Reference talk:Catherine, personal journal (Riven (2024))
Possible Errors[edit source]
There are a handful of oddities in the text that I suspect may be errors. I don't have a copy of the game so I cannot check myself whether these are transcription errors (in which case they should be rectified) or whether they are present in the text itself (in which case they should be marked with a {{ref sic}}).
1. The text currently has three sentences using quotes that end as thus: '"Temple Island".', '"water pool."', and '"pool of stars".'. The first and last use the convention of placing the full stop outside the quotes, whilst the second places the full stop inside the quotes. This is a clear inconsistency.
2. There is an instance of "Atrus' hands", which should likely be "Atrus's hands".
3. In "It is said that they did not die—but what becomes of them remains a mystery.", I question whether that 'what becomes of them' ought to be 'what became of them'. This seems more likely to be a conscious choice by the writer, but if so it should still be marked with a 'ref sic' to avoid future confusion at the unusual style.
4. "My limited encounter with Gehn's followers have been discouraging." violates grammatical number agreement. By rights it should either be "[...] encounters with [...] have been [...]" or "[...] encounter with [...] has been [...]". Given the context, I suspect the former was the intended phrasing.
5. In "I have also just learned that years ago a Moiety scout managed to steal a book that was an early failure that Gehn has intended to destroy. It was largely complete, but did not work.", given the context I believe the 'has' ought to be 'had' - i.e. he had intended to destroy it, but failed to do so.
6. "But he his nothing if not determined" should certainly be "But he is nothing if not determined". I suspect this is a transcription error rather than being present in the original text.
7. "The The Rivenese have long used crystalline substrates" contains a duplicated 'The'. Again, I suspect this is a transcription error but I am reluctant to presume so and would rather wait for someone to verify.
8. "Which means we'll only have one chance before they're alerted to out presence." - should likely be 'our presence'.
Lastly, as an aside, I note that words such as 'age', 'linking book', and 'descriptive book' which were capitalised in the original game appear to no longer be capitalised. I'm presuming that's not a transcription error and does in fact reflect a change of stylistic choice from Cyan?
- Pharap (talk) 19:17, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for the proofreading. Comparing with the in-game journal, here is what I found:
- 1. The handwriting makes it sometimes unclear if the full stop comes before or after the quotes, but it most likely follows the convention of having it outside the quotes, so I'll fix the second one.
- 2. The original text does say "Atrus' hands". I'm not a native English speaker, but I believe that the apostrophe for a possessive case is not followed by an "s" if the word already ends with an "s". But there may be exceptions that I'm not aware of. I don't know if we should put a {{ref sic}} on this one or not.
- 3. The writer indeed chose to write "becomes". Will put a {{ref sic}} on that.
- 4-5-6-7-8. These are all transcriptions error to be fixed.
- Regarding capitalization, they are written as such in the journal, while they are still capitalized in Gehn and Atrus' journals. It seems a deliberate choice to have Catherine write them in minuscule.
- I looked into it to check. According to The University of Sussex, how one capitalises names that end in s depends on how one would say it in ordinary speech, which is the rule I tend to follow (and I would presume is the rule I was originally taught at school). Personally I would always say "Atrus's <belonging>", so I'd personally write it that way too, but if someone says "Atrus' <belonging>" (which sounds weird to my ears), they would write it that way instead.
- Similarly, various other sites (e.g. Grammarist, Editor's Manual) regard it as a stylistic choice.
- In regards to 1., Catherine's handwriting was notoriously hard to read in the original as well. It's interesting to know that that hasn't changed.
- In regards to 2., after consulting other sources (see my above response to Talashar), I'm siding with this being a stylistic choice, so even though it will seem odd to some people, I think a {{ref sic}} can be omitted. (Unless it ends up confusing someone else in the future, at which point adding a {{ref sic}} would be a good way of preventing future confusion and confirming that it is transcribed accurately.)
- The capitalisation situation is interesting.
