ex post slarto

Three of the five dragons in Exile and Avernum had gender-changing issues. At least the serviles were relatively minor characters...

In those scripts, objects that are defined get the characteristics that are given to them after begindefineitem (such as "it_stats_to_affect_0 = 0" or whatever), but they ALSO inherit the characteristics of another item. If "import = x" is used, they inherit the characteristics of x (overwriting any characteristics that the item has already been given). If no import line is there, they inherit the characteristics of the previous item in the file.

 

All rings (except for item 171, the platinum ring) import item 170, the gold ring (or another ring which itself imports the gold ring). (You might say the plain gold ring is the master ring...) If item 170 is no longer the gold ring, they no longer important the characteristics that make them rings!

 

This is why editing the script files is not safe if you aren't extremely careful.

Minor engine improvements mostly uninteresting, some very annoying, still good overall. Plot forgot to show up, felt rushed at times.

 

7.0

Minor engine improvements, minor plot developments. A very basic sequel.

 

8.5

Extremely creative, mildly glitchy, wonderful atmosphere, interesting though not quite balanced gameplay, pretty good story.

 

9.0

It was limited before both by having a quantity of good arrows and, more importantly, by the hassle of dealing with them.

I'll start. My favorite thing is definitely the unlimited bow ammunition, which makes archery the powerful tool it deserves to be.

 

— Slartucker, who felt like being positive this evening

Percentage chances just don't work. Save-and-reload has been a customary option for far too long, and most gamers these days -- even those who don't identify with Red Mage -- will use it without thinking, especially in the case of annoying effects like attacking friendly characters.

I agree with SoT. Giving the canisters positive AND negative effects on your stats, as well as positive AND negative effects on the story, would make them WAY more interesting. And they desperately need to be more interesting.

I see I chose the wrong three weeks to ignore the Geneforge forum.

 

I'm really excited to hear Jeff's plans. Everything he's said suggests he's approaching GF4 with a dynamic attitude, where rules are broken, strange new ideas are released, and "good enough" gets embellished until it becomes "whoa, cool." This is the attitude that has brought us the most engaging game-worlds and stories, like GF1, E2, and Nethergate. Huzzah!

 

I am thrilled to hear that there will be returning NPCs. (I'm rooting for Khyryk myself, but I'll be happy as long as it's not just the drakons.) I am elated to hear that there will be an actual war. The Empire War in E/A2 has got to be one of the best-implemented plot devices I've seen in a game. And I am completely euphoric that there's a servile PC option. It has been more than ten years since Jeff last cracked open a new non-human character option. HUZZAH!

All right, you've convinced me Kel. And it is horribly circular. Syntactic theory is full of horribly circular definitions. You might appreciate the following exchange I had with my syntax prof two years ago:

 

"So we know the subject is in SpecTP because it's the thing that sits in SpecTP?"

"Yes."

But in Nephilian, the subject of a transitive verb is in a different case from the subject of an intransitive verb -- so this is quite relevant information.

As far as prodrop goes, I didn't see it in your descriptions anywhere, but there were some example sentences that had subject pronouns omitted.

Also, I see what you mean about the tenses now. Your table format makes it look like there are four different suffixes for each person/number combination, one for each tense. If the table is going to contain TWO different types of suffixes, you should label it appropriately.

If the language is still ergative-absolutive, the important part about transitive verbs is not that they require an object, it's that they require a transitive subject (i.e., they use the absolutive, which is not going to get used with intransitive verbs).

 

Are you still making it prodrop, or not? It appears that you are allowing pronouns to drop if they are ergative subjects, or absolutive subjects, but not ergative objects. I still think that makes little sense, for an ergative language, since it's basically dealing with pronouns as if they were nom-acc.

 

Your writing is mostly simpler and clearer, which is good, but there are still some really bad typos (transitive vs intransitive are mixed up in 1 or 2 places).

 

If I am reading your conjugation charts correctly, then it is impossible to tell the difference between 1st 2nd and 3rd person in any tense besides present tense. Right? Um... not good in combination with prodrop!

 

Oh yeah. And is it STILL called Nephilian?

Well, the Exile trilogy package did (still does, actually) offer a small discount for each game you'd already registered.

So basically, if we can convince some Nephilim to start playing Avernum 4, maybe we'll get some more Nephil icons, eh?

Nice point, Shine.

 

Although I've always wondered why everyone in Exile was so damn tolerant. I suppose being thrown into the underworld for your own differences might make you more tolerant of others -- but for many people, it would probably make them bitter, and make them search out scapegoats. I suppose the nephils and sliths sucked up a lot of the hateful energy, and some of those people ended up in the Abyss. But Exile still seems inconceivably tolerant to me. (Maybe it's better that way.)

 

...on the other hand, Nance and Elspeth don't seem to be entirely out of the closet. (I suppose I wouldn't be either, in their shoes.)

