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[Splint]

My vote is leave the names on a singular basis as they are (coyote man, coyote woman for example,) but perhaps use -folk suffix as a better plural, at least for the ones that are less of a mouthful - coyote folk, mantis folk, and so on seems like a more natural sounding plural to differentiate them from the other variations of the animal they're based in. Similar to how human men and women are collectively just called humans, or dwarf men and women would collectively just be called dwarves (with the understanding it's not what these creatures call themselves, since why would they append themselves as whatever-men/women or whatever-folk.)

[Vordak]

Alternatively, more archaic constructions can be used. For coyote man - coyotecephalus, coyote woman -coyotecephales.

I do not think that one word construction will be suitable for all types of semi-animals.

But in principle the suffix "-folk" is great, and the fact that it is impossible to apply gender distinction for him is good, because for civilized races do not care what about talking toad sex. All these dog -man and -woman have a negative association with comics.

[Thundercraft]

My vote is leave the names on a singular basis as they are (coyote man, coyote woman for example,) but perhaps use -folk suffix as a better plural, at least for the ones that are less of a mouthful - coyote folk, mantis folk, and so on seems like a more natural sounding plural to differentiate them from the other variations of the animal they're based in.

Actually... I... could get behind this idea. As long as the singular name is left as it is in vanilla DF (allowing us to still search them in the wiki), having a "-folk" or some other plural name should not pose as much of an issue.

Alternatively, more archaic constructions can be used. For coyote man - coyotecephalus, coyote woman -coyotecephales.

You want to make animal men names that complicated to pronounce and remember?  Please no! Those are real tongue twisters. How can anyone other than a biologist or major science nerd appreciate them?

But in principle the suffix "-folk" is great, and the fact that it is impossible to apply gender distinction for him is good, because for civilized races do not care what about talking toad sex. All these dog -man and -woman have a negative association with comics.

I'm willing to admit this:
In principle, I have no major objection to the use of "-folk" or "-kin" instead of "-man" or "-men" for animal people... That is, unless the motivation to do so is to push some social agenda or avoid sounding politically incorrect. Otherwise (in principle), it doesn't bother me what term is used.

However, I do not like deviating from vanilla DF too much, especially if it makes the official wiki rather useless as a game reference.

Why make the idea exclusively a Revised thing? If using "-folk" or "-kin" really is such a better way of naming them, then why not post it in a separate suggestion thread or otherwise try to bring the idea to Toady's attention? At least, if Toady decides to do this, then the wiki would get updated with the new names and it would still remain highly relevant to Revised users.

Edit:

Also, have you considered how, the more Revised deviates from vanilla DF, the more unlikely it is to get another mod to work with Revised without a lot of work? If not even the names of various creatures and races are the same, then getting it to work with another mod would probably be a chore.

[Splint]

Actually that's a good point, regarding the wiki usage. While it's not that big an issue to look when on the wiki itself, it's still something that if just googling an animal man (such as to check if they're gonna try to steal your shit,) but they're called [animal] kin or [animal] folk, you'd probably not get any results related to dwarf fortress, barring some of the more obscure animals like the various bird people.

Also I'm gonna vote "no" on names that sound overly scientific. The common person in these world would just use man/woman on an individual basis, or kin/folk when dealing with a group, if I had to guess. The animal focused nerds and priests though might go for the more sciency names. 

EDIT: Not gonna lie, a lot of animal people sound like really obscure or low effort/lazy comic book character names.

[Taffer]

This got a lot more attention than I'd expected! I'll try to reply to everybody, but first I think there's a bit of confusion. This is what I want to fix:



Once again, this isn't about politics, this description is (to me) inaccurate. This is literally just about me looking at a hyena woman and having the game tell me I'm looking at a hyena man.

Taffer, first of all, I want to express my gratitude for sharing this mod and admiration for the continued work and keeping it updated.

Thank you so much for the kind words!

Something I wanted to ask about: I've noticed there are a few differences (a few features that seem missing by way of omission/mention) between the readme for v2.1.0 and v1.7.0.

I think I'll add a proper mission statement to the OP, but as I said several times throughout the thread: I'm a minimalist. I want to improve the gameplay, readability, and atmosphere of Dwarf Fortress in a minimal way. The definition of minimal often means "as few changes from the default raws as is reasonable". I'm comparing my whole mod (once again) to the vanilla raws, line by line, and I want every change to be justified. There's still a lot of changes, but I can agree with the logic behind all or most of them. I encourage people to disagree with me where they think I'm off.

