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USSEP 4.07


Steelbeard

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Hi, I am grateful for all the work done on USSEP.  I just reviewed the changelog for 4.07 and am again blown away by all that is being fixed.

However, I thought I'd point out that some of the text changes you are fixing are not really bugs, and you don't need to work as hard as you're doing on those.

Specifically, whoever is submitting these "bugs" seems to think that this possessive form:  "Gallus's" is some sort of mistake.  I assure you, it is not.  When someone's name ends in an S, adding an apostrophe S is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.  It is not in any way a grammatical mistake.

In fact, when I was growing up, the mistake was to put Gallus', because s' is reserved for forming the possessive of plural nouns, and Gallus is a single person, not a family or multiple people.

Now, however, it seems that writing Gallus' is an acceptable variant spelling for the possessive of a single person whose name ends in s, so it isn't as if you are changing the grammar to an incorrect form.

But it does mean that you are going to a lot of extra work to fix "bugs" that aren't bugs at all, since there is nothing wrong with "Gallus's" as it is.  Since the writers of Skyrim used this form extensively throughout the text of the game, I think you could save a great deal of time if you quit changing all these possessives to a variant spelling and instead invested the time into fixing actual errors, many of which persist in the text of the game.

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Hi Steelbeard, welcome to the forums.

Yes, you have a point.

Have you also considered other NPCs in Skyrim whose name ends with S? Perhaps if the USSEP folk were presented with a list of such sic with accompanying examples of use/abuse in dialogue it would add weight to the case.

And of course deciphering the over arching intent of the Skyrim authors if there were ever any inconsistencies extant. :)

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We've really been over this plenty of time and according to all of the grammar our team members were taught in school, Gallus' is correct, Gallus's is not. There were no exceptions made based on plural vs singular and if you made this mistake in a paper you got marked down for it.

We fix what's reported or what we find on our own, and if we've missed something it needs to be reported so we can look at it.

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Apologies if you have been over this.  I searched the forums and could find no threads discussing it, and I haven't been over it, so here we are.

You all have my sympathies then for being taught incorrectly in school.  Gallus's is not in any way wrong.  Neither is Gallus'.   This is a matter more of style than of grammar.  If your teachers marked you down for it, then it was because they wanted you to go with one style over the other.  If they taught you it was incorrect grammar, well, again, you're learning now that it isn't.

Also, by way of explanation the plural versus singular does have something to do with it.  For example, if you have 1 boy, and he has a ball, you say "The boy's ball."

If you have more than 1 boy, and they have a ball, you say "The boys' ball."   This is not a matter of style, but of correct grammar and communication.

For names, the same is true.  If you are referring to Robert's ball, you mean 1 guy.  If you say Roberts' ball, you are talking about more than one Robert.

But if the name ends in an s, that's where the style part now comes in.  People have written both 's and s' for the plural of names ending in an S.  This is because for written communication, writing "Roberts' "  by itself is no longer clear.  Do you mean multiple boys named Robert, or do you mean a family of people?  Or perhaps you have one person whose last name is Roberts.  So both forms of the possessive were written, and now both are accepted as correct.

For example, the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook both weigh in as authorities on this subject, and they have said and maintain the different styles over the years, and they also commonly disagree.  Here is a reference page for you that compares the two: http://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-forming.html

There is also the classic Strunk and White's Elements of Style, that offers its opinion, favoring 's, as in "Charles's."  Style commonly arises from usage.  AP, for example, offered their style guide for newsprint and thus space was at a premium, so favoring Charles' was better because it saved space.  Wikipedia discusses all this on their talk page on possessives, since it has many editors and they try to come to some agreement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_(punctuation)

So, the upshot is, if you were taught that one style is wrong, then you were taught something wrong.  It's a style thing now, not a point of grammar.  Style can't be wrong, really, even though people may have vehement disagreement over it.

If you folks at USSEP want to go with the opposite style over what the writers of Skyrim chose, you are of course free to do that, but you should at least be aware that you are incorrectly labeling these as "bugs".  The possessive is just in a different style.  In my opinion, you are wasting time and energy correcting something that doesn't need it, and that could be better spent fixing actual errors in the game, both textual and otherwise.

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4 hours ago, lmstearn said:

Hi Steelbeard, welcome to the forums.