Well, I appreciate your saying those things. And I applaud your suspicion of people who claim to know what they're talking about -- many of them don't. But I think one should be suspicious of what you think you know, too. Subjecting your own arguments to the same scrutiny you demand of others is the only way to keep yourself from turning into a pompous airhead. (And yes... I have had in my life occasion to be a pompous airhead )

 

Anyway, I guess I'll contribute my opinion again if you want, though I think you'll understand if I don't debate things. --t

I stopped helping because it was getting frustrating, and it felt like I was spinning my wheels. You constantly misinterpreted the statements I made, and answered questions I did not ask.

 

The genitive is the big thing. It took 2 pages of Kelandon explaining something very simple to you, suggesting your disagreement was related to English/Dutch word differences, and imploring you to look it up yourself -- during which time you repeatedly told us we were wrong -- before you finally looked it up and lo and behold, we weren't wrong. Meanwhile, attempting to address that question another way, I asked you for a reference to substantiate the claim you'd made about Sumerian genitive. Despite clarifying my question many times in very specific terms, you have now offered me references to Akkadian and Hurrian but NOT Sumerian. (No, I do not want the reference anymore!)

 

As somebody else observed, you seem much more interested in winning an argument than in resolving it according to logic. And you seem more interested in arguing than in producing a grammar that is accurately described and understandable to the reader. That last part, of course, is what I was trying to help with.

 

I wish you good luck with the grammar, as I said, but I have no interest in helping someone who is going to argue with everything I say.

 

-- Slartucker, who really should know better than to fan flames, however reasonable he may think he's being

Interesting question, wz. Keep in mind, though, that the idea of a universal grammar is FAR from universally accepted.

 

Personally, I am inclined to think that Chomsky has observed a number of useful patterns that run across languages, but I don't buy most of his theories about grammar operation. Syntactically, in particular, I find it really suspicious that with his UG it's (relatively) simple to get from deep structure to surface structure in English, but in languages with different word order, suddenly you're doing all these twists and turns. Not to mention agglutinative languages... judge for yourself, though.

 

UG is based largely on generalizable human cognitive structure and development. To the degree that sliths or nephils are cognitively different from humans, they might have a different UG. But it seems to me that (like almost all fantasy/SF races) they are almost identical to us, cognitively. Differences in temperament are as likely to be cultural as anything else, and both seem to be capable of more or less the same stuff humans are capable of.

 

-- slartucker, who is trying to resist the temptation to reduce everything to Optimality Theory

Okay, I am so very done here. Thralni, good luck with the language. I hope you are more receptive to constructive criticism you receive in the future.

First of all, Cale Johnson, the author of the page I linked to, is at UCLA. Are you thinking of Chuck Jones, who used to run the computer lab at the Oriental Institute? Different person, different name.

 

Thralni, I was not shooting down your source. The point of my comment about the GAG was that I know, like, and respect it very much! However, it simply did not address the point in contention *whatsoever*.

 

And that *is* the problem, Thralni. I was not complaining about your assertions of what the Sumerian genitive *was* for, those were quite correct. I was complaining about your assertions of what it was *not* for -- which you have just admitted you have no evidence for!

 

The point that we have been trying to get across to you is that terms like "genitive" are the same no matter what language you apply them to! The English word "genitive" means one thing and one thing only. It may be that in Dutch, the word used for "genitive" is also used for "possessive" and that distinction is not made. That's why Kelandon asked you to do something very specific in order to clarify the issue.

 

Edit: And you looked it up!!! HALLELUJAH! As we suspected, this is all a translation problem.

 

Thralni: In English, the case "my" is in is NOT called genitive, it is called possessive. In other words, English uses two different words for genitive and possessive, but Dutch uses the same word for both of them. Therefore, if you are writing in Dutch you are correct to use that word to describe a case that only deals with ownership. But if you are writing in English, you need to check whether "genitive" or "possessive" is the correct word to use. If it only deals with ownership, "possessive" is the correct word.

Thralni, I asked for a reference to something very specific. Quoting myself: "Give me a citation for a book or a scholarly article stating that in Sumerian the genitive is only used for possession."

 

Your reference:

- is about Akkadian, not Sumerian

- does not state that any genitive, let alone the Sumerian genitive, is ONLY used for possession. (I spent many hours buried in the G.A.G. learning cuneiform...)

Mr. Salmon, you speak wisdom.

 

I have one really important question... is "jezus Bok" something in Dutch, or is there now a Christian Vahnatai conspiracy? I knew "Vahnatai Creationism" sounded fishy...

 

About the words Nephilim and Nepharim... it seems reasonable that words like those could have irregular plurals, since they are important and unique. Personally, I always figured that they were words created by humans, either based on misapprehending something a nephil said, or some kind of mage language name for the kitties.

*facepalm* *facepalm* *facepalm*

Thralni, you do realize that the only reason I was arguing with you about this was because you said its genitive was only used for possession? OY.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!!!!!!!!

