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Comment #1 posted on 2018-05-02 16:51:17 by Fweeb

2nd person

I think you might be a bit mistaken about 2nd person POV. My understanding is that it's not a distant pronoun (he or she)... that's still 3rd person. 2nd person is almost exclusively using "you" as the subject of the sentence for an action from the main character. So, useful in writing interactive stories... tougher for pure narrative.

Comment #2 posted on 2018-05-02 17:02:39 by clacke

Chinese

It occurred to me that from what I know about Chinese, in particular Cantonese, most of what you are saying about these nuances goes away.

You say that by just this little change in tense, you've already communicated something about the whole situation. In Chinese you can't really do that. If you try, you're making your text just unnatural and cumbersome to read. Must be a real challenge for translators in either direction.

From my personal conversations I also know that even pretty accomplished speakers coming from Chinese languages don't pick up on these cues when speaking English. All tense just goes through type erasure in parsing.

Comment #3 posted on 2018-05-03 05:29:55 by lostnbronx

Fweeb, I think you're right

I misspoke, getting my POV names and distinctions mixed up a bit. I think I give enough examples in the episode to make it clear what I'm really talking about, though, and still stand by my observations about how they affect story construction.

Thanks for the correction!

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