Linguistic comparison of IE games with Nu-Games

[Zed Duke of Banville]

What separates PS:T from the other mentioned examples, is that the jargon feels organic to the language. It succeeds in giving you the impression that you are reading english, but the english of a different civilization, with its own customs and symbols that are separate from our own. The people you met felt alive and belonging to their own, discreet society.

It certainly felt forced in Pillows and natural in PST, but if I'm being honest, I don't know much of that is due to my being younger when I played PST and older and more cynical when I played pillows.

As with the setting in general, Planescape: Torment the computer game borrowed Sigil's jargon from the Planescape AD&D campaign setting by David Zeb Cook, who in turn borrowed from the actual, historical slang used by the English criminal underworld circa 1600-1800.

 

[Tigranes]

That said, I wonder what makes some people say "Bar that" is super cool & organic, while "Postenago" is apparently some painful, soul-wretching eyesore. Is it because English-inspired slang and neologisms feel more natural to fantasy given the history, so that nobody even thinks about Waterdeep as 'hurr durr water is deep oh jesus christ'? Because it's hard to think of what exactly "berk" does in PST that is so hugely different. Most explanations tend to be retroactive and not consistent. ("Fampyr is so annoying because it instantly reminds you of vampire but different!" - but we don't say that about basher or dustmen or pike it or guvner.)

Personally, the jargon wasn't what made or broke it - I'm very fond of Torment's Sigilspeak, but I also didn't find any POE dialect so horrible. The difference seemed to again come from what kind of interesting, dramatic situations I am part of / hearing about. I think a lot of the smaller free-standing 'stories' in Torment (i.e. from individual plane travelers or diaries or tombstones), you could easily transplant into POE and people would point to it as prime example of POE wordy boringness. There's something else about how the stories fit together in a stylised world that is more about aesthetic than some kind of calculative rule around language use.

 

[gurugeorge]

What separates PS:T from the other mentioned examples, is that the jargon feels organic to the language. It succeeds in giving you the impression that you are reading english, but the english of a different civilization, with its own customs and symbols that are separate from our own. The people you met felt alive and belonging to their own, discreet society.

It certainly felt forced in Pillows and natural in PST, but if I'm being honest, I don't know much of that is due to my being younger when I played PST and older and more cynical when I played pillows.

As with the setting in general, Planescape: Torment the computer game borrowed Sigil's jargon from the Planescape AD&D campaign setting by David Zeb Cook, who in turn borrowed from the actual, historical slang used by the English criminal underworld circa 1600-1800.

I once picked up a book in a second hand shop that I subsequently lost in a basement flood, that was all about the Victorian criminal classes, their cimes and jargon. Absolutely wonderful and curious stuff - most of the crimes themselves were highly specialized to social and economic peculiarities of the time.

 

[agris]

That said, I wonder what makes some people say "Bar that" is super cool & organic, while "Postenago" is apparently some painful, soul-wretching eyesore. Is it because English-inspired slang and neologisms feel more natural to fantasy given the history, so that nobody even thinks about Waterdeep as 'hurr durr water is deep oh jesus christ'? Because it's hard to think of what exactly "berk" does in PST that is so hugely different. Most explanations tend to be retroactive and not consistent. ("Fampyr is so annoying because it instantly reminds you of vampire but different!" - but we don't say that about basher or dustmen or pike it or guvner.)

Personally, the jargon wasn't what made or broke it - I'm very fond of Torment's Sigilspeak, but I also didn't find any POE dialect so horrible. The difference seemed to again come from what kind of interesting, dramatic situations I am part of / hearing about. I think a lot of the smaller free-standing 'stories' in Torment (i.e. from individual plane travelers or diaries or tombstones), you could easily transplant into POE and people would point to it as prime example of POE wordy boringness. There's something else about how the stories fit together in a stylised world that is more about aesthetic than some kind of calculative rule around language use.

While good points, the lot of them, there is the whole issue of construction and utilization of the language. The Tyranny text snippet read a bit like a first-person dictated Wikipedia article. That gets to my forced vs natural observation for POE and PST. POE's writing style reinforces the artifice of the conlang, so rather than drown you in setting and atmosphere, it puts it in stark contrast that struck me, the reader, as forced. PST's style was very natural, probably independent of the setting's colloquialisms.

Putting a gun to my head, it's probably very difficult to establish a strict definition of forced vs natural. The interpretation of such definitions, as much as they can be established, is also going to be highly subjective. This whole thing reminds of the US supreme court's one-upon-a-time definition of pornography: "you know it when you see it".