Yes, you have a point.

Have you also considered other NPCs in Skyrim whose name ends with S? Perhaps if the USSEP folk were presented with a list of such sic with accompanying examples of use/abuse in dialogue it would add weight to the case.

And of course deciphering the over arching intent of the Skyrim authors if there were ever any inconsistencies extant. :)

I think Skyrim's writers did a good job, given that there are many thousands of lines of text in the game.  I haven't noticed many typos after spending hundreds of hours playing.  I think I noticed dropped or repeated words mostly.  But you are right, there are many NPCs with names that end in S, and if you look through the USEEP changelogs, they have been changing all possessive forms of these names and labeling them as bugs, which is unnecessary.  I figured I would post here because I didn't know how else to contact them, thinking that they must believe that "Talos's mead" is a grammatical error.  I used to think that certain points of style were errors, too, because I grew up in a small town before there was any internet.  So your English teacher was used to only one style, such as Chicago or AP or Strunk and of course that became the "right" way because they didn't know any better.  Then I went to college, and found out that a lot of what I was taught was just an alternative style, so I thought I'd try to let these good folk know that they don't need to change any more possessives like this.  They're fine as they are, really.  Some people, however, won't be able to tolerate a different style, so for all I know, they'll go right on changing the "wrong" style to the right one.  I hope not, however, since I don't see the need to work that hard to fix something not broken.  Heh.

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Given that it wasn't only grade school at the public level but also the portion of college education I also started (but never finished) I'm inclined to go with what they were teaching vs people claiming it's been changed now because I've yet to confirm it from anyone in the education field or seen anything definitive online that says it's ok.

99% of these things are already done at this point though and even if Todd himself told us we wasted our time, we're not wasting more to go back in and start yanking all those edits back out. Rather, we'll just fix whatever happens to remain instead so they're all consistent.

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On 2017-05-06 at 4:11 PM, lmstearn said:

Hi Steelbeard, welcome to the forums.

Yes, you have a point.

Have you also considered other NPCs in Skyrim whose name ends with S? Perhaps if the USSEP folk were presented with a list of such sic with accompanying examples of use/abuse in dialogue it would add weight to the case.

And of course deciphering the over arching intent of the Skyrim authors if there were ever any inconsistencies extant. :)

Have you realized that, even if the OP has a point, the spelling in-game is due to what language the developer has, in this case it is US-British which has differences to British.

I'm also sure that the British that's spoken in Australia is different to the British used in the UK.

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12 hours ago, Leonardo said:

Have you realized that, even if the OP has a point, the spelling in-game is due to what language the developer has, in this case it is US-British which has differences to British.

I'm also sure that the British that's spoken in Australia is different to the British used in the UK.

A few of the developers were probably from the UK and Australia, which explains some of the grammar in item names and dialogue. From my knowledge, "Chris' " is correct in American English, and "Chris's" is just a way it is preferred in certain versions of the English language. American English differs in quite a few ways from other forms of English (UK, AU, Canada, etc). Even in certain parts of the US it differs. Pronunciation changes depending on region, country, and what the language derives from.

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Yes, the "s apostrophe s" is used in UK English, but not in U.S. English. Since Bethesda is an U.S. company, we use only use the apostrophe and no additional "s" since Bethesda couldn't make up their minds which way it was supposed to be. We've had quite a few extensive debates about this and concluded that the additional "s" is the bug and that it should be removed for consistency.

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Plus if you go through every instance of it you'll find that the vanilla usage was overwhelmingly favoring s' instead of s's and all we've really done is make the usage consistent across the board. Consistent with both the delivered state of the game and with grammar as taught by US schools - who apparently still teach it this way today.

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9 hours ago, BlackPete said:

Yes, the "s apostrophe s" is used in UK English, but not in U.S. English. Since Bethesda is an U.S. company, we use only use the apostrophe and no additional "s" since Bethesda couldn't make up their minds which way it was supposed to be. We've had quite a few extensive debates about this and concluded that the additional "s" is the bug and that it should be removed for consistency.

That's my point.

Although, I admit I had tough times reading stuff in Morrowind (my first TES game) when I'm used to UK-British and are not familiar with US-British, because my native language is Swedish and we in Sweden learn English in school how it is spoken in the UK.

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