Sometimes people ask the best questions on Reddit:
What does Yoda’s syntax look like in non-English versions of Star Wars? For those who aren’t familiar with Star Wars (all two of you), Yoda is an alien who, when speaking English, uses what seems to be an OSV syntax instead of the traditional SVO syntax.
So how do foreign translations of the script handle this? I am particularly interested in what it looks like in non-SVO languages. Are there any translations where Yoda’s incorrect syntax is emulated by using an English-like syntax? Or are other languages’ syntax so free that mistakes in the use of case or verb conjugations must instead be used to emulate Yoda’s “alien” speech?
And some answers so far:
Czech: Free word order. Yoda speaks consistently in SOV. Interestingly enough, putting an object before a verb does sound unusual to most speakers of Czech.
Estonian: Free word order language. Yoda retains the English OSV order. This is grammatical in Estonian, but does make it seem as though Yoda is constantly stressing the object phrase as the main point of his statements. This gives his speech an unusual quality.
French: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
German: A SVO or SOV language. Yoda brings the Object to the front (OSV), like in English.
Hungarian: A free word order language. There is nothing unusual about Yoda’s speech.
Italian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: OSV is also the syntax used in the Italian of the less-proficient speakers of Italian from the region of Sardinia.
Japanese: An SOV language. Yoda seems to use a more or less correct syntax, with a more archaic vocabulary.
Korean: An SOV language. Nothing is unusual about Yoda’s grammar.
Norwegian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
Romanian: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV. He also places adjectives before the noun instead of after the noun, and uses an archaic form of the future tense.
Spanish: An SVO language. Yoda speaks in OSV.
Turkish: An SOV language. Yoda speaks in OSV. Note: This order is also used in classical Ottoman poetry, so the syntax may have been chosen in order to emphasize Yoda’s wisdom or age.
Amazing costume and a great photo!! The painting is the perfect added detail 😀
It’s hard to tell in this shot, but the painting’s the cover on a messenger bag (she hid the straps to pretend to be stealing the painting), so it’s not just a perfect detail, it’s useful too!
2. I had to keep reading just to see which state the city was in, because during the Bronze Age, Athens *Ohio* was canonically in the same location on Earth Prime as Central City on Earth One. Which would have made this even stranger than it already is.
3. My brain kept reading Eastanallee into Eastallen.
It’s almost as though cruelty and neglect can affect people’s mental health.
Everyone gives Batman shit over the state of Arkham but no one ever talks about Iron Heights.
There was a bit of criticism for Iron Heights within the Flash book, such as when Ashley Zolomon called the prison “the Rogue Factory” (which she said was a widespread nickname) and accused Wolfe of having no compassion for its prisoners. It seems quite likely that the mistreatment there has made some of the prisoners worse, with I think Roscoe as one of the prime examples. And as awful as Arkham is, at least they make some attempt to treat their inmates; we’ve seen that Iron Heights leaves theirs barefoot in straitjackets and isolated in filthy cells. So it’s no surprise that they end up even more mentally ill and anti-social, which is almost certainly what Ashley was alluding to.
Wally and Wolfe clashed on a number of occasions over the treatment of prisoners there, once Wally found out about it. But Wally had no authority there, he was just a vigilante super-hero, and Wolfe kept running things the way he wanted to. The one win I remember was that Wally was able to get Fallout an actual, comfortable room that absorbed his radiation instead of leaving him hooked up to tubes like he was before.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to open an issue of The Flash since I saw the list of casualties in Heroes In Crisis #1. I’ve been buying them. I’ve picked the next one up a couple of times to read it. But I just haven’t been able to do it.
I’m getting close to the why-are-you-buying-it-if-you-aren’t-reading-it point.
So, with Facebook continuing to be a pain, Google+ shutting down, Twitter continuing to be a dumpster fire, and Tumblr clumsily kicking off a huge section of their userbase so that Verizon can better monetize them (making me wonder how long they’ll try before they decide it’s not worth it), I figured it was time to reconsider my social network presence.
As far as Tumblr goes, I’m in wait-and-see mode. I’ve never been super-active here, and I’ll often go a few weeks without reading or posting, but I also have automatic cross-posting set up with Flickr, Instagram, and my blog. A lot of my posts here are duplicates.
I’ve saved a full archive of my Tumblrs, and I’m going to be going through over the next week or few cleaning out the duplicates, except for posts that got traction over here (like M’Hael’s, for instance). Hopefully it’ll result in a more focused blog going forward, with mostly Tumblr-original material (both my own stuff and reblogs), and it’ll be easier to pick out what needs to be saved in the event that Tumblr does go the way of GeoCities and Google+ (or even just the way of LiveJournal, which it’s halfway to already).
