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Author Topic: Professional-strength pronouns  (Read 2889 times)

Dirst

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Professional-strength pronouns
« on: December 20, 2014, 06:58:49 pm »

This came up in the FotF thread and deserves its own Suggestion.  It started as:
Would it be possible to get more control over gender in the future? As well as the pronouns used themselves? I don't expect trans dwarves in the vanilla game, but being able to have enough control to mod it in thoroughly would be really nice. Being able to designate pronouns for a caste would be pretty much solve the problem, I think.
Caste-level tags for pronouns would help in a number of cases where a modder would like a little more control over how the game refers to a caste.  At the moment, pronouns are hard-coded as follows:
A caste with a [MALE] tag uses "he" and "him" and "his" (and a mars symbol)
A caste with a [FEMALE] tag uses "she" and "her" and "hers" (and a venus symol)
A creature with no [MALE] or [FEMALE] tags anywhere uses "it" and "it" and "its" (and no symbol)
An ungendered caste in a creature that has genders uses feminine pronouns (but no symbol)
Plural is the same for everyone.  Second person is the same for everyone.

The above works just great for typical cases and for insects (where the neuter castes are actually sub-females), but there are three specific cases where moddable pronouns would be very helpful.

1. Supporting localization in languages other than English.  Pronouns can be fairly complicated and English happens to use the same words in several categories.  Simple string-replacement won't cover all of the cases.  For example, Spanish differentiates second-person references into personal and formal.
2. Dealing with neuter castes.  If we add a genderless "golem" caste to Dwarves, it would use feminine pronouns even though the proper form would be "it."  The modder could decide that non-reproducing castes are treated as sub-males or sub-females or "it".  The modder could also refer to a genderless creature as a "he" or a "she" if desired.
3. Dealing with non-standard references.  The simplest use-case is to make all references gender-neutral (probably by abusing "they"), but a society might have for example a biologically male caste that is socially feminine.  This only matters if the caste is fertile and capable of marriage, otherwise it can be treated as a special case of 2 above.

An extension would be to allow noble positions (or even professions) to override caste-level tags.  This allows the royal we as well as strange customs such as referring to all generals as male, or all priests as female, all no-good cheesemakers as "it" or whatever.


I recommend keeping the default behavior exactly as it is, because it does work for the majority of cases.  The actual tag might look something like:
[PRONOUN:I:we:me:us:my:our:he:they:him:them:his:their:his:theirs:himself:themselves:'♂']
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Knight Otu

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #1 on: December 21, 2014, 12:40:00 pm »

An ungendered caste in a creature that has genders uses feminine pronouns (but no symbol)
Could I quickly ask where you've seen this? In all my testing, ant worker/soldier women use it, just like the ungendered castes of a modded creature of mine. I've never seen that ungendered creatures get gendered pronouns.
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Meph

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #2 on: December 21, 2014, 06:35:51 pm »

An ungendered caste in a creature that has genders uses feminine pronouns (but no symbol)
Could I quickly ask where you've seen this? In all my testing, ant worker/soldier women use it, just like the ungendered castes of a modded creature of mine. I've never seen that ungendered creatures get gendered pronouns.
I can confirm that genderless creatures are refered to as "she/her". Source: I mod a lot.
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Knight Otu

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #3 on: December 22, 2014, 06:17:22 am »

I can confirm that genderless creatures are refered to as "she/her". Source: I mod a lot.
Why does my modding disagree, then? A difference between OSes, or something else?
Spoiler: images (click to show/hide)
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Dirst

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #4 on: December 23, 2014, 04:55:05 am »

I ran into this behavior precisely when I tried to add a larger-but-neuter 'golem' caste of Dwarves when I was first experimenting with modding.  At first thought it was a bug in Dwarf Therapist, but realized DT was following DF's lead.

To get feminine pronouns for a neuter caste, it is sufficient to have two other castes with one male and one female.  if no males or females exist, then everyone is an it.  This default works great for insect societies, but modders like myself would appreciate more flexibility.
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smeeprocket

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #5 on: December 23, 2014, 06:50:07 pm »

I just made a thread about this myself without realizing this existed. Thanks for putting this up here.

Yes I think, as Graknorke suggested, a freeform non-mandatory tag like [CASTE_PRONOUNS:they:them:theirs] would be divine.

I'm not sure how much work this would require really, but I don't think it can come soon enough. I really hope Toady takes it into consideration.

Also, I would like a few new gender symbols

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I can't find a smaller one of the second one, sadly. Fixed

knight_otu, you shouldn't be getting it unless you add the no_gender tag, no tag at all uses the feminine.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2014, 07:38:24 pm by smeeprocket »
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BlackFlyme

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #6 on: December 23, 2014, 07:30:21 pm »

You can resize images by altering the image tag.

Like so:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Code: [Select]
[img width=250 height=263] image url goes here [/url]
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Reelya

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #7 on: December 23, 2014, 11:54:43 pm »

I highly support this, be able to override a caste's pronouns but the game should default to he/she/it for non-modded races so that we don't need the tags on every single animal.

Knight Otu

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #8 on: December 24, 2014, 06:10:22 am »

knight_otu, you shouldn't be getting it unless you add the no_gender tag, no tag at all uses the feminine.
Well, that's the thing - I do not use the tag, and still get 'it'. I've tested adding the following caste after male dwarf caste:
Code: [Select]
[CASTE:GOLEM]
[BODY_DETAIL_PLAN:FACIAL_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS]

I've tested it in the most recent Linux version, I've tested the 34.11 Linux version following Dirst's suggestion, I've tested the 40.19 Linux version with DFHack due to my hunch, I've tested the latest Windows version through Wine. I have screenshots in my post above, I showed Dirst screenshots of the test with the most recent Linux version. All with the same result - the ungendered caste uses ungendered pronouns.
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Putnam

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #9 on: December 24, 2014, 06:19:09 am »

Did you make sure to keep the female caste as female?

Knight Otu

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Re: Professional-strength pronouns
« Reply #10 on: December 24, 2014, 07:33:41 am »

Did you make sure to keep the female caste as female?
Yes. The golem caste is the only change to the raws I did for each test, and I would have had to mess it up each time I did the tests even if I didn't.
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