• missing brackets have been added to the raws where they were missing. (Taffer)

- I think this is still a fix in one spot, I'll find it sometime during my comparisons and add a note to the OP, and report something on Toady's bug tracker. The other spots with missing brackets were all about nail growth, and I'm guessing this was "commented out" deliberately.

• swan, duck, and goose bites aren't edged. Giant tortoise bites are. (Button)

- None of this seemed important enough to justify its inclusion.

• bayberry trees are tropical, not temperate. (Scam Tank)

- This didn't seem important enough to justify its inclusion.

• moon snails also live in tropical oceans. (Button)

- This didn't seem important enough to justify its inclusion.

• chitin and shells are used for crafts. (Button)

- This didn't seem important enough to justify its inclusion.

• warthogs and hippos aren't benign. (Button)

- I reverted the warthog change because I didn't think it was important, but on further investigation the BENIGN tag directly contradicts both Toady's description and the PREFSTRING, so I'll bring the fix back. Maybe report this on the bug tracker as well.

• owls sleep at night now. (Button)

- This didn't seem important enough to justify its inclusion.

I have a suspicion that most of these are no longer mentioned because Toady got around to fixing them. But I wanted to ask.

I don't even know if all of it is reported. Reporting more bugs was on my todo list.

For dilemmas on what Revised should or should not change, I think we should consider: What is the primary goal or aim of Revised? Is it to more-or-less fill the role that Modest Mod used to serve: To fix some bugs and make very minor changes that virtually nobody would object to? Is it to change things for the sake of realism, convenience or to better fit traditional fantasy tropes? Or, perhaps, is it something in between?

Of course, since this is Taffer's mod, he would have to answer that. But I would point out that more and more controversial changes would, inevitably, lead some to decide to avoid using Revised.

As already mentioned, "I'm interested in improving the gameplay, readability, and atmosphere of Dwarf Fortress in a minimal way". Or something. Doesn't mean I won't add things: I'm thinking about adding mastodons to the next release, for example, because the arctic can get a little..samey right now.

If the purpose of Revised is the former - to fix things and make changes that are not controversial - then I don't think a change such as this is wise. For one thing, changing the names of various things in Dwarf Fortress - particularly the names of animal people or other races - will confuse new players.

It is especially confusing or inconvenient in how such radically-altered names would not align with the names used in the official wiki. If we, for example, type in "Lizardfolk" in the search form and click, we get "There were no results matching the query." However, if we type in "Lizardman", the wiki redirects to "Reptile man" and it gives us the relevant info.

This is a decent argument against a change to "snowy owl daemon", but if I changed the default name to "snowy owl person" (with a plural of folk) I'd still keep the "snowy owl man" and "snowy owl woman" caste names.

This push to rename animal people from using the "-man" suffix to using the "-folk" suffix is not motivated by a desire for the game to be made more PC... is it...? 

It's pretty jarring (in my opinion) looking at what the game labels a "hyena man", only to realize that it's actually a "hyena woman". This has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with consistency.

My vote is leave the names on a singular basis as they are (coyote man, coyote woman for example,) but perhaps use -folk suffix as a better plural, at least for the ones that are less of a mouthful - coyote folk, mantis folk, and so on seems like a more natural sounding plural to differentiate them from the other variations of the animal they're based in. Similar to how human men and women are collectively just called humans, or dwarf men and women would collectively just be called dwarves (with the understanding it's not what these creatures call themselves, since why would they append themselves as whatever-men/women or whatever-folk.)

I also like the folk suffix, but this doesn't address my concern: I don't want to look at an animal woman's description just to have the game tell me it's a man, that's all. Perhaps "coyote person" isn't so terrible after all, but (unfortunately) I can't think of a singular version of "coyote folk".

Alternatively, more archaic constructions can be used. For coyote man - coyotecephalus, coyote woman -coyotecephales.

I do not think that one word construction will be suitable for all types of semi-animals.

But in principle the suffix "-folk" is great, and the fact that it is impossible to apply gender distinction for him is good, because for civilized races do not care what about talking toad sex. All these dog -man and -woman have a negative association with comics.

I like simple language where possible, so I wouldn't use "cephalus". It has to be a separate word anyways, because some of the animal people have multiple words for a name (eg snowy owlcephalus?)

Regardless of what civilized races care about, every description is gendered when you look at it in DF, even the flies. And the player's POV isn't the POV of an ingame civilized race.

Thank you for your thoughts!

Actually... I... could get behind this idea. As long as the singular name is left as it is in vanilla DF (allowing us to still search them in the wiki), having a "-folk" or some other plural name should not pose as much of an issue.