The first Dungeons & Dragons videogame came out in 1982
for the Intellivision, but the burgeoning industry was already under the tabletop
game’s influence. By 1980, two games represented a kind of fork in the
philosophical road for computerized RPGs. Rogue focused on the dangers of
dungeon crawling and complex rule sets that verged on the mystical – it was
essentially a simulation of D&D mechanics where stories emerged from the
action without narrative guidance. Down the other path lay Zork.
Zork was developed by students at MIT from 1977 to 1979. It was
inspired by Will Crowther’s 1975 mainframe game Colossal Cave Adventure that,
though it lacked monsters, was directly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons
sessions (which included Zork writer and Infocom founder Dave Lebling). Zork
was definitely fantasy, though, with a vast underground empire to explore,
treasures to find and monsters to fight (or be eaten by, if we’re talking about
the darkness dwelling Grue).
Zork is an interactive fiction, that is, everything is
presented as text. You direct your actions by typing them into the command line
and a bit of code known as a text parser acts as a kind of dungeon master (Zork
III’s subtitle actually is Dungeon Master, come to think of it), interpreting
your commands and telling you their consequences. If the Dave Arneson school of
D&D thought sought to have players inhabit the fantasy stories he read and
loved, then Zork is perhaps the closest we’ve come to that Platonic ideal.
I love Zork. It is as old as I am, has no flashy graphics,
and yet remains my favorite videogame of all time. It stoked my imagination as
no other videogame has, but in ways similar to D&D. As a kid, peering at
the green monochrome screen, trying (and mostly failing) to work out the devious
puzzles. I didn’t make much of a distinction between Zork and Dungeons &
Dragons. Even though they didn’t share a brand name, I knew they were both
facets of a larger world.
Interactive fiction mostly died out in the late 80s, leaving
the mechanical influence of D&D to dominate videogames until recent years,
when technology has allowed complex narrative to remarry rules systems in
something that approximates the experience of telling a story with friends
around the gaming table. Sort of. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
This is my friend TJ, wearing a costume she made for Halloween, 1977. She was 16 at the time.
Now, keep in mind: there was no internet to search for images. She could not have rented and paused the movie, because it wasn’t released on video until 1982. No, TJ just went to the movie a bunch of times, took notes with a flashlight, drew a bunch of sketches, and put this together.
In 19-fucking-77. So let’s bury this bullshit about how women didn’t grow up on Star Wars.
Some dude tried to explain why TLJ is an insult to real fans and since I liked it I wasn’t a real fan and SON, I GOT A DOT MATRIX PRINT OUT OF Star Wars: New Hope, The Journal of the Whills, Part 1 IN A DRAWER SOMEWHERE, COME AT ME.
My mother is 74 years old and knows what a Corellian blood stripe is. The ladies have been here the whole time.
Indian hawthorn flowers in bloom, spotted on my lunch hour walk. It’s been a warm winter in California, and we’ve finally gotten some rain over the last few weeks (not enough, but some is better than none).
What a gorgeous photo, and I’m so envious of those blossoms! We still have snow 🙁
Thanks! I wish we could put some of that snow in our mountains…
Thanks! So it turns out this was the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg.
The bright spot at the left moved across the sky, trailing a shell of vapor.
I ran back inside shouting “come see this, fast!” and grabbed the better camera, but it wouldn’t focus, so I snapped this with my phone.
The vapor trail persisted for another 10 minutes after the rocket and booster stage (I could briefly see an expanding ring around the booster) were no longer visible, and it was high enough to continue reflecting sunlight even though it was long after sunset.
According to his parents, staff at the preschool knew about his severe dairy allergy, but an adult gave him the cheese sandwich anyway. He ate it, went into anaphylactic shock, and died in the emergency room. No word on whether they gave him epinephrine. (New…
So was the person who gave him the sandwich charged with negligent homicide? (I can read the article because I’ve used my allotment for the month.)
There’s an article at Allergic Livingwith some more info now (and no paywall), but the upshot is that it’s still under investigation. It’s not even clear at this point whether the specific person who gave him the sandwich was aware of the allergy (though they certainly should have been), or whether they gave him epinephrine, though it is clear that:
The school was aware of his allergy
The school didn’t call 911, they called his mother instead.
The school has been closed pending the investigation results, and new directives have been issued that childcare staff will call 911 in the event of a medical emergency.
Remember to vote in local elections. Initiatives, council & school board members, judges, etc. affect you and your community directly even if it’s not as exciting as the Presidential race. And the people elected locally go on to build the pool of state and national candidates. If you care about 2018 or 2020, get out and vote locally to get the ball rolling.
