ryusui

Ryusui

@ryusui

"It's the greatest day."

  • he/him

maker of tiny games | navigator of retail chaos | artist | FFXIV fan (Ryusui Teira@Brynhildr) | he/him | trans rights are human rights | death to crypto

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ryusui
@ryusui
lizbushouse
@lizbushouse
lokeloski
@lokeloski
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lizbushouse
@lizbushouse
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ryusui
@ryusui

FFXIV does some amazing shit with plurals (multiple pieces of lapis lazuli will be identified as "lapides lazuli") which makes it stand out when it gets things wrong

i remember there being an odd thing at one point where the various "Emperor's New" accessories were inconsistently pluralized, and also that there were multiple quests where the dialogue and the number of items requested did not line up properly (e.g. a questgiver asks for multiple of a thing but the quest only needs you to give them one, or vice versa)

also, in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, there's a bit where Richard asks you to help him find his "gold leaf," only for him to spring it on you that there are actually five gold leaves to find. but in Japanese, his initial request reads ambiguously enough that this doesn't leap out as an inconsistency the way it does in English!

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in reply to @lokeloski's post:

thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

A useless fact, but English did, a long time ago, have three types of number: singular, dual, and plural—or, at least, the fossilised dual persisted in pronouns like wit ('we two'), git ('you two') and incer ('yours-but-there-are-two-of-you').

IIRC, Proto-Indo-European had dual number but a lot of the relevant grammatical architecture for nouns and verbs had already atrophied when English split off from its ancestor languages.

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PC36
@PC36

do you know which languages have separate 4 plurals or which ones have every number ending in "1" being singular? i knew about the trial and paucal beforehand but not these and i'd like to know more

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nortti
@nortti

Finnish presents an interesting corner case – it has singular and plural quite like English, but you do not use the plural number if you explicitly specify an amount

For example, let's consider a file download UI. You want to translate into Finnish the message "File Downloaded" / "Files Downloaded", which become "Tiedosto ladattu" / "Tiedostot ladattu". In both of these cases, tiedosto 'file' is in the nominative, in the former in the singular and in the latter in the plural.

If you then add a number to the UI, you can keep the one-file case as-is using nominative singular, "1 tiedosto ladattu", but the non-one-file case needs to become "5 tiedostoa ladattu", using the accusative singular

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