What if the caste name was the same, and I give up on the "daemon" suffix? Coyote person or perhaps coyote sprite (with a plural of coyote folk). The caste name still shows up in many places, so the player can still google it.

You want to make animal men names that complicated to pronounce and remember?  Please no! Those are real tongue twisters. How can anyone other than a biologist or major science nerd appreciate them?

I like simple language, to the point where I replaced "herbivore" with "plant-eater" for a while in the descriptions. I think I walked back a bit on that, but not to worry. Scientific language won't end up anywhere in my descriptions or names.

I do not like deviating from vanilla DF too much, especially if it makes the official wiki rather useless as a game reference.

I don't like deviating from vanilla DF too much either, but where I draw the line is inevitably going to be different from others. I just hope I can continue to do what I want without upsetting too many people.

Why make the idea exclusively a Revised thing? If using "-folk" or "-kin" really is such a better way of naming them, then why not post it in a separate suggestion thread or otherwise try to bring the idea to Toady's attention? At least, if Toady decides to do this, then the wiki would get updated with the new names and it would still remain highly relevant to Revised users.

I'm a pragmatic fellow. I don't really care about influencing Toady, I just want to do my own thing with my mod. I don't have the patience to post a suggestion then wait 3 years to find out if it made it in.

Also, have you considered how, the more Revised deviates from vanilla DF, the more unlikely it is to get another mod to work with Revised without a lot of work? If not even the names of various creatures and races are the same, then getting it to work with another mod would probably be a chore.

This is exactly why I don't want to deviate much from the vanilla RAWs unless I think the change is worthwhile.

[Splint]

Either I'm always high and never noticed, or I'm seriously unobservant. I could have sworn female animal people had the "woman" part as a caste level name that'd show up on the unit list and such. 

Demon/daemon: Definitely against that. Considering what else shares a similar name, it'd be a bit confusing.

Neutral term for them: Not in favor of it, because in my book, anything that reduces at-a-glance information for a unit is a bad thing. It'd be like making pigs, regular badgers, or armadillos genderless at a glance (which can be important for animal captures/maintaining breeding stocks,) but that's just my opinion. I'm trying to stay neutral. I'd be more in favor of fixing the botched caste-level names if possible, or just not bothering if that's not do-able (because it'd be more effort than it'd be worth.)

[Shonai_Dweller]

Either I'm always high and never noticed, or I'm seriously unobservant. I could have sworn female animal people had the "woman" part as a caste level name that'd show up on the unit list and such. 

Vanilla raws are "hyena man" and "hyena woman". Vanilla description is "A person with the head and markings of a hyena", not whatever that screenshot above was from.

Is vanilla not reading the raws correctly? In which case not much point in making any suggestions to Toady, but posting a bug reoort instead.

I like (and use in my own mod) -folk.

[Taffer]

Vanilla raws are "hyena man" and "hyena woman". Vanilla description is "A person with the head and markings of a hyena", not whatever that screenshot above was from.

Is vanilla not reading the raws correctly? In which case not much point in making any suggestions to Toady, but posting a bug reoort instead.

I like (and use in my own mod) -folk.

Screenshot above is from Revised with my tileset and color scheme. The game doesn't use the caste name everywhere it should, as shown above. Everyone's talking about folk as a plural form, but my question was about the singular general name, not the caste name and not specifically only the plural form. I'm leaning toward " sprite" and " folk" for the plural at the moment.

Honestly I wouldn't have opened a poll for discussion if I was just going to rename the plural form to "folk" and leave everything else alone, I would have just done it.

[Splint]

When you read or hear sprite, you don't think of some roughly human-sized thing (hell, you don't even think of something the size of a kobold.)  You think of some kind of real small, annoying fey creature, which most animal men aren't. Or I do anyway, can't speak for anyone else. But considering, unlike other fey creatures (such as fairies that our cats so love to nom,) they aren't restricted to good biomes, I would say sprite isn't a good term.

I've also never read or heard the term "folk" be used to refer to anything in the singular, except for maybe a Werewolf: The Apocalypse source book, and I don't even know if kinfolk there were referred to as such in the singular.

Also whatever-kin make me think of a rather unfortunate subculture on the internet.

If it'd work decently, I'd suggest calling them Tribals instead. That's basically what they are anyway, mobile and more skittish versions of the tribes found underground. Otherwise I'd suggest just leave them be. Doesn't seem worth it for the potential shitshow a touched nerve can cause, given the current troubles in gaming elsewhere.