 

Thralni, I am not discussing the genitive further unless you do one of two things:

1) Do what Kelandon asked. Find a book about English grammar which is written in Dutch and report the name of the case of the personal pronoun "my".

2) Do what I asked. Give me a citation for a book or a scholarly article stating that in Sumerian the genitive is only used for possession. That way, I can go look it up in the research archives at the university. It doesn't need to be online. (And if the book or article is not in English, that's fine too.)

 

!!!!!!

 

Finite and non-finite are just classifications of different forms of the same verb. This is like talking about "present tense verbs" and "past tense verbs" as two totally different sets of lexical entries, which they are not. They are just different forms of the same verb!

 

The problem is that transitive verbs and intransitive verbs are two different groups of verbs. Regular verbs and irregular verbs are two different groups of verbs. Finite and infinite verbs are two different groups of particular verb forms... but you can't logically separate out types of verbs after you separate out verb forms. Once you separate out groups of verb forms, you are no longer dealing with entire verbs, you are dealing with verb forms!

 

Furthermore... looking at the verb page, it seems that your explanation of what finite and non-finite verbs are is really misleading. A verb form is classified as "finite" or "non-finite" based on the presence of markers specifying person, number, gender, and so on. It does not matter whether the markers are prefixes or suffixes or pronouns! In English, the suffixes are mostly other information. In Nephilian, however, they are always part of the suffixes!

 

Perfect evidence of this confusion is in your table showing how a finite verb is constructed. How can a finite verbal form be an infinitive? That is a contradiction.

Sigh. Okay, a few points:

 

1) Nobody's attacking you. If you don't want any more feedback, then when you post that you have updated the site, I suggest you specify that you don't want feedback. Otherwise, please stop responding to my questions by saying "it's under construction." If it's really *that* unfinished, why are you publicizing it? (Rhetorical question, no need to answer

 

2) Almost any book about ancient near eastern language is written for a specialized audience. General overviews are no exceptions. First-year graduate students in such a field are expected to have (or to very quickly pick up) a WEALTH of knowledge on the subject that 99.99% of the world does not have. It is absurd for you to claim that any material giving technical details about the language is written for a general audience. It's not.

 

(For what it's worth, grad students at uofc aren't even allowed to take Sumerian until they have had a year of Akkadian; the faculty feels the scholarship is significantly more obscure to a newcomer.)

 

3) I am a little confused about this persistent disagreement over the genitive. I assume your mother knows what she's talking about, but it's strange that my sources disagree. Is it possible that this is some kind of discrepancy between English and Dutch? Alternately, can you point me to a bibliographic reference to a book, article, whatever which states that Sumerian has a genitive which is only used for possession?

 

4) Source wrote: "including possession, location and composition" You said: "How can it be location? they already have a seperate case for that: the locative! The locative would be made useless if this is true."

— ALWAYS, in a language, there is more than one way of expressing the same or similar things. Sometimes, one of these ways is specific to the grammar (like a case). Interrogatives are a really good example: many languages have more than one way of marking an utterance as a question, including those that rely on inserting words, on changing word order, on prosody, and so on. Often, these different ways are mostly interchangeable. Does that render any of them useless? No!

 

Languages are subtle creatures. Semantics interfaces with everything; variations on meaning are infinite. So be careful before you go calling a linguistic structure "useless."

 

5) Me: "It is probably worth noting that most Indo-European languages are Nom-Acc languages, however, the two terms are NOT the same thing, so talking about the enormous difference between ergative and Indo-European languages is really misleading."

Thralni: "I didn't say they are the same thing. What exactly is your point?"

 

— Okay, I will try to be clearer. Quoting from your nouns page:

What you go on to contrast here is the difference between an ergative-absolutive language and a nominative-accusative language. However, what you SAY you are contrasting is the difference between an ergative language and "a standard Indo-European language." Basically you say the above phrase in place of saying "a nom-acc language" — very misleading.

 

It's extra misleading because there exist Indo-European languages that are partially ergative. Hindi and Urdu, which are ergative-absolutive in certain situations, are one well-known example.

 

6) "I thought the chart would be clear enough. What I mean is, is that the irregular verbs, like the transitive and intransitive verbs, form a seperate sub-group in the bipartite-group."

— EVERY verb is either transitive, or intransitive. EVERY verb is either regular, or irregular. They are two binary features which are completely unrelated. Your chart clearly suggests that if a verb is irregular, it isn't transitive or intransitive.

 

7) Now that you have explained the meaning of bipartite/multipartite, the names make more sense. It's still a really weird naming convention, and I am confused as to what the discrepancy between those two types of verbs is supposed to add to the language, anyway.

 

--slartucker

Regarding our assertion that the genitive has wider uses, Thralni asked:

"Then how come I don't see anything about it in already two or three books?"

 

My guess would be that you are reading highly technical books about languages like Sumerian and Hurrian, which are read by a very tiny pool of highly specialized scholars! They probably assume a broad base of knowledge both about the ancient near east and about general linguistics.