
21441	MAZZYJ	BG2:EE	Well spoken, gypsy woman.

Unfortunately, both Bioware and Beamdog were inconsistent in whether or not to hyphenate "well-spoken," as you can see in the above table.

I disagree that they were inconsistent.

It seems to me that "well-spoken" was used consistently as a compound adjective and "well spoken" was used consistently with "well" as just an adverb (to signify something like, "You have spoken well.") One could argue that "well-spoken" should not be hyphenated when used as a compound adjective that does not immediately precede the noun it refers to; it is the case, for example, of string 79195. I would agree.

But in a string such as, say, 21441 (which is akin to the string I was bringing up in my initial report), the hyphen would definitely be out of place.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Andrea C.

[Andrea C.]

There's a note in SoD's dwarves of Dumathoin's dungeon that says it's got " a gray stain on it back." It should obviously be "its".

[Andrea C.]

When you first meet Jaheira in SoD, she says, "I was trapped outside Bridgefort, Khalid within."

If we want to be pedantic, and we do, the correct punctuation would be, "I was trapped outside Bridgefort; Khalid, within."

[Sam.]

On 6/1/2022 at 7:01 PM, markzaku said:

The Oxford comma is probably the most well-known example of this. If one style guide supports using the Oxford comma and another doesn't, that doesn't mean one guide is "right" and the other is "wrong";

Just saying...

[argent77]

PSTEE, strref 59886:

Quote

"GAUNTLETS OF CELESTIAL FIRE"
Damage: 3-18 Crushing
Enchanted: +3
Special:
   +2 to Armor Class
   +10 Fire Damage
   +10% Resistance to Crushing Attacks
THAC0: +2
Speed: 3
Weight: 5
Proficiency: Fist
Usable only by Fighters and Thieves
Usable only by Lawful Good characters

"Celestial Fire" was the only object that Trias had left to remind him of the Upper Planes. The blade became a pair of gauntlets in your hands. They is warm to the touch, and flames have been carved across the knuckles of the gloves. The intricacy of the carvings is breathtaking; they are done with such skill that the gauntlets seem to be burning with metallic flames... someone must have spent several centuries rendering them. The metal of the gauntlets is unfamiliar... it is heavy, but it shines like silver.

The gauntlets look several millennia old. A faint hum can be felt within them, and the vibration becomes stronger when they touch human flesh. Not surprisingly, the "Gauntlets of Celestial Fire" can be wielded only by those with sufficient strength and purity of heart. When used in combat, the "Gauntlets of Celestial Fire" burst into a holy radiance that burns any evil creature they strike in combat.

"They is" -> "They are"