I dislike the slang or accent writing in this game

[bunny de fluff]

As a non-english person, whoever wrote the dialogues of "Ghysis the crooked" made the text a pain to read and understand. Write the story using proper english is better for everyone.

[mikeydsc]

IIRC, he was one of the lecturers with an British accent or similar nations such as Australian or maybe even a Kiwi.

[bunny de fluff]

Originally posted by mikeydsc:

IIRC, he was one of the lecturers with an British accent or similar nations such as Australian or maybe even a Kiwi.

I skip that whole section of story about how he allegedly survived the blood war or something, I just cant stand the gibberish words.

[Netscape Navigator]

https://cold-blood.obsidianportal.com/wiki_pages/guide-to-planescape-cant
this should help in further playing and future runs

[Ray tracing is faster]

Sorry, the world is full of illiterate people who can barely speak or backwater places with their own messed up dialects, and this game illustrates that very well. If it was all proper English then it wouldn't be very believable or plausible. The writers did a great job at creating their world. Writing the entire story in proper English wouldn't be better for everyone; what you think is best for you is not best for everyone.

Often times such things are a good way to learn about different cultures as well, but I suppose this just doesn't interest you.

[bunny de fluff]

Is this a game about the importance of dialects and accents? This is just bad design, a major oversight. If you want the player to know someone is speaking in an accent instead of writing the actually distorted English, you simply say "he speaks with an accent", that is enough. One other character in the game speaks in complete gibberish too but the writer remember to write proper English behind their every sentence, which sadly didn't happen to this guy .

[Ray tracing is faster]

Originally posted by bunny de fluff:

Is this a game about the importance of dialects and accents? This is just bad design, a major oversight. If you want the player to know someone is speaking in an accent instead of writing the actually distorted English, you simply say "he speaks with an accent", that is enough. One other character in the game speaks in complete gibberish too but the writer remember to write proper English behind their every sentence, which sadly didn't happen to this guy .

It's the opposite of an oversight and it is not at all a bad design, you're just upset when you don't understand things in games. Simply saying "He speaks with an accent" just shows the reader/player that the writer has no imagination or creativity.

The point of Sigil is to have a mix of all kinds of people, being the center of the multiverse, so you're supposed to find people with different languages and dialects, yet at the same time there is an underlying Sigil lingo that you see throughout the entire game. Excellent design.

[mikeydsc]

I agree with Jester on this. Sigil is a city of many doorways and some people arrived there and do not know how or which door to activate to go back to their plane. Some speak broken dialects learned while they are stranded in Sigil.

[Mysti_Fogg]

I can sympathize with being a non-English speaker trying to work through a dialect. I've had to adapt to the Japanese Osaka dialect or look up references to understand anime.

However, it's not bad design and saying "he speaks in a dialect" does not come across the same as actually using a dialect.

For one thing, everyone speaks in a dialect. So we'd have to decide what the "proper" dialect was. For the UK, it's RP, which is a fake accent that people work at acquiring rather than speak naturally. For the US, newscasters usually aim for "Midwestern" and on dialect maps, Michigan wins as having the one both they and other Americans think of as American (8 out of a 10 point scale, next closest state accents were in the 6.7 point range).

So only people with RP or a Michigan dialect speak "properly?" (Sorry, I don't know the Canadian, Irish, Aussie, New Zealand, Indian, or South African standards (and I'm sure I missed a lot of other English-speaking countries, sorry for that)).Well, my dialect is a Michigan dialect because that's where I lived for my first 18 years, and I can tell you for one thing that I have 2 of them depending on who I'm talking to (informal relationships vs. talking to strangers).

So you want actors and newscasters to learn and master the "talking to strangers" Michigan dialect since that's the most formal and polite? Well, you're really stumbling farther into a mistake then because that's one of the things dialects convey: relationships. The words you pick and how you say them in all dialects usually conveys something about your levels of affection and how you express them to friends and family.

Aside from relationship information, a dialect conveys educational information. Or as my best friend put it "One of the things I like about you is that you say something like accoutrements rather than sh*t."

And I will bet that there are a number of you out there judging me for that choice right now, and that's another things dialects do: give you a basis to make judgments about personality based on a superficial characteristic that you have personally assigned value to. We all do it. And we're meant to do it in this game. It provides instant characterization that can be built on or challenged as the game progresses.

You don't get the same effect if everyone has the same dialect. And you don't get the same effect with "he speaks in a dialect" because it doesn't engage the same personal bias and experience judging and cause the same emotional effect and investment.

[Ray tracing is faster]

I can relate to it too but I don't call my own ignorance bad game design. I only speak English but I had to "translate" (machine translate and then interpret) a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod that has authentic Russian prison slang. That was a damn nightmare and even normal Russians don't understand everything they say, but it was a fascinating subject and I merely saw it as an opportunity to learn something new.

[Ember]

Originally posted by Mysti_Fogg:

I can sympathize with being a non-English speaker trying to work through a dialect. I've had to adapt to the Japanese Osaka dialect or look up references to understand anime.

However, it's not bad design and saying "he speaks in a dialect" does not come across the same as actually using a dialect.

For one thing, everyone speaks in a dialect. So we'd have to decide what the "proper" dialect was. For the UK, it's RP, which is a fake accent that people work at acquiring rather than speak naturally. For the US, newscasters usually aim for "Midwestern" and on dialect maps, Michigan wins as having the one both they and other Americans think of as American (8 out of a 10 point scale, next closest state accents were in the 6.7 point range).

