Excerpt: Paragon paths (merged)

[nothing to see here]

This is crazy talk. If we start thinking like this, "their" will become the correct English singular possessive. This must not be allowed.

Ever.

Seriously.

/shudder.



Thaumaturge.

Hmmm...interesting what one comes accross when reading about paragpn class...

Option one -- impled masculine "his"...not particularly welcoming in these days of gener partity. Last seen in 2e splats.

Option two -- gender inclusiveness "his or her". Awkward and ugly - political correctness run amok. A book full of that would make your eyes bleed.

Option three -- non gendered possiessive pronoun already widely in use -- "their". No real downside outside of traditon. Looks like language evolution to me.

 

[FreeXenon]

I'm actually quite fond of hu myself.

Damn you! Now I feel the overwhelming urge to Blog this.
Arrrggghhhhh!!!



Yea on 30+ PP. That is excellent.

 

[Engilbrand]

I'm about to win "Ridiculous Linguistic Debate 2008" with a beautiful selection from Amrbose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary".



LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that _was_ in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
And catalogued each garment in a book.
Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
"Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
And scan the list, and say without compassion:
"Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion."
Sigismund Smith

 

[nothing to see here]

There's a fairy tale where this girl is a maid in an old man's house. This old man hates the regular names for things, so he renames them all and insists the girl use them. Eventually his house burns down because the girl tries to convey to him that a spark from the fire has jumped from the fireplace, and is unable to do so in a timely manner due to his arbitrary language constraints.

Its a silly story, but we can take a lesson from it- the essence of an item denoted does not change due to the label we place upon it. Fire burned his house down even though it was named something else, and a Kensai by any other name will still give you a +1 attack bonus.

No doubt the old man took a different lesson- he undoubtedly concluded that if only the entire language was altered to use the words he invented, no language confusion would exist.

Whoa...heavy stuff...I have a hankering to dust off some of my old Wittgenstein books

How did an off-hand comment about the Kensai come to this?!

 

[MindWanderer]

1) There are over 30 paragon paths in the PH.

2) My paladin took a multiclass cleric feat so she could qualify for a cleric paragon path.

Bless you! My elf archer-cleric is saved! All I have to do is take a Ranger Training feat and an archery-ranger paragon path and I should be set... right? Assuming there isn't a cleric-legal paragon path I like anyway, like a path that lets me use a weapon (a bow) as a divine implement.

 

[Sojorn]

Whoa...heavy stuff...I have a hankering to dust off some of my old Wittgenstein books

How did an off-hand comment about the Kensai come to this?!

Welcome to the internet?

Yeah, none of us know how it works really either. Heck, we're just struggling to figure out English.

 

[RandomCitizenX]

D20 Modern called them Advanced classes, but they moved back to the PrC title for Star Wars Saga Edition, and very few of them implied any prestige or membership.

Just wanted to point out that D20 modern did indeed have Prestige classes in addition to the Base and Advanced classes. Each one was just a more focused concept than the category which came before.

 

[JohnSnow]

If one includes in "English" only words that are of Old English descent, then "kensai" is not English. If one includes in "English" words that are used in modern spoken and written English, then "kensai" is surely "English", even if it is only used in the specialized English jargon of Japanese history and RPG gaming.

If one includes in "English" only words of Old English descent, then not only such words as "futon", "ginkgo", "hibachi", "soy", "(head) honcho", and "tycoon" are not "English", but also a large percentage of the words used in your post are not "English", such as "referring", "assertion", "properly", "arguing", and "porousness", which go back to another foreign language: Latin.

Travis

Add to that list the following words which come up in gaming from time to time:

From French:
paladin, prestige, cavalier, halberd, victual, and countless others.

