Quote Originally Posted by Elim View Post
The nearly intelligible FAKE old english that the orginal FFXIV:ARR has(or had, if they fixed it) would NOT be helpful for your friend to read. The expansion dialogue is fine.
Most of the ARR dialogue is hardly unintelligible for native English speakers (intelligible means it's able to be understood) outside of the more extreme versions spoken by characters like Ramuh, Urianger, and Jacke of the Rogue's Guild (which, like other Limsa NPCs, is meant to model an accent) unless - and I don't mean this as an insult, but it is true - you have a somewhat limited vocabulary, or your only exposure to literature is solely modern works.

Also, to be pedantic, it's not "Old English" at all (which might look something like this "Is hēr ǣnig þe Englisce spricþ?")...it's not even Shakespearean English (which might look a bit like this "To the king god hath his offyce lent / of dread of Iustyce, power and Comaund / hath bid him rule, and willd you to obay,"). You have to get all the way to around the era of Tolkien and CS Lewis (so the 1940s and 50s for the most part) to find English that more closely matches what you see in this game, and even then it is modernized.

Just throwing in a "Mayhap" here and there, the occasional "eth" (for Ramuh) and using an older and more formal sentence structure (again, outside of extremes like Jacke's dialect) should hardly make it hard to read for native English speakers, and certainly doesn't turn it into a nearly unintelligible mess.