 

[Butter]

That said, I wonder what makes some people say "Bar that" is super cool & organic, while "Postenago" is apparently some painful, soul-wretching eyesore. Is it because English-inspired slang and neologisms feel more natural to fantasy given the history, so that nobody even thinks about Waterdeep as 'hurr durr water is deep oh jesus christ'? Because it's hard to think of what exactly "berk" does in PST that is so hugely different. Most explanations tend to be retroactive and not consistent. ("Fampyr is so annoying because it instantly reminds you of vampire but different!" - but we don't say that about basher or dustmen or pike it or guvner.)

Personally, the jargon wasn't what made or broke it - I'm very fond of Torment's Sigilspeak, but I also didn't find any POE dialect so horrible. The difference seemed to again come from what kind of interesting, dramatic situations I am part of / hearing about. I think a lot of the smaller free-standing 'stories' in Torment (i.e. from individual plane travelers or diaries or tombstones), you could easily transplant into POE and people would point to it as prime example of POE wordy boringness. There's something else about how the stories fit together in a stylised world that is more about aesthetic than some kind of calculative rule around language use.

What's great about Torment's jargon is that as a native English speaker, I don't need a translation to intuitively understand what they're saying (your mileage may vary if you're ESL). Pillars jargon being superficially similar to Italian or Welsh doesn't change the fact that it's entirely made up, and will always require a translation. Furthermore there isn't the same breadth of jargon, so some words get repeated over and over until they become a meme. It's like when Battlestar Galactica characters constantly say frak because that's the only cuss the writers made up for the show.

 

[oscar]

Planescape the words were real if antiquated lower class English slang that even someone not particularly versed in that culture with a decent grasp of English can gather the meaning of through logical inference. Somewhat in the manner of Gene Wolfe. It added colour and feel to characters who spoke like that and differentiated them from characters who spoke formally or in today's English.

Some of those terms in the dictionary above are still regularly used in my culture (especially by older generations). Watch Mad Max 1 for instance and some of the characters have a similar style of speaking.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That said, I wonder what makes some people say "Bar that" is super cool & organic, while "Postenago" is apparently some painful, soul-wretching eyesore. Is it because English-inspired slang and neologisms feel more natural to fantasy given the history, so that nobody even thinks about Waterdeep as 'hurr durr water is deep oh jesus christ'? Because it's hard to think of what exactly "berk" does in PST that is so hugely different. Most explanations tend to be retroactive and not consistent. ("Fampyr is so annoying because it instantly reminds you of vampire but different!" - but we don't say that about basher or dustmen or pike it or guvner.)

Personally, the jargon wasn't what made or broke it - I'm very fond of Torment's Sigilspeak, but I also didn't find any POE dialect so horrible. The difference seemed to again come from what kind of interesting, dramatic situations I am part of / hearing about. I think a lot of the smaller free-standing 'stories' in Torment (i.e. from individual plane travelers or diaries or tombstones), you could easily transplant into POE and people would point to it as prime example of POE wordy boringness. There's something else about how the stories fit together in a stylised world that is more about aesthetic than some kind of calculative rule around language use.

because randomly saying a word from another language is dumb

 

[laclongquan]

Yeah, reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld books and read PST lines sound really similar.

On another note, DnD linguistic, Faerun and Sigil in particular, sounds really like Chinese in the way of word-making. Waterdeep might sounds funny to other language speaker but not Chinese and chinese-influenced speakers. Like Silverymoon or something~

 

[Tigranes]

Planescape the words were real if antiquated lower class English slang that even someone not particularly versed in that culture with a decent grasp of English can gather the meaning of through logical inference. Somewhat in the manner of Gene Wolfe. It added colour and feel to characters who spoke like that and differentiated them from characters who spoke formally or in today's English.

Some of those terms in the dictionary above are still regularly used in my culture (especially by older generations). Watch Mad Max 1 for instance and some of the characters have a similar style of speaking.

I'm not sure that this is always down to how English it is. First, we have quite a few people who speak other languages, even in the Codex, that seem to have found POE-speak annoying. Second, we are apparently fine with more exotic pseudobabble, like "Tasloi" or "Sahuagin", or with faux-Greek/Latin. So I suspect a lot of it is down to pop culture exposure and what people think wizards and dragons are "supposed" to sound like.