From Gaelic (Irish or Scots, sometimes hard to tell which):
banshee, bard, blarney, bog, brat, brogue, bunny, cairn, clan, claymore, collie, curragh, donnybrook, dram, galore, glen, hooligan, hubbub, keen (as in 'to wail'), leprechaun, pet, ogham, shamrock, shillelagh, slew, slob, slogan, smidgen, smithereens, sporran, whiskey, and many more.

From Welsh:
coracle, corgi, eisteddfod, flannel, metheglin, pendragon.

From Breton:
menhir, penguin.

From Cornish:
brill, dolmen, gull.

Shall I go on?

 

[Xanaqui]

Grammer

If you think that it's Japanese, please use 剣聖, not "kensei" It's far easier for me to understand, particuarly since there are multiple "kensei" in Japanese that refer to different types of fighting people (using different Kanji, "kensei" is closer to the D&D "Monk" than the D&D "Sword Master").

None of the sentences above about 剣聖 describe the relative importance of the group you're in versus the 剣聖's group. The tenses also seem to be wrong in most (if not all) of the sentences, and some instances of 剣聖 are conjugated completely incorrectly. Even worse, the gender of the author is indeterminate in declarative sentences, inaccurate self-references are present, and I don't even want to get into the complete numerical illiteracy.

Or we could assume that "Kensei" is an English word that has only a bit to do with the language it was originally taken from (heck the pronunciation, meter and meaning are pretty far off just to start with), and ignore the above paragraphs (which, since they're in English, have the exact same problems that they complain about ).

This is why I think that all loanwords are words in the language they are loaned to, not the language they are loaned from.

For those who are mourning the loss of 剣聖 as a future oriental base class, it really shouldn't be one. 剣士 ("Kenshi") would likely be more appropriate for a base class. Kenshi loosely translates to "Swordsperson", although the weapon classification is a bit more specific than "sword".

Gasp.

Heretic!

You will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

I taught English for a few years, and I'm only five years older than you. Egads man! Of course, the best form of your example sentence is: "If a student doesn't have anything to do during a seminar, he will...". "She" is perfectly acceptable here, too. Either one is OK. "One" is inelegant, but "their" is heretical!

My understanding is that "their" was preferred when the gender was indeterminate until sometime in the 1800s.

My preferred construction is "hir", but it never seems to catch on Apparently, academia accepts "tey" these days.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

Being a loanword and being a word in English are not contradictory things. Actually, something is only a loanword if it is actually part of the language doing the borrowing...

That is why I said 'more properly', rather than 'only can be called'.

Unless you want to argue that popular French loanwords like "Beef" are not actually English words, then you might want to rephrase your statement.

For myself, I use a guideline of 'how long has it been in common usage?'. I will grant, this is ridiculously fuzzy, and applies in no way to anyone else's parameters.

Personally, I have no problem with words like "kensai" showing up in D&D. Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more words from different languages showing up. It would help WotC avoid the truly terrible names that start showing up when most of the good names are already taken. Maybe a few more blatantly French or German words could be used for class names.

I don't either, honestly. But, as has been noted, it rather sticks out with all the other Germanic and Frankish historical terms. I realize that 'monk' has done that for three decades now, but that has become part of the canon. See my above guideline.

And again, I am not really concerned with the inclusion, I am more concerned with the inaccurate usage. A kensai is someone who is beyond any measure of skill. They don't need to actually use their swords. If kensai were included as an Epic path or set of powers that dealt with reducing morale or causing fear effects, I would be less inclined to complain. As mentioned above, sloppy usage combined with sloppy, florid prose sets my teeth on edge.

Also, stop using 'you' in the descriptions.

Also, as someone who majored in English myself, I am taking more offense at people citing that dictionary.com is a good source for this kind of debate than I would ever take offense at someone using the word Kensai. The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is the one true dictionary. Accept no substitutes. As far as I am aware, professional writers don't.

Right now, it is sitting at about $1000USD, not counting shipping costs. That is 20 volumes. Not an inconsiderable cost to ship.

But if you have a spare you can shoot over my way, I will be forever grateful.