Reference talk:Rivenese transcriptions

Tok Pisin

(reposting the discussion that was added as a comment in the page source)

Judging by his YouTube handle at the time (he's now changed it), he was trying to impersonate Everett Gunther. The real Everett Gunther has a different YouTube account and has never claimed to have translated any Rivenese. Tok Pisin is a fairly well-known language and dictionaries and such are widely available, as is spoken audio, and it's immediately obvious that Rivenese doesn't even resemble it. Rivenese vocabulary isn't almost exclusively derived from English and its grammar shows signs of the kind of word inflection that Tok Pisin just doesn't have. And there are obvious differences between his ‘transcription’ and what Nelah actually says. In addition, here is a comment from someone who claims to be a native speaker:

Can you provide a source for this? I'm very curious, as I grew up speaking Tok Pisin, and played some Riven, and looking up cutscenes online I can't make sense of any of the Rivenese (well, the foreign language bits, I don't know if it's Rivenese or not), at least not in [Cho's speech] or [both Nelah's speeches].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549672

I think the fake ‘eedobaba7726’ was bullshitting and we shouldn't give all this any unnecessary exposure. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.61.180.106 (talk • contribs) 18:16, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I can't comment on the linguistic aspects (I don't know anything about Tok Pisin), but I want to point out that the eedobaba7726/datacentre channel is probably not impersonating anyone. Everett Gunther is a member of the Starry Expanse team (or at least was at some point), and one of their blog posts from 2012 embeds a few unlisted videos from the eedobaba7726 channel, which confirms that this channel belongs to him.

There is a different YouTube channel called "Everett Gunther", which I assume is what you meant with "the real Everett Gunther". My guess is that nobody is impersonating anybody and that the two channels belong to the same person. This isn't very unusual - thanks to the whole Google+ nonsense a while back, many people have ended up with two YouTube channels tied to the same Google account (one "brand" channel from the YouTube identity, and one personal channel from the Google+ identity).

Obviously this doesn't automatically validate any of the claims from his comment, but he's a real person and not an impersonator looking for attention, so I assume the comment isn't just made up from thin air. --dgelessus (talk · contribs) 03:21, 17 December 2021 (PST)

In that case I'm forced to acknowledge the unavoidable: Everett Gunther was bullshitting. I'd rather not have known that, to be honest.

>I can't comment on the linguistic aspects (I don't know anything about Tok Pisin)

Textual and audio resources are widely available, as I said. Rivenese and Tok Pisin are so different that it should be obvious even to untrained ears and eyes.

Folopa

I've identified the language as some version of the w:Folopa_language, a Papua New Guinea language. Some examples: sirapo is, according to one source I found, roughly "I have it". sirapo gets used in a number of compounds as well. -po at the end of many sentences is pretty characteristic both of the Rivenese and of Folopa, as it seems that -po is a marker for an indicative sentence, and Folopa is primarily verb final. Also, I found one reference (which I can't find right now) that the Folopa word for "book" is buku - Cho says this many times, though he seems to pronounce it variably, pronouncing the /u/ as /o/. I dunno if this is due to the actor not being an actual speaker of the language, a dialect difference, or an ideolect difference. I suspect the first, since Cho's body language seems a bit out of sync with the dialog.

Reference: https://www.sil.org/system/files/reapdata/19/00/85/19008547614574591810273680930394972884/Folopa_Language_Lessons.pdf

Of course, I am merely matching up stuff I found on the internet, and have no real exposure to Folopa, So feel free to take all of the above with a grain of salt. BladeLakem (talk) 11:40, 8 April 2022 (PDT)