E.g. if someone asked me whether to go with Sigilspeak-style or POE faux-Italian style in a game, I'd go with the former, purely because even as a non-Brit, I'll generally have more cultural references to know what all these words are supposed to feel like.

Funnily enough, my personal 'worsts' are bad not because they're not English (why would anyone give a fuck?) but because they often cut too close to what they were referencing: "Knight-Captain" in NWN2 is just some amazing 13 year old power fantasy energy, while I have of course whined many times about god damn Bleden Mark.

 

[Brancaleone]

Planescape the words were real if antiquated lower class English slang that even someone not particularly versed in that culture with a decent grasp of English can gather the meaning of through logical inference. Somewhat in the manner of Gene Wolfe. It added colour and feel to characters who spoke like that and differentiated them from characters who spoke formally or in today's English.

Some of those terms in the dictionary above are still regularly used in my culture (especially by older generations). Watch Mad Max 1 for instance and some of the characters have a similar style of speaking.

I'm not sure that this is always down to how English it is. First, we have quite a few people who speak other languages, even in the Codex, that seem to have found POE-speak annoying. Second, we are apparently fine with more exotic pseudobabble, like "Tasloi" or "Sahuagin", or with faux-Greek/Latin. So I suspect a lot of it is down to pop culture exposure and what people think wizards and dragons are "supposed" to sound like.

E.g. if someone asked me whether to go with Sigilspeak-style or POE faux-Italian style in a game, I'd go with the former, purely because even as a non-Brit, I'll generally have more cultural references to know what all these words are supposed to feel like.

Funnily enough, my personal 'worsts' are bad not because they're not English (why would anyone give a fuck?) but because they often cut too close to what they were referencing: "Knight-Captain" in NWN2 is just some amazing 13 year old power fantasy energy, while I have of course whined many times about god damn Bleden Mark.

Because PS:T's jargon feels organic to the rest of the text in contemporary English.

Doesn't it drive you up to the wall when in a movie, in order to show that a character is foreign, they insert everyday's words from his native language into his otherwise perfect English (when it is utterly ridiculous that he wouldn't know their English equivalent given he has no problem with the rest of the speech)? "Come on, don't be such a niño or I'll kick your culo all the way around the manzana!"

So the question is: does PoE's jargon feel organic to the rest of the text?

 

[gurugeorge]

It's basically because Welsh is too unfamiliar to most people. It wasn't really a good choice as an evocative root language selection.

 

[Ol' Willy]

faux-Greek/Latin

Crudux Cruo!

 

[PrettyDeadman]

I dislike Tyranny/PoE writing, but Tyranny is miles better and a lot of specialized jargon is expected considering you play as an acting member of a totalitarian bureaucracy. If anything, the language in Tyranny is too informal, bureaucratic language is usually a mess of standart formulas with a bunch of buzzwords and links to legal normative documents, which makes buzzoword heavy language of the game somewhat more authentic and tolerable. Well, the game itself quickly degrades towards a standart fantasy adventure, so its pointless to expect that they will keep the bureaucratic style of the dialogues intact.

 

[Maxie]

The problem with POE writing is the same as with anything produced by Californians - the writers assume that bilingual people, despite having perfect command of grammar and vocabulary, randomly replace words with ethnic shit
It's not confined to fantasy black people saying postenago, I assume many of you have heard at least once some tv or film latino character who keeps putting Spanish in perfectly normal English sentences
Poles say kurwa even when speaking English because it's treated as a verbalized comma to divide the clauses within a sentence, but it's quite literally an expletive and you won't see any educated Pole doing that while talking about weather

 

[ERYFKRAD]

you won't see any educated Pole

Agreed.

 

[oscar]

PoE was much more annoying than Tyranny I'll agree.

 

[Hag]

What's great about Torment's jargon is that as a native English speaker, I don't need a translation to intuitively understand what they're saying (your mileage may vary if you're ESL).

As a non native speaker it was ok. Way easier than Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick for example. Deducting idioms from the context took a little time in the beginning but after a few hours reading it got natural. Words also felt right, such as being addressed as "cutter" by some thug.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Imagine PST with Cockney slang

 

[CyberWhale]

That said, I wonder what makes some people say "Bar that" is super cool & organic, while "Postenago" is apparently some painful, soul-wretching eyesore. Is it because English-inspired slang and neologisms feel more natural to fantasy given the history, so that nobody even thinks about Waterdeep as 'hurr durr water is deep oh jesus christ'? Because it's hard to think of what exactly "berk" does in PST that is so hugely different. Most explanations tend to be retroactive and not consistent. ("Fampyr is so annoying because it instantly reminds you of vampire but different!" - but we don't say that about basher or dustmen or pike it or guvner.)

