SureAI

I am in the process of going through the English versions of the text in the Enderal Books and Notes with the intention of standardizing the fonts and formatting. I will be adding Illustrated Capitals to some books, breaking up "wall of text" paragraphs, using dividers, fixing any obvious spelling mistakes, looking for Notes that overrun a single word to a second page and at a fairly basic level checking the grammar where necessary.

I will take great care not to use fonts that are too small for comfortable reading and will outline the rules I used so that the German and other Language teams can hopefully reflect some of the changes into those versions.

I am likely to have a few questions about some of the shorter Notes that have unusual contents. I don't want to "correct" spelling errors that were supposed to be in there to denote the fact that the writer was either in a hurry or of low education.

With that in mind, can I ask about this one...

0201CAEC - Brother Greed's Note

Current : We beleive that Nessah hide in a small cave west of here. Lightgrove. Go there, kill here, then come back to me. I'll wait here.

Proposed : We believe that Nessah is hiding in a small cave west of here. Lightgrove. Go there, kill her, then come back to me. I'll wait here.

In that original letter there are so many errors I was wondering if it was supposed to tell us anything about this "Brother Greed" character (which I have not encountered yet myself).

Brother Greed is encountered during the Rhalata quest chain. He is a mute and communicates with notes, so the poor grammar may be intentional, the devs would have to answer that. I could believe that he scribbles notes out quickly without much attention to grammar. Interesting question though, how many mistakes are intentional. Maybe one would have to compare the German version and see if it also had grammatical mistakes to see if the mistakes were just in the translation. Glad I don't have your job!

You might also consider that American English and British English don't always use quite the same grammar, so it would depend to some extent who did the translating. What might look proper to an Englishman might look improper to an American and vice versa; for example, are collective nouns such as "team" or "parliament" singular or plural. There is also the commonly heard colloquial shift from singular to plural, especially when dealing with pronouns, such as "the one who killed him hid their weapon" rather than the grammatically correct but wordier "the one who killed him hid his or her weapon." [Back in the distant days of the 20th century when I learned grammar, "he" was a pronoun that would stand for both genders, but during the rise in political correctness, writers tried to use (s)he in such circumstances which was rather awkward, so now it has devolved into using "they, them,their" even when it refers back to a singular person. I have no idea what they are teaching kids now, maybe just use whatever word their smartphone suggests. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.

Oh, I won't be going through the books for any serious grammar... don't worry. I fully intend to have my old English teacher turning in his urn.

I think there are a fair few occasions where the flow of the story could be smoothed by the culling of some unnecessary commas and alternatives to passages such as "This is all I could read out of the old and tattered book, I found at the loiterer."

To be honest a lot of the stories read a lot better just by having some paragraph breaks added as you don't get a lot to a page in Skyrim unless you drop the font size to silly small levels.

the german notes are without spelling mistakes/grammatical errors, if that's of any help
(we were taught in 3rd grade (mid 90s, 9/10 year olds in germany, english as a second language),
that they/them/their is absolutely used in singular form, if the gender is unknown or otherwise not disclosed.)

Thanks for the clarification on the Brother Greed note. I will go with the corrected version.

Hopefully my edits to the text of the books will be considered "accurate enough". I think most folks (even in Enderal) tend to use language somewhat informally.

OMG! OMG!

Actually, this caused me to search & discover Wikipedia's article "Singular they" which was quite interesting, for anyone interested in such grammatical issues. But it gets even more confusing when you consider a verb following a "singular they". For example: "The announcer is hard to understand when he or she speaks rapidly" -- "speaks" being singular. But using the "singular they": The announcer is hard to understand when they speak rapidly" -- "speak" is the plural form of the verb to match "they" being plural, even though "they" is being used as a singular pronoun. Somewhere there must be a PhD dissertation about all this!

'Singular they' has been correct English grammar since around the 12th century, I believe (definitely have read 12th somewhere quite recently, can't find it now, so I'll go with 14th). It was only in the Victorian era, from what I've gathered, that 'genderless he' became 'the correct way' (until that point, *both* were 'correct' when discussing an unknown person/person of unknown gender). In other words, 'singular they' is significantly older than 'singular you' and both predate 'only genderless he is correct'. Most people will naturally default to 'singular they' when discussing someone unknown, I have rarely heard someone say 'someone has lost his umbrella', for example, unless in a context (such as an all boys' school) where it could *only* be a 'he', most people would say 'someone has lost their umbrella', or avoid the pronoun altogether and use an article.

One way to look at the verb issue is 'speaks is 3rd person singular, speak is 3rd person plural'. Another way to look at it is 'speaks applies to "he" or "she", 'speak' is for literally every other pronoun.' 'Speak' is clearly not an exclusively plural form of the verb, because it is perfectly valid when used for 'I speak' or 'you speak'.

(The Victorians are also responsible for such grammatical nonsenses as 'you mustn't split infinitives because you can't do that in Latin [where they are single words]', because they were *really* into prescriptivist attitudes to grammar, personally, I prefer a more descriptivist, flexible approach, because language evolves as times change. (That is to say, the 'genderless he' was not a reflection of an organic change in the language, but a decision made by Some Person Writing A Book On Grammar, pretty much.))

Ultimately, if it's good enough for Austen, Byron, Chaucer, and Defoe, it's good enough for me.

As for the original question, my gut feeling is that the errors are intentional, because they look less like errors someone translating hurriedly from German would make than they do errors that someone perhaps not too familiar with what badly-written English tends to look like would intentionally put in, if you see what I mean? I feel like the first would look more like perhaps "We believe Nessah in a small cave west from here hides. Go there, kill she, then come to me back" (closer to German sentence structure, most people are more likely to mess that up than spelling, IME), and probably if *I* were writing an 'error-filled' version I might make it more like "We beleve that Nessah is hid in a small cave west of here. Go their, kill her, than come back to me," or something along those lines. (Mind you, I missed urst's point that the German versions don't have errors, so maybe I'm talking out of somewhere south of my face...)

I have a question on the intended meaning of part of the following item if folks could make some suggestions please? I have shown the excerpt below in bold...

===
0006A8A9 - _00E_ThunderFrostNote02 - Letter

ORIGINAL : We won't leave the Golden Forest anymore. The Shadow Pass will be overrun, and it won't be long, until these beasts will burst through the gate into this valley. I didn't get a message by Hail Malphas City for two days - I assume the worst. Nobody might manage to keep behind the mountain passes, because the path is closed by the ice of winter.

PROPOSED : We won't leave Goldenforst anymore. The Shadow Pass will be overrun and it won't be long until those beasts will burst through the gate into this valley. I haven't had a message from Ark for two days - I assume the worst. Nobody can manage to get through the mountain passes because the path is closed by the ice of winter.

@DanielCoffey

Can you please enter your question or suggestion in the bugtracker.
Is better than just in the forum. You know how it works

I'm pretty sure "Hail Malphas City" doesn't refer to Ark but to the new settlement Dal'Marak had founded (hence he assumes the worst). Yerai calls it "Malaph", which while not the same sounds similar enough.