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Aviary Attorney and French by Cowboypunk

I recently got Aviary Attorney, one of the few games I've been excited enough to play that I bought it almost immediately when it came out. The game is a crime-solving visual novel set in in 19th century France just before a revolution, and is styled in ink drawings befitting that era. It's charming and delightful and, although it still has unwritten chapters to be added and updated in the future, I super duper recommend it. It's currently on sale on Steam for $13, so you too can play a weird Poirot/Phoenix Wright/Harvey Birdman falcon lawyer and spend two weeks looking for a sandwich that demands a password.

Unsurprisingly, the game has a decent amount of French in it, which has apparently been a final straw for me. I keep finding myself making things that involve French, which is terribly ironic because I just completely dislike French as a language. It's annoyingly superfluous and sloppy, and any language that involves letters that don't make sounds is just a confusing, messy waste as far as I'm concerned. Although I will say that it's very pretty and flows nicely when spoken - it's a very form over function kind of language. And to note, that doesn't mean I find English a good language either. But French keeps coming up for me and I keep using it and being influenced by it, so one of my two new years resolutions is to learn French.

The other is to work out regularly, I'm very bad at the 'regularly' part of the deal.

Aviary Attorney and French

Cowboypunk

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  • Link

    Farouche

    "any language that involves letters that don't make sounds is just a confusing, messy waste as far as I'm concerned"

    Immediate thought: "Yes, English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though."

  • Link

    Rollup

    French is insane when it comes to silent letters, and spelling is just as inconsistent as it is in English, so I can absolutely see what you mean. At least French pronounciation tends to be more consistent than English pronounciation.

    I remember that when I first learned English, I felt it was a much cleaner, easier and more efficient language. With time, I've come to realize it has its own set of flaws. Where French is very wordy, it's clear and precise. English is much more concise, but sometimes it get really hard to tell how you're supposed to parse a sentence, and you feel like you'd have to be in the other person's head to really get what they're saying. It's hard to explain, but I imagine French speakers know what I mean... it's most obvious when noun cascades and other misuses of the language come up, but it's true of even "proper" English, to a degree. Neither language really is better than the other, but they definitely both do well in some areas and terrible in others.

    For instance, to me, anything horror written in French feels lame and toothless, and anything flowery written in English feels terribly fake and forced.

    • Link

      Cowboypunk

      I don't feel like I've ever become fluent enough in another language to compare the experience of using English, but I think I understand what you mean. I totally agree with you on the horror/flowery thing, though. French feels very soft and passive, and English feels too clunky and direct.

      I don't know if you've learned much about Japanese at all, but I studied it for a few years and it is generally super clean and concise, but holy shit the counting system is just the worst thing I've ever seen devised. When counting entities, you have to add a suffix to the number to denote that you're counting an entity. This would be fine if there wasn't a different suffix for every different kind of object you could be counting. AND IF THE SUFFIXES DIDN'T RANDOMLY CHANGE THE THE SPELLING OF THE NUMBER OR ARBITRARILY DECIDE TO USE A SECOND, OVERWHELMINGLY UNUSED SET OF NUMBERS OR SOMETHING. You can't just say "there's ten papers", you have to say "there's ten-paper-counter-suffix papers". There are counters for small animals, large animals, birds and rabbits, floors on a building, square objects, round objects, long and thin objects, flat and square objects, books, packets of papers, powdered things, and like 100 more. It's unbearable.

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        PrincessTor

        Good old English with yer 1-10 and more. Simple and easy eyup!