Personally, the jargon wasn't what made or broke it - I'm very fond of Torment's Sigilspeak, but I also didn't find any POE dialect so horrible. The difference seemed to again come from what kind of interesting, dramatic situations I am part of / hearing about. I think a lot of the smaller free-standing 'stories' in Torment (i.e. from individual plane travelers or diaries or tombstones), you could easily transplant into POE and people would point to it as prime example of POE wordy boringness. There's something else about how the stories fit together in a stylised world that is more about aesthetic than some kind of calculative rule around language use.

because randomly saying a word from another language is dumb

Literally how English came into existence.

 

[gurugeorge]

I once picked up a book in a second hand shop that I subsequently lost in a basement flood, that was all about the Victorian criminal classes, their cimes and jargon. Absolutely wonderful and curious stuff - most of the crimes themselves were highly specialized to social and economic peculiarities of the time.

I'd be interested if you could remember the name of the book, as those are good sources for spicing up the appropriate setting.

There's a book called A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, which is now freely available online, and was first published around 1700; it was probably David Zeb Cook's source for a considerable portion of the terms imported into Planescape.

Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney.

 

[Tigranes]

Planescape the words were real if antiquated lower class English slang that even someone not particularly versed in that culture with a decent grasp of English can gather the meaning of through logical inference. Somewhat in the manner of Gene Wolfe. It added colour and feel to characters who spoke like that and differentiated them from characters who spoke formally or in today's English.

Some of those terms in the dictionary above are still regularly used in my culture (especially by older generations). Watch Mad Max 1 for instance and some of the characters have a similar style of speaking.

I'm not sure that this is always down to how English it is. First, we have quite a few people who speak other languages, even in the Codex, that seem to have found POE-speak annoying. Second, we are apparently fine with more exotic pseudobabble, like "Tasloi" or "Sahuagin", or with faux-Greek/Latin. So I suspect a lot of it is down to pop culture exposure and what people think wizards and dragons are "supposed" to sound like.

E.g. if someone asked me whether to go with Sigilspeak-style or POE faux-Italian style in a game, I'd go with the former, purely because even as a non-Brit, I'll generally have more cultural references to know what all these words are supposed to feel like.

Funnily enough, my personal 'worsts' are bad not because they're not English (why would anyone give a fuck?) but because they often cut too close to what they were referencing: "Knight-Captain" in NWN2 is just some amazing 13 year old power fantasy energy, while I have of course whined many times about god damn Bleden Mark.

Because PS:T's jargon feels organic to the rest of the text in contemporary English.

Doesn't it drive you up to the wall when in a movie, in order to show that a character is foreign, they insert everyday's words from his native language into his otherwise perfect English (when it is utterly ridiculous that he wouldn't know their English equivalent given he has no problem with the rest of the speech)? "Come on, don't be such a niño or I'll kick your culo all the way around the manzana!"

So the question is: does PoE's jargon feel organic to the rest of the text?

I'm sure you're right, but I suspect it's more about familiarity than some rational judgment of cohesiveness. It's not like it's that hard or fucked up to imagine a fantasy setting where people do blurt out their own language occasionally. It's not some grand sin against linguistics (and I doubt people who complain about this really know or care about that). Rather, I suspect it's an accumulated expectation for what fantasy dialogue is supposed to sound like and how it's supposed to fit in. Somehow, we're fine with "English English SAHUAGIN KALACH-CHA MINAS TIRITH English English", right?

If, instead of Vaillians saying Postenago because they came from Not-Italy, it was just that everybody in this game said Postenago and it was part of the common language, would players nod and say "that makes a lot more sense, now I have no problem with it?" Or would it still be a question of what 'sounds weird' to the player?

It also seems a bit different for language versus aesthetics - seemingly nobody has a problem with Italian or Japanese influences swabbed all over architecture or clothing in games, even though in fact, English itself has always been half foreign words.

 

[Shadenuat]

there's a reasonable amount of linguists who believe conlangs to be dumb and waste of time actually.

in the end a bunch of fake words spread out at random to make world feel "authentic" would tire anyone out quickly. with proper context and intonation player might understand the use of slang, but not if it was obviously done for sake of Deep Lore TM.

