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Kulyok's BG1NPC Grammar and Capitalization Review


cmorgan

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This post is up temporarily for those gracious souls who are playtesting but do not have access to the Playtest Subforum (or have been unable to successfully register yet). Several folks have asked what the ground-rules are; here they be!

 

 

The Gibberlings Three Forums

From BG1 NPC Project Workroom

 

Kulyok's BG1NPC Grammar and Capitalization Review

Summarized from Domi, Kulyok, and Jastey's notes, August, 2005

  • Capitalization of all actions in the incomplete action sentences (ie *sigh* ) should be changed to the lower case, like BioWARE's. Complete sentences will still be capitalized (ie *He turnes around and sighs*)
  • Proper names, races, titles and the similar staff should be treated as following: people, places, titles and so on should have initial capitals. Generic terms should not. So, 'elf', 'dwarf' and other PRO_RACES, and also 'ranger', 'bard' and other professions are normally spelled without a capital letter.
    Examples:
    Bioware's "Maybe someday you'll grow a spine, elf!" by Briel, and Safana's "Watch what you say, elf."
    Dragonlance novels: "Dragons of Winter Night": "Either sound the alarm now, elf, or let us go."
    However, (and it's a *big* however) there are exceptions - to show respect and admiration, to lessen possible negative impact of the sentence, it is acceptable to write "Elf" - for example - if author wants to conceive a feel of said respect. Your own "Master Elf" is a perfect example.
    So, with races and professions, it is the author's preference, provided he\she does not overdo capitalisation, as it is common not to capitalise.
    Now, for the members of the organizations, it is basically the same as "Russian", or a less formal "Harvarder" - the member of the organization should be spelled with capital letter only - "Red Wizard", "Zhent". No exceptions.
  • Spacing: "* hisses *" to "*hisses*", definitely. [Cmorgan's note: sound referenced files start with an invisible bracketed ~[text] string~ header with a space. Spaces on these strings should be left intact.
  • Speech patterns (Montaron, Kagain, Yeslick, Dynaheir, Imoen, Alora) should be left unchanged.
    "Aside" speech, like Edwin's muttering, is left unchanged.
  • Extra spaces in graphic dialogue have been cut off: "* hisses *" -> "*hisses*"
  • Capitalisation in graphic dialogues: if the sentence is not full, the capital latter is replaced with a regular one: "*Sighs*"->"*sighs*".
    In the case of a full sentence, a full stop is placed at the end:
    "*Faldorn is staring back, with somewhat less calm and somewhat more distaste*"->"*Faldorn is staring back, with somewhat less calm and somewhat more distaste.*"
  • Capitalisation in addressing, and using races', professions', etc. titles in regular speech: with rare exceptions, races, professions and their adjectives are now spelled without a capital letter, while narrow titles are always spelled otherwise: "Hathran", "Wychlaran".
  • Addressings like "sir" and "my lady" are now spelled without a capital letter, as well, as to provide consistency with BG1 game dialogue and current conversational style. (In cases of Dynaheir saying her pledge, or Branwen reciting an old legend, "My Lord" or "Sir" is legitimate.)
  • In all cases of 'aside' speech, punctuation goes as follows: Text. (Text.) Thus, cases like : "I see. (Stupid simians)." are changed to "I see. (Stupid simians.)"
  • All occurrences of ellipses should be unified to "point point point space" - "... ". There should be no more "... ." or "....." or "I...see...blood" cases, or any cases of "..." as one symbol in Microsoft Word. Only four symbols: "... "
  • Double spaces between sentences. As most of BG1 NPC material does not have them, and so does quite a big part of game dialogue, Kulyok did her best to eliminate these.
  • There have been some typos/inconsistencies with names: Occurrences of "Rasheman" have been changed to correct "Rashemen". "Thayan" and "Thayvian" Kulyok left untouched.

Cmorgan's usage notes, based on what appears to be common practice within project:

  • "text" is also a delimiter for strings in WeiDU, and while is not a problem so far makes me nervous. I would like to suggest standardizing on 'quoted text in conversation' instead of "quoted text in conversation"
  • I suggest that in a multilingual mod, US and UK spellings should be considered interchangeable, i.e. "armor/armour", "capitalize/capitalise" probably don't need fixing, or we will get into unwinnable grammar debates rather than improve the mod we enjoy :).

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Update on the " vs ' -- I asked Ginger for an independent ruling on the " vs ' thing, as I read more and more variants; let's all go with her suggestion, please:

 

double quotes, as in

~ Hey there! He just said, "that dragon is big". ~

Then, for quotes within quotes, single quotes: as in

~ The parchment reads, "He just said, 'that dragon is big'." ~

It's simply because it's harder for double quotes to get mixed up with apostrophes.

Eg

~ He just said, 'that dragon is Moses',' looks weirder than ~ He just

said, "that dragon is Moses',".~

 

This makes more sense than my generic "change everything to single quote" :(

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