Thread: Grammatical error in Lv.70 sidequest "Village of Woe"

Date and time: June 28, 2019
NPC: Eueliss
Quest: Village of Woe
Location: Kholusia (x15.1, y28.4)
Steps:

1. Escort Eueliss to Stonegazer
2. Speak with Sai-Lewq
3. Return to Wright
4. Speak with Eueliss

Eueliss says "He hung himself." The grammatically correct way to say this is "He hanged himself."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/word...hung-or-hanged
"Use hanged when referring to a person being suspended by a rope around the neck until dead."

If this was written this way on purpose as a colloquialism, please disregard.

This is another place where we have to consider descriptive vs prescriptive grammar. Yes, we consider it wrong to use "hung" in this situation, and people should use "hanged" when referring to a person strung up by the neck. But might someone still say "hung" in practice? Yes, and I don't doubt that there are villagers in the real world who would use the wrong word in this scenario.

Merriam-Webster have even said

Originally Posted by Merriam-Webster

The distinction between hanged and hung is not an especially useful one (although a few commentators claim otherwise). It is, however, a simple one and certainly easy to remember. Therein lies its popularity. If you make a point of observing the distinction in your writing, you will not thereby become a better writer, but you will spare yourself the annoyance of being corrected for having done something that is not wrong.

Originally Posted by SirBrighton

I checked the welcome post beforehand and didn't see anything regarding grammatically correct vs colloquial speech, only that we use "proper" English, which is open to interpretation.

The rule about using "proper" English is about how we talk during our posts. For example, we shdn't tok lik ths b/c ppl might not understand. It's not about what we read in game--if it were, 90% of the Lominsan population would be reportable!

I think of it this way...Report typos for sure. Probably report awkward wordings and see what other people think. But we don't have to report things that are non-standard but still not-wrong, because not everyone in Eorzea (or Norvrandt) speaks with perfect academically prescribed grammar, and the writers and localizers do take character into account when writing or translating dialog. If a real world native English speaker would use a particular grammatical construct, prescriptions be damned, it's okay for an in-game character to use it.

So in this particular case, it's probably okay for the mayor of a small pastoral village to use "hung" to refer to someone who has been "hanged", just as it's okay for someone with higher expectations of people's grammar to cringe at such a use.