Translation Team: Please stop doing this...

[MilesSaintboroguh]

What's weird is, given one of the only examples of dialogue choices with more than "Yes/No" in the game is a Rogue/Ninja quest, apparently our characters speak with a Limsa accent.

And the player character dialogue choice also mimics how the Shagians speak when you first speak to them for their beast quest (pssshh...). It's just the localization having too much fun with the script.

[Felis]

And the player character dialogue choice also mimics how the Shagians speak when you first speak to them for their beast quest (pssshh...). It's just the localization having too much fun with the script.

Not really. The Echo give the character the ability to undstand and speak every language.

[Estellios]

SE should just hire Working Designs to localize this game so we can have macarena references and npcs reminding us to eat our Wheaties.

[Aegis]

And cutting back on the "Limsan accent" will help everyone. It's not dumbing down anything. The dialog is terrible, nearly unreadable English. >< I like the idea of it, not the implementation. :/

Nearly unreadable to you, perhaps. It scans perfectly easily for me. The thief talk takes a while to get used to the code switching, but once you do that scans easily too.

People complaining about 'obscure' words like portend and mummer. What did they teach you in high school English lit?

[Sadana]

Nearly unreadable to you, perhaps. It scans perfectly easily for me. The thief talk takes a while to get used to the code switching, but once you do that scans easily too.

People complaining about 'obscure' words like portend and mummer. What did they teach you in high school English lit?

That those words exist, but aren't used in common parlance any longer.

And, sure, some folks will find the Limsan vocabulary easy to read. It's similar to how many people find a sentence like, "OMFG that GD DRG just RQ while in AK HM. WTF man?? Whatev. BRB 420." to be completely unreadable. This kind of thing is really subjective. I personally feel that SE should take the middle road and lighten up on the "accents" in some npc dialogs.

[Niwashi]

I don't mind it much, but I have to admit that it gets annoying at times. English is my second language so certain texts are difficult for me to understand. I'm not even going to lie, I skip over pirate-speak text shakespearean English I can handle to an extent but pirate speak is no.

Early modern English, like what Ramuh uses, is at least valid and recognizable English words, and grammatically correct as well.

The problem with the pirate speech is that it's neither. It's an attempt to describe an accent by using non-standard spelling. You have to just guess at what actual word that jumble of letters is intended to represent, because it's not a standard way to write anything. Familiarity with a wide range of accents makes that guessing easier, but nobody actually "knows" those words because they aren't actually words at all the way they're written. (Even people who speak with a strong accent still read/write words with the same standard spelling as everyone else. It's only authors who need to convey the sound of a character's accent through a purely written medium that resort to this type of jumbled spelling to convey it. Though a common way to literarily convey accents, it's a practice that can easily be overdone, becoming very hard to read.)

[EDIT: I originally said the above about both pirate speech and rogues' speech, but as Mholito pointed out, it doesn't apply to the rogues.]

Let's use

portendeth

as an example. Portends, itself, is an infrequently used word anymore. You don't need to add on the awkwardly archaic -eth to the end to make it sound MORE 'old' or 'stuffy' or 'pretentious' or whatever effect they're going for.

First off, "portends" isn't particularly uncommon. More significantly "-eth" isn't a suffix you can just tack on or remove arbitrarily. It has to match the tense of the rest of the sentence. Their only options were (1) include it as they did, (2) remove all traces of early modern English from the dialog, or (3) leave it as grammatically wrong. You can't change a sentence piecemeal and still have a valid sentence. Personally, I'm glad they used it correctly. (I can't stand when games or other media take a haphazard approach of just randomly taking on suffixes to words where they don't make sense. That makes it far harder to read than the correct English that SE's localization team uses for Ramuh and Urianger.)

(Example: "I go whither the wild rose blooms." Did we come from the same uni as Urianger? O.o Wait... then we would've said goeth and bloometh... =_= )

Bloometh perhaps, but Urianger wouldn't use goeth because it doesn't match the pronoun "I". (I go. Thou goest. He/she/it goeth.)

[Sadana]

First off, "portends" isn't particularly uncommon. More significantly "-eth" isn't a suffix you can just tack on or remove arbitrarily. It has to match the tense of the rest of the sentence. Their only options were (1) include it as they did, (2) remove all traces of early modern English from the dialog, or (3) leave it as grammatically wrong. You can't change a sentence piecemeal and still have a valid sentence.

Bloometh perhaps, but Urianger wouldn't use goeth because it doesn't match the pronoun "I". (I go. Thou goest. He/she/it goeth.)

Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that SE wouldn't be able to just change Urianger's method of speaking without some drastic change like Moenbryda telling him to knock off the act or something. >< I guess it's more a hope for the future.

Now I'm curious though... how often does the word "portend" show up in modern media? I would bet you'd be hard pressed to find it in any of today's newspapers and newscasts. :/

And thanks for the grammar correction! xD My bad about adding -eth to 'go'.

[Mholito]

The problem with the pirate speech and rogue's brogue is that they're neither. they're attempts to describe an accent by using non-standard spelling.

The rogues actually talk in Thives' cant.

[Niwashi]

The rogues actually talk in Thives' cant.

Thanks. Corrected.

Now I'm curious though... how often does the word "portend" show up in modern media? I would bet you'd be hard pressed to find it in any of today's newspapers and newscasts. :/

It's probably more common in novels than newscasts. Although the word could technically be used for scientifically well-accepted predictions like weather forecasts, it tends to have a somewhat more mystical connotation. A novel where things like fate and prophesies are integral to the story is where an interest in portents is more likely to appear.

[Kikosho]

The problem with the pirate speech is that it's neither. It's an attempt to describe an accent by using non-standard spelling. You have to just guess at what actual word that jumble of letters is intended to represent, because it's not a standard way to write anything. Familiarity with a wide range of accents makes that guessing easier, but nobody actually "knows" those words because they aren't actually words at all the way they're written. (Even people who speak with a strong accent still read/write words with the same standard spelling as everyone else. It's only authors who need to convey the sound of a character's accent through a purely written medium that resort to this type of jumbled spelling to convey it. Though a common way to literarily convey accents, it's a practice that can easily be overdone, becoming very hard to read.))

Basically this. Going from reading words normally to having an apostrophe replace nearly every single "h" or randomly thrown in to convey how the characters forgo a sound throws me for a loop. Whenever I do get around to reading the passages, the accent is clear as day in my head but it doesn't mean it's any less a pain in the ass to parse all of that. I liken Limsa pirate speak to Jamaican patois (for ex. "Wah mek yuh ask suh much questi-on fah? Mi ago link up mi friend dem). While I'll be able to read and understand it, it wouldn't be second nature to me as I'm just not used to it. The Rogues Cant just introduced unfamiliar slang into the mix which naturally will confuse anyone that doesn't know what the words mean.