EDIT: Obviously, nothing anyone else says matters at the end of the day, cause it's your mod and you do you.

I just personally don't like the idea of them essentially being redefined as something akin to unicorns, demons, spirits, or fairies when they're just  either weird looking people, or weird looking animals, depending on point of view, and not bound to places you would expect to see a sprite or what have you, but rather places considered too wild to easily tame/establish civilization; nor do I like loss of information (I can usually tell at a glance of the unit screen what gender a tribal is. I don't think I've ever actually seen a glitch like the one in the screenshot.)

[Shonai_Dweller]

Vanilla raws are "hyena man" and "hyena woman". Vanilla description is "A person with the head and markings of a hyena", not whatever that screenshot above was from.

Is vanilla not reading the raws correctly? In which case not much point in making any suggestions to Toady, but posting a bug reoort instead.

I like (and use in my own mod) -folk.

Screenshot above is from Revised with my tileset and color scheme. The game doesn't use the caste name everywhere it should, as shown above. Everyone's talking about folk as a plural form, but my question was about the singular general name, not the caste name and not specifically only the plural form. I'm leaning toward " sprite" and " folk" for the plural at the moment.

Honestly I wouldn't have opened a poll for discussion if I was just going to rename the plural form to "folk" and leave everything else alone, I would have just done it.

Ah, yes, I see. The creature name is all "-man", so when it uses that instead of the caste it's weird, of course. I see I named all my new animal people -person/-people (sometimes one word, sometimes hyphenated) and the actual entities -folk. You've now inspired me to rename the rest of the vanilla "-men".

So, if it's the creature name, are you thinking of something like "a male hyena-folk", "a female polar bear-folk", etc?

It seems a bit off to me. "-sprite" works better. But I'll stick with "person". Most of the time it seems to catch the caste name OK, and bugs will get fixed eventually.

[Teneb]

Vanilla raws are "hyena man" and "hyena woman". Vanilla description is "A person with the head and markings of a hyena", not whatever that screenshot above was from.

Is vanilla not reading the raws correctly? In which case not much point in making any suggestions to Toady, but posting a bug reoort instead.

I like (and use in my own mod) -folk.

Screenshot above is from Revised with my tileset and color scheme. The game doesn't use the caste name everywhere it should, as shown above. Everyone's talking about folk as a plural form, but my question was about the singular general name, not the caste name and not specifically only the plural form. I'm leaning toward " sprite" and " folk" for the plural at the moment.

Honestly I wouldn't have opened a poll for discussion if I was just going to rename the plural form to "folk" and leave everything else alone, I would have just done it.

Ah, yes, I see. The creature name is all "-man", so when it uses that instead of the caste it's weird, of course. I see I named all my new animal people -person/-people (sometimes one word, sometimes hyphenated) and the actual entities -folk. You've now inspired me to rename the rest of the vanilla "-men".

So, if it's the creature name, are you thinking of something like "a male hyena-folk", "a female polar bear-folk", etc?

It seems a bit off to me. "-sprite" works better. But I'll stick with "person". Most of the time it seems to catch the caste name OK, and bugs will get fixed eventually.

AFAIK, it should only use the "Hyena Man" for a female in two situations: when talking about items/materials made from one, and in the Arena. That's because in either of those situations the game looks at NAME instead of CASTE_NAME.

[ZM5]

Yeah, what Teneb said. It's just an arena+material deal, so my vote goes to leaving their names as they are.

If you look at other creatures that have different caste names in the arena you'll see the same thing (i.e if you spawn in a giantess, arena still calls it "Giant 1"), so it's just a quirk and not something that'll pop up in game.

[Taffer]

It seems I was mistaken as to the extent of the problem and this is a pretty diff-intensive change, so I'll probably abandon the idea given that it's controversial. Thank you to everyone who voted and gave feedback!

[Taffer]

Re: today's announcement

I have no interest in supporting my work anywhere outside of GitLab or the Bay12 forums. If it isn't posted by spiral-king on GitLab or by Taffer on the Bay 12 forums, then I didn't make it.

[Shonai_Dweller]

It seems I was mistaken as to the extent of the problem and this is a pretty diff-intensive change, so I'll probably abandon the idea given that it's controversial. Thank you to everyone who voted and gave feedback!

The other place that this occurs, and I don't know whether you'd even consider it an issue, is in the util, Legends Viewer (which is pretty popular as far as I know - more so than in-game Legends Mode perhaps). That uses the creature name for it's descriptions. So, yeah, you'd probably consider this an issue for Legends Viewer to fix, but it is more widely seen than just in the arena.