Welsh is too unfamiliar to most people

i had no problems immersing into Chronicles of Prydain as a kid
it had character named Fflewddur. but, since shit was everywhere as Tigranes says, and multiply on shrewdness of writer who writes with single vision, not some game designer + adds, I ate it.

 

[Brancaleone]

I'm sure you're right, but I suspect it's more about familiarity than some rational judgment of cohesiveness. It's not like it's that hard or fucked up to imagine a fantasy setting where people do blurt out their own language occasionally. It's not some grand sin against linguistics (and I doubt people who complain about this really know or care about that). Rather, I suspect it's an accumulated expectation for what fantasy dialogue is supposed to sound like and how it's supposed to fit in. Somehow, we're fine with "English English SAHUAGIN KALACH-CHA MINAS TIRITH English English", right?

If, instead of Vaillians saying Postenago because they came from Not-Italy, it was just that everybody in this game said Postenago and it was part of the common language, would players nod and say "that makes a lot more sense, now I have no problem with it?" Or would it still be a question of what 'sounds weird' to the player?

It also seems a bit different for language versus aesthetics - seemingly nobody has a problem with Italian or Japanese influences swabbed all over architecture or clothing in games, even though in fact, English itself has always been half foreign words.

Oh yes, I think it works mostly on an instinctual level.

In PS:T, let's say English stands in for whatever language or lingua franca they speak in Sigil (sorry, I'm not really well versed in Sigil lore), the fact that the jargon is basically some archaic English terms make it more cohesive (I think even if you are not a native speaker you more or less perceive that it's not a radically different language, at least I definitely did when I first played it 20 years ago and my English was not particularly good). Which leaves the problem whether the player ought to know the meaning of those terms (that is, how to convey their meaning to him), but the setting helps there, because you are an amnesiac, so getting acquainted with the jargon sort of merges with recovering from your amnesia and getting 're-acquainted' (from TNO's perspective) with the setting in general.

I'd say that in PoE the use of, say, postenago, would make more sense if everybody Vailian was using it and you as well were Vailian (of course, there would be the need of conveying the meaning to the player, since as a Vailian he's supposed to know what it means). But in a conversation between a British and a foreigner with English as the common language, you'd expect to find frequent occurrences of foreign terms in the foreigner's speech only if his English is pretty broken. Or the foreigner to employ very specialized terms from his own language (the ones he doesn't know the English equivalent of), in conjunction with something like "how do you say such and such in English" or something similar (because he known employing that term will make things more difficult in terms of the communication).

So the Vailian who routinely inserts Vailian terms in his otherwise good English (or the PoE language English stands in for) either appears as quite uninterested in making the conversation more difficult and cumbersome (since the player would either not understand them or be continuously interrupting the conversation to ask what those terms mean), or is assuming that the player would understand them (and in that case why does he not speak directly Vailian)?

I think at least on an intuitive level the player understands that a conversation with a foreigner who has a commendable grasp of English and is choosing to use English to communicate with the him does not work like that, in other words, it feels forced and unnatural and motivated by an external necessity (that is, inserting touches of local ethnicity in some way, no matter if it fits the context).

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, I'm mostly on board with that way of looking at it. For POE, I think a lot of difficulty came with trying to introduce multiple distinct speaks. Sure, it is mostly reasonable on paper in terms of how the words are constructed, and it also might be a good way of depicting a pseudo-colonial melting pot area, but in terms of the actual player experience, you're giving yourself a much harder job of selling a cohesive, cool world.

I remember thinking after POE1 that I'd like to see the sequel set in Old Vailia, somewhere where you can be really steeped in one of the lore cultures, but instead they went for even more of a melting pot. I actually like the look & feel of Deadfire and the tensions between natives and transplants, but again they gave themselves a needlessly difficult job of having multiple colonial factions plus natives to represent, plus Engwithan stuff in the background.

Perhaps the postenagos feel even more out of place because the player, again given the sheer variety of cultures suddenly thrown into their lap, finds it difficult to keep track of their personalities and cultural quirks. There are copious uses of 'foreign' words in tons of fantasy RPGs out there, but it's one thing for eveyrone to speak English in your game and have one Not-Orcs race go on and on about their own weird honour concept with their own special words. It's quite another to just have everybody you talk to pull out belfettos.

 

[samuraigaiden]

This is the gayest codex thread