They Fill Me With Joy So Profound

..................WTF?! YOU DONT KNOW WHAT IS "XRUMER"?!

Moderator: Quantum P.

User avatar
Mooseka
;-*
Posts: 282
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2003 5:01 pm

Post by Mooseka »

this is all wrong
User avatar
Zenith Nadir
this is my hammer
Posts: 2767
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2003 11:40 am
Location: between the black and white spiders

Post by Zenith Nadir »

Okay, just to weigh in as a languages student on the Tails'/Tail's/Tails/Tails's thing:

There are two conflicting bases here, the first one having to do with possessive formation in Germanic nouns and the other having to do with how Latin handles loan-words. As people who have too much time on their hands will tell you, every stupid piece of grammar that people complain about because it "doesn't make sense" is an example of someone trying to make English more like Latin, so let's start with that one.

Latin is, of course, an inflected language with lots and lots of cases (English has two: Objective and Subjective and it only really matters with pronouns: he/him, I/me, we/us etc.; Latin has ~6). So with a nice, Latin name like Julius, it's very easy to make a possessive, as you'd merely have to use the genitive case: Julii. That's oversimplifying, but you get the point.

Later on, when you're getting Vulgate Bible forms of Hebrew names, they're Latin transliterations (words changed from one alphabet to another) of Greek transliterations of the original Hebrew, and it got very confused. Some of them look enough like Latin words that they continue to decline ("Rebecca" (sometimes) goes to "Rebeccae, Rebeccam" etc) but others simply don't decline at all and they can function as whatever case the sentence needs. So what started out as a "just do what sounds good" rule gave us the fascist grammarian "Biblical names don't decline except when they do" rule, then later on that gets changed into "foreign names that look weird," and by the time we get to modern English the only names capable of "looking weird" are those that already end in S.

The second force at work has to do with Germanic noun formation. If you go back far enough (even in Chaucer's day, although it's more pronounced in Anglo-Saxon) English was also heavily inflected, and there were two kinds of nouns: strong (those that experience a stem change in the plural) and weak (those that don't). Think of child/children and man/men vs. lamp/lamps. They declined differently, but masculine and neuter strong verbs had the ending -es in the genitive, of which 's is today's convoluted cousin.

As the language simplified, and we ended up with a couple of fossilized constructions (grabbing a sword "by the hilts," the word "midships," constructions like "one of John's friends") the only die-hard case was the genitive, which saw the rules shift completely so that the rule was simply "add an s." (I'm afraid this part is a bit out of my expertise, so someone else will have to explain why that happened)

Later on, and I swear I read this somewhere but I can't any longer remember where, so take it with a grain of salt, an 18th century grammarian who didn't really understand this point, decided (not completely without reason) that the s must be a contraction with a genitive article "his": rather than "Johns buddy" the construction was originally "John his buddy," and thus we ought to have an apostrophe there. I have no idea how he ended up with s' for plurals (except for the plurals of strong nouns, which are still 's: child's/children's and never, never childrens') but whatever; that seems to be the rule. My point is that the apostrophe doesn't actually have a philological reason for its existence, it's merely an aid to comprehensibility.

So Tails. Tails is a nickname that's actually the plural of the common noun "tail," because he happens to have two tails. It's also what for argument's sake we'll call a loan-name, in that it doesn't immediately conform comfortably to our expectations. So we're left with two conflicting principles again: do we want the "correct" form, or the form that functions as an aid to understanding? We're left with a few titles:

1) Tails' Adventure - If we take the "tails" as a plural common noun, they function as a synechdoche for the whole fox who happens to have two tails, and this form works grammatically. It really should have a definite article in front of it, though: "The Tails' Adventure."
2) Tails's Adventure - If we take "Tails" as a proper noun with no reference to the fact that it's kind of a plural, this form makes perfect sense, and conveys the possessive nature. "Tails's Adventure."
3) Tails Adventure - In this case, the "Tails" doesn't function as a possessive at all, but rather this is a hendiadys, a construction in which one just throws two nouns together as a phrase and one functions vaguely as an adjective, like "paper plate." Tails here is limiting the kind of adventure it is.

I'd probably go with door #2, but 3 is probably what's printed on the box.
he looked upon the world and saw it was still depraved :fvkk:

Overall: Rotton egg for breakfast
User avatar
Schroedingers Cat
We must invent teleportation!
Posts: 721
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2006 11:35 pm
Location: Idaho, Wisconsin

Post by Schroedingers Cat »

holy SHIT nadir

...wow. just... wow.


