Insane-sounding complaint about "sprightly"

[Serilda]

I know I sound insane, but this has bothered me from the very first day I started playing and I finally wanted to post about it. Part of the reason I never use /dance is that my male Elezen looks ridiculous doing it. However, the other reason is that the grammar of the emote text description is so awkward.

When I use /dance, the emote text explains that "Renard dances sprightly". I have never heard this usage of "sprightly" anywhere else in my life, and I feel that it is grammatically questionable at best.

This has (amazingly) previously been addressed by two different reps back in a few 1.0 threads.

Thank you for your concerns about our use of the word "sprightly", Viridiana. "Sprightly" may be used as an adjective, as illustrated by your example. However, "sprightly" may also be used as an adverb, as in the in game text. If there are any other concerns you have about the text in the game, please feel free to let us know!

Source

Duly noted!

Source

I accept what the official response in the first thread is saying, however I strongly believe that it is incorrect and will inelegantly attempt to explain why.

"Sprightly" is indeed most common as a descriptor in modern English, e.g. "Renard was surprisingly sprightly" or "Renard smiled at the sprightly old man". This qualifies it as an adjective; it's used to describe nouns.

The confusion seems to come in when it's used as an adverb; a word to describe actions. A lot of the time, an adverb is formed by modifying the adjective form to make it suitable for use on an action e.g. "Renard was a proficient dancer" (adjective form "proficient") versus "Renard danced proficiently" (adverb form "proficiently").

With "sprightly", there's no separate adverb form and its use in this way is unusual. "Sprightly" (adverb) is not a derivative of "sprightly" (adjective); instead, the exact same spelling is used to describe both nouns and verbs e.g. "Renard dances in a sprightly manner" or "Renard performs a sprightly dance". See also "spry"; this is written "spryly" when it becomes a standard adverb (and is likely to have its roots in the exact same word). I understand that "sprightly" can be used conditionally or for flavour in regional dialects, which is probably the rationale that old response was using, but if we take the distraction of the '-ly' spelling out of the picture there are many words which function as both adverbs and adjectives yet don't work in every situation which requires an adverb or an adjective. In the case of "sprightly", it comes across as having been tagged onto the end of the text just like "lightly", "happily" or another word might. Except it doesn't work like those words, and sounds hackneyed as a result.

To go with another example, the word "long" can be used as an adjective or an adverb. You can say "Renard has long ears" (adjective) or "Renard had long wished to be able to dance" (adverb). You can't say "Renard danced long" or "Renard's ears twitched longly" without sounding strange. You can still use the word in a different way, like "Renard danced for a long time", but even though "long" is an adjective and an adverb it's not globally usable in every single sentence structure which requires an adverb. Some accommodation has to be made.

As not all adverbs were created equally, I strongly believe that "Renard dances sprightly" follows this same logic.

Now, I know that antiquated and regional English is something that FFXIV particularly strives for and if this was a general old fashioned term I could happily deal with it and treat it as a learning experience for myself. However, I cannot find any consistent examples of the usage on display in the game elsewhere. Not in any books I have read, and not online; extensive searching has produced some amateur writing from a local region (always specifically American, which goes against the usual trend for the localised dialects we've seen to date in FFXIV even though US English spellings are prevalent and perfectly acceptable) and a single poem (which uses idiosyncratic English throughout). The overwhelming majority of examples consistently treat the word the way I have always understood it to work.

It may be the case that the in-game usage is correct in some region, somewhere on the planet; I'm not going to pretend I speak every English dialect on earth. However, it's most certainly not standard English (whether US English or International English) and all of the other emote text is written without this kind of flavour. I can only read it the way it's written in-game if I imagine myself having an obscure US country-style accent, which rather takes me out of the moment.

So while I appreciate it's incredibly unimportant and I'm not coming off very well by making this post, I would be extremely grateful if the usage can be looked at and possibly standardised.

Thank you for reading.

[Culfinrandir]

It is difficult because "sprightly" is not commonly used, the preferred term being "spritely" where I am from in the north of England. Both have the same root & mean to "behave like a sprite" (ephemeral, fleeting, actively etc). It is even pronounced sprite-i-ly most of the time, which is why spright-ly can sound harsh to the ear.

As it is a descriptive word it would be classed as an adjective but it's use doesn't make it "feel" like one! The reason it's not an adverb is because the adjective can't be added to otherwise it would be nonsensical - sprightlyly. Think of the adjective "ugly", it never becomes the adverb "uglyly".

[Solarra]

Interesting. Sprightly, seems to have come into use around the time of Shakespeare, according to Webster's 20th Century Dictionary, but it was only used as an adjective.
Its use as an adverb is definitely incorrect in Standard Modern (UK) English (from the Cambridge Dictionary and personal experience living in South East England and Eire). So, I'd be very interested to know what source the localisation team found that said it could be used as an adverb.

'Renard dances in a sprightly manner/fashion/way' would all be correct usage.

[zonderbunny]

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sprightly According to my dictionary sprightly can be used as an adverb. *shrugs*

[Solarra]

Well, you learn something new every day Although I wish they'd given an example of it being used as an adverb because it still feels wrong to me.

[zonderbunny]

Honestly I was just curious. I'm not strongly inclined one way or the other. XD But it seemed fair to provide a source the localization team might have used.

[Serilda]

Honestly I was just curious. I'm not strongly inclined one way or the other. XD But it seemed fair to provide a source the localization team might have used.

I'm struggling to find any natural examples of it being a pure adverb, though, and the only ones I have seem to be regional (limited to some parts of the US, specifically). British English dictionaries unanimously define the word solely as an adjective while MW seems to be the only citation for the adverb definition - with no examples - outside of free sites which likely use MW as a source. Collins cites the adverb usage as an obsolete variation, again without supplying any examples. In the absence of a single piece of reliable literature using the word in the way the game does, it's only natural that it seems awkward and incorrect.

If anyone can pipe up with examples or cite the actual origins of the use as an adverb that's fine, but the rest of the game's emote text is written very neutrally without obscure US colloquialisms or archaic language (if anything, most of the game is more prone to using British colloquialisms but the emote text descriptions avoid these). It comes off sounding very inconsistent, though possibly not to people from the part of the US where this usage is normal. I don't feel correct making my character express emotes written in a dialect he doesn't use.

I'm from a region with a strong local dialect and sometimes I'm surprised when I discover expressions which mean something different in standard English. Mostly, though, I'm aware of things I shouldn't say to people from elsewhere. It's possible that the original writer did not realise it's a nonstandard expression (a Google search for examples tends to support this).

I maintain that its use in the emote text is jarring and inconsistent with the rest of the descriptions.

[Naria]

Right so according to the Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition "sprightly" is both an adjective and an adverb. As an adverb it means "In a sprightly manner; with vigour and animation". It is first documented being used as an adverb in 1604 by Thomas Dekker in the Kings' Entertainment describing the coronation procession of King James and Queen Anne in London. The quote from Dekker is "Nine Trumpets and a Kettle Drum did very sprightly and actively sound the Danish March." We know that the Loc team uses the OED; this is probably where they got this usage from.

/thread ?

[Serilda]

/thread ?

All I can really say is...

/bow

Still never going to use it in game, but it does seem that Mr Dekker was fond of the usage.

[Shurrikhan]

If the texts from my British and Early American Lit courses are anything to go by, it can be used as either; the same morphology is both adjective and adverb interchangeably.