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)