So only people with RP or a Michigan dialect speak "properly?" (Sorry, I don't know the Canadian, Irish, Aussie, New Zealand, Indian, or South African standards (and I'm sure I missed a lot of other English-speaking countries, sorry for that)).Well, my dialect is a Michigan dialect because that's where I lived for my first 18 years, and I can tell you for one thing that I have 2 of them depending on who I'm talking to (informal relationships vs. talking to strangers).

So you want actors and newscasters to learn and master the "talking to strangers" Michigan dialect since that's the most formal and polite? Well, you're really stumbling farther into a mistake then because that's one of the things dialects convey: relationships. The words you pick and how you say them in all dialects usually conveys something about your levels of affection and how you express them to friends and family.

Aside from relationship information, a dialect conveys educational information. Or as my best friend put it "One of the things I like about you is that you say something like accoutrements rather than sh*t."

And I will bet that there are a number of you out there judging me for that choice right now, and that's another things dialects do: give you a basis to make judgments about personality based on a superficial characteristic that you have personally assigned value to. We all do it. And we're meant to do it in this game. It provides instant characterization that can be built on or challenged as the game progresses.

You don't get the same effect if everyone has the same dialect. And you don't get the same effect with "he speaks in a dialect" because it doesn't engage the same personal bias and experience judging and cause the same emotional effect and investment.

The U.S. had it's own version of the RP / Michigan dialect. It mostly fell out of use after World War 2. It was called a Transatlantic Accent if I'm not mistaken.

[Mysti_Fogg]

Originally posted by Pixelated Vex Milk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯:

The U.S. had it's own version of the RP / Michigan dialect. It mostly fell out of use after World War 2. It was called a Transatlantic Accent if I'm not mistaken.

::nods:: I considered going into the Transatlantic accent. It wasn't quite the same thing. It's probably closest to RP in that it is a made up accent that was considered the most proper and people learned it for being in movies back when talkies first became a thing. If you wanted to be a movie star, you had to learn it.

Michigan is a real place and people will naturally have a dialect from growing up and living there (There's really more dialects within the state than I'm accounting for, but I didn't want to make things complicated). I did one of my capstone papers on American dialects and particularly my own because I wanted to understand it, which was how I found out that it's rated so highly as what people think of as "American."

You can hear newscasters who learned "Midwestern" for their careers. I always think of Dan Rather's very careful speech when I want an example of the American standardization because his natural dialect is from Texas, which is very different than his professional dialect for the national news.

Conversely, I went to college with a girl from West Virginia mountain country who worked very hard to master a Midwestern dialect because her natural one was considered "low class" (or at least that's what she thought). "Wash" would come out as "warsh," for example. She was kind of kicking herself when she went into Elizabethan studies and discovered her normal dialect was one of the closest surviving dialects to the Queen's English if the queen you're thinking of is Elizabeth I.

[ManCanCook]

Regional accent does not equate to dialect, necessarily. Dialect includes grammar and vocabulary, and I seriously question the bona fides of anyone implying that Early Modern English is anything close to modern Appalachia.
Please spare us this faux-academic silliness.

[Mysti_Fogg]

Originally posted by ManCanCook:

Regional accent does not equate to dialect, necessarily. Dialect includes grammar and vocabulary, and I seriously question the bona fides of anyone implying that Early Modern English is anything close to modern Appalachia.
Please spare us this faux-academic silliness.

If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that accent is the term misused by laymen when referring to regional ways of speaking and dialect is the correct term.

You are correct that a dialect includes grammar and vocabulary. You'd be incorrect in thinking that regional dialects don't have distinct vocabulary and grammar. For example, when it is raining while the sun is shining, many regions in the US use the term "sunshower." In certain areas of Texas, the term is "The Devil is beating his wife." A free standing piece of furniture that has shelves and holds clothes is a clothespress in most of New England but an armoire in Michigan and Louisiana thanks to the English vs. French colonization. And pretty much everyone knows about the pop/soda/coke US regional debate. There are also unique grammar features that are regional such as "you all/y'all" which is basically plural you plural because you is the plural second person (we lost the singular second person thee/thou). Places with French heritage will sometimes move the adjective after the noun so that the Rouge River is the River Rouge.

::shrug:: Any locality will have similar distinctive features if you study it.

As for Elizabethan dialects, there's this thing called The Great Vowel Shift that happened in the English language during the time of American colonization. Last I heard, no one had come up with a reason for it, it's a mystery that could make a reputation. In any case, American English is actually the more conservative language than British English in terms of vowel sounds and retains a number of features and pronunciations that were jettisoned in the UK by the late 1700s when the Vowel Shift ended. (Brits seem to think nasal sounds are ugly and a sign of poor education, from what I gather, and so stopped using them if they could avoid it.) Rural areas with low immigration tended to retain the original sounds more closely (such as mountain towns in West Virginia). Though I will concede that US English is based on a UK West Country dialect more than anything spoken in London.

I finished my degree 15 years ago, but if you're really bored, I'd be happy to give you a general history of the English language from when it was cobbled together out of the 3 Germanic tribal languages of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Spoilers: There's several invasions and the French ruin everything. I used to be able to read Old English, but I've happily forgotten it (never wanted to learn it in the first place, and declensions are really weird). I can still speak and read Middle English. It's not hard at all if you've studied linguistics.

Perfect I am not, but neither am I a fake.

[/^^\461|[ 834||]

I guess Shakespeare and Dickens should of thought about how their work would appeal to an international selling audience instead of, you know, be genuine artists expressing non-artificial art

[/^^\461|[ 834||]

It basically boils down to "I don't speak English very well so can game developers please dumb down their writing styles and volcabulary because it is unfair to me"

That's how moronic it sounds. Non-english speakers will always be secondary to native speakers in games made by English speakers