:safe:
User avatar
Dr. Dos
OH YES! USE VINE WHIP! <3
Posts: 1772
Joined: Tue Mar 11, 2003 12:00 am
Location: Washington

Post by Dr. Dos »

Tails' Adventure was the best game gear game.
Visit the Museum of ZZT
Follow Worlds of ZZT on Twitter

Apologies for the old post you may have just read.
User avatar
Commodore
fgsdfs
Posts: 2471
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2003 5:44 pm
Location: :noitacoL
Contact:

Post by Commodore »

nadir capitalised!

:agh:

nice word: hendiadys
*POW* *CLANK* *PING*
User avatar
Kjorteo
^o.O^
Posts: 432
Joined: Sat Feb 28, 2004 10:59 am
Location: Kjorteoville or something
Contact:

Post by Kjorteo »

I've never played Tail's'sss's's's's's's's'' adventure.
"You're alive," said the maker, and smiled at the aardvark.

<Kjorteo> "yiff"
<gbelo> Wanna yiff.
<Kjorteo> yes
<gbelo> No no no.
User avatar
Zenith Nadir
this is my hammer
Posts: 2767
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2003 11:40 am
Location: between the black and white spiders

Post by Zenith Nadir »

Commodore wrote:nadir copy-pasted!

:agh:

nice word: hendiadys
can't believe someone would write that much shit about an ass-old game gear game without stopping and thinking "what the fuck's wrong with me. i am wasting my life."
he looked upon the world and saw it was still depraved :fvkk:

Overall: Rotton egg for breakfast
User avatar
Commodore
fgsdfs
Posts: 2471
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2003 5:44 pm
Location: :noitacoL
Contact:

Post by Commodore »

i did search for some of the sentences but came up empty.
*POW* *CLANK* *PING*
User avatar
Kjorteo
^o.O^
Posts: 432
Joined: Sat Feb 28, 2004 10:59 am
Location: Kjorteoville or something
Contact:

Post by Kjorteo »

Writing "what the fuck happened to this man's life"-sized walls of text about Sonic characters (even obscure ones) is the hip new thing to do on the internet

or have you not seen Wikipedia lately
"You're alive," said the maker, and smiled at the aardvark.

<Kjorteo> "yiff"
<gbelo> Wanna yiff.
<Kjorteo> yes
<gbelo> No no no.
User avatar
meldels
Ordinery
Posts: 43
Joined: Thu Aug 09, 2012 7:04 pm
Location: VOILA

Re: They Fill Me With Joy So Profound

Post by meldels »

I am meldels, VOILA!
User avatar
Schroedingers Cat
We must invent teleportation!
Posts: 721
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2006 11:35 pm
Location: Idaho, Wisconsin

Re: They Fill Me With Joy So Profound

Post by Schroedingers Cat »

WHY ARE YOU BUMPING A

Oh. It's stickied. CARRY ON.
User avatar
H1~~
1 full minit uv 1 secend mesiges
Posts: 72
Joined: Fri Apr 05, 2013 9:34 am
Location: Northeast Ohio

Quad Damn it.

Post by H1~~ »

My turn.
I inadvertently broke all of Dr. Dos's 12 'Z2 Survival Guide' rules in a row.
VVVVV homage to ZZT
Furry Ideological Pursuits...
Far too many unfinished ZZT games to work on at once
Why I'm awkward about ZZT forums
I hate me.
Did I win the thread?
User avatar
Commodore
fgsdfs
Posts: 2471
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2003 5:44 pm
Location: :noitacoL
Contact:

Re:

Post by Commodore »

Zenith Nadir wrote:Also Greenshrike I hope that thing between your avatar's legs is a tail.
*POW* *CLANK* *PING*
User avatar
Mooseka
;-*
Posts: 282
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2003 5:01 pm

Re: They Fill Me With Joy So Profound

Post by Mooseka »

so what's up dudes
User avatar
bitbot
Official Clamp School Defender
Posts: 328
Joined: Thu Mar 01, 2012 3:00 am
Location: earthbound
Contact:

Re: They Fill Me With Joy So Profound

Post by bitbot »

hi i'm bitbot. i'm a newbie.
Post Reply