Illarion.org

A simple problem, a quick survey: What do you prefer for official game content (NPCs, book texts, item description); american english or british english? It is out of question that NPCs should react on both, but for game content, IMHO, one style should be made standard.

So, AE or BE?

British English is the English you learn in the school, normally.

So this is the right the choose, I guess.

Jupiter wrote: British English is the English you learn in the school, normally.

So this is the right the choose, I guess.

Wrong!

You can choose between AE and BE

I would say AE.

Das Auge wrote: You can choose between AE and BE

Wrong.

We had no choice...BE!! (though i voted for finnish *g*)

As non native speaker I don't see the difference anyway.

You could check up how many americans arround and how many britains and learned Speakers...
But I guess the BE sounds more medieval.

British English plz.
And in german they should react on "Bavarian"

Rincewind wrote:As non native speaker I don't see the difference anyway.

You could check up how many americans arround and how many britains and learned Speakers...
But I guess the BE sounds more medieval.

I agree with all that

I agree with the above aswell. And I learned and am still learing BE back at high school and now in college.

Pity this is a secret poll, otherwise we could find out who voted for American and persecute them

I want Austrailian English as an option.

Rakust, I think that is British English! It's not like its any major differences though, is it?
Mom= Mum
Jelly= Jam
Familytime= tv watching (Just kidding, Americans! I love your movies!)

there is a difference betweeen amrican english and brittish english?:P written difference that is....i voted brittish english...for obvious reasons.

Arvemor wrote:Rakust, I think that is British English! It's not like its any major differences though, is it?
Mom= Mum
Jelly= Jam
Familytime= tv watching (Just kidding, Americans! I love your movies!)

Have you ever heard an Austrailian?

Probably not, otherwise he wouldnt have said that xD

British English all the way.

Bring back our U's!

Arvemor wrote:Jelly= Jam

What? No

Jelly = Jelly

Jelly is Gelatine.

Jam is squashed and preserved fruit.

I'm going to go away from the norm and say "American English".

There seems to be a lot of confusion on what the difference is between formal American English and British English a lot of people thinking that formal American is British English, which isn't true. From reading the responses it becomes obvious how much this mistake has been skewing the results and I would wonder how the results would be if people realized the difference. What people appear to want is formal language, as opposed to slang, which is why they think that British English is the response they should pick. Please correct me if I am wrong, but do read for yourself and see if this isn't the case with most of the replies.

Second, let me point out that this mechanic makes only one major difference. Since both will be understood by both groups of people, that is not the issue. Also, since both types are the same in formal writing if one goes back to American colonial times (and going back much more than that gives something that is uninteligable to both groups, such as Baewolf in its original format) this does not much affect period sensitive material either. What this does affect is the ease at which people can easily add to current stuff and will, effectively, greatly reduce the ability of either American English speakers or British English speakers to add to game lore or become deeply involved in expansion of the game. While I do love my British friends and understand that most of the development of this game probably takes place in europe, I must point out that the pool of available people speaking British is many many times smaller than the population of America. For this reason, namely the future expansion of the game, I would have to point out that American English is the better long-term choice.

Or mabie looking at the locations of the people who play the game would be a better indication of which should be more standard. It should be a simple thing to find out how many American/British player there are, though I'm not sure what should be done with the other European countries (not including Germany, since they already have German support), if they should not be counted or if they should be counted with the British group since they might either go both ways or may be more familiar with the British variant. Either way, a dirty estimate using the "get to know the players" post showed the two groups to either be even or only a slight difference between them (which is surprising since this is a European based game that seems to have not really hit the American market very hard yet, from what I have seen).

I think it may be best to post examples of each as comparison.

I think the difference is negligible, since the written versions do not differ enough to really make an apparent difference.

I, personally, consider this poll rather useless.

I think it's interesting we have a GM worry about which English is being spoken, and yet other, incredibly simply to do updates. which would be nice to see on a regular basis, thus showing the new players stuff actually gets done, are being put off for the giant update.

now, if this is to simply bring this mild conundrum to the attention of the populace then ok. but why are we worrying about which english they speak when we have npc's that still don't have good spelling. and at least one item is this way as well. the baking oven. or as it's known ig, the backing oven.

as far as i know the bandages thread died. as well as the varied attributes one because even though there where many excelent proposals that where met with majority's excitement the gm's activity kinda died away and now we see this.

such a tiny aspect of the game that would take tedious hours to rescript, to change something most people won't notice. not to mention most of the npc's lines are so short there are essentially bilingual.

while i did cast my vote i think this entire thread is incredibly pointless, just like that poll a while ago about what you do in your down time, for that one the gm NEVER actually stated what they where trying to accomplish, we all assumed it was to get players to stay IG more, while this is seems to be about changing the ig atmosphere. to that end are there not easier, simpler, faster ways of doing this?

Tanistian_Kanea wrote:gm's activity kinda died away

Usually GMs do quests and ban people. That is GM activity.

I am currently writing NPCs and I noticed that there is no common guideline whether to use BE or AE for game content. That's all. And now back to poll.

Never in my life did we have BE in school in... It was AE or it was incorrect.
Honestly I don't see the point in using BE in the game, it only causes more of a hassle to stick a random "u" in places they are not really needed.

It's a waste of time and makes merchant interaction much more difficult for newer players.

I voted Finnish because, while I speak AE, I can deal with either.

Juliana D'cheyne wrote:I think it may be best to post examples of each as comparison.

Lor-Angur Guardian's Armor -> Lor-Angur Guardian's Armour
Harbor -> Harbour
Gray - Grey

And so on.

Removing the severe dumbing down of the language, basically.

So no "realizing", but "realising". Color, honor, valor, armor, neighbor become colour, honour, valour, armour, neighbour.

Practise is a verb. Practice is a noun.

Defence.

Hadrian_Abela wrote:American English is as much of a language as l337 speak is

Here's a list.

http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues ... erican.htm

Note: When it shows 2 terms always look at the left term, from what I've seen the right ones are always bs, with the exceptions of: Gaol (we'd use Jail), Judgment (We'd use Judgement) and we use Yoghurt.

Thank you.. the list is helpful, in that case it really doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

Why should all the NPCs spell/speak the same? The players don't. And won't start as a result of this. A BE speaking character can just have grown up in a different region than an AE speaking one. Same goes for books IMO, no need to have them all writing one way or the other. Why can't different dialects develop within Illarion?

As for in-game descriptions (items and such), I'd like to see BE used. Clearly it is the preferred choice.

As has already been said, this is an incredibly unnecessary thread/poll. I'm all for player involvement and discussion, but there are some things that can and should be taken care of without this.

No one is going to nerdrage quit Illarion because they log on to find that all the NPCs suddenly start talking a single version of English. No one is going to start playing Illarion because "OMG! I'm American! And this game uses American English! I am totally going to play!" People are not going to be able to exploit such a change in any way at all. Players won't cry because their characters have been 'nerfed'. This is going to have little to no effect on roleplay. It is just pointless getting input on such a thing. Something so trivial could have been decided in a few seconds by whoever felt it was an issue.

Well let's put it this way: Who thinks it's an issue?

I think it's an issue and that it should be British English. You know how incredibly annoying it is to see what is essentially a retarded phonetic version of your language written everywhere?

I think the problem is with triggers

"I wish to buy a plate armor"
"I don't sell that item, n00b"
"I want to buy a plate armor!"
"I don't sell that item n00b"
"Buy plate armor"
"Say what?"

Sure we can do it for both, but meh.

Well, it took me a long time to start writing armor instead of armour.