Talk:French Jester

Bad French

Out of curiosity, what is supposed to be the correct French for this phrase? Googling "Mange moi" seems to return a lot of legitimate results in French. --Terilem (talk) 09:09, 13 September 2017 (MDT)

Indeed, "mange moi!" is the correct translation of the command "eat me!", but the game reads "manger moi", that is incorrect. Personally, I thought the jester wanted to say "it eats me" ("il me mange") with reference to the giant Pac-Man bush next to him. The mistery will remain unsolved... ---Abacos (talk) 12:54, 14 September 2017 (MDT)

Ha, I see. Could it simply be an unintentional misspelling on Richard Garriott's part? Even in English he wasn't the best speller ("Your quest is compleat", etc.) and freely admits it. Something else occurred to me as well: if the intended phrase is indeed "Eat me", can this be used as an expression of aggravation in French like it can be in English? I suspect you're correct on the Pac-Man reference, though, whatever the jester's dialogue is intended to be. --Terilem (talk) 23:45, 14 September 2017 (MDT)

Of course it is an unintentional misspelling. About the aggravation expression, unfortunately, French verbs are a bit more complicated than English ones. Therefore, the command "(you) eat me", the incorrect phrase "manger moi", and "it eats me" in French use three different "verbal moods", with different pronouns and/or suffixes. Too much trouble about just two words. Let us keep it easy: I will restore the page as it was, and add a trivia saying that there is a typo. --Abacos (talk) 01:43, 15 September 2017 (MDT)

Yeah, I agree on handling it that way. --Terilem (talk) 06:02, 15 September 2017 (MDT)

But Ultima is always right! That means in the description should pretend that there aren't any errors, then take care of the elephant in the room in the trivia.

It seems likely that what happened was Garriott went to the library, took out a French-English dictionary, looked up the definition of "eat" and of "me", and decided it was a fait accompli. But I wouldn't recommend the article reflect speculation so specifically. "Eat me" seems to make the most amount of sense out of any other translation speculated here, and is consistent w/the masochistic psychology of NPCs in this game, like the one who says "beat me, kick me, tell me lies!".--The Ultra-Mind (talk) 09:39, 11 June 2024 (MDT)