Will you be fixing the rest of the game, too? The inconsistent spelling of "simoleons" and the other, more atriocious, grammar and spelling errors? I can't stand some of the wrongs Maxis has made in those popups

Isn't that correct form to say "has ran away" since "ran" is past tense ? And run is like, present tense...if I know what I'm talking about? lol I'm probably wrong though lol.

No, it's "has run" because it's not simple past tense. It's... present perfect, I think?

Anyway, thanks for the fix.

Ran is past tense. Like if I was to say "What happened to your dog?" You would say "He ran away last week." Now if the action is in place it would be "My dog is running away!"

But technically they both are irregular past tense forms.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian...PastTense03.htm

But I have never been good at grammar so I could be wrong :P

Well, if you want to get really technical, "them" shouldn't be used for a singular pet. It's worked its way into our grammar, but there are some who'll tell you that it's incorrect.

But the first part is correct. "Has run" is right; "has ran" is not. The following link conjugates "run". This particular instance would be "present perfect". Simply saying "ran" is "preterite". (See? You learn something new every day.)

http://conjugator.reverso.net/conju...h-verb-run.html

Well, what if my dog done runned off? What then? ;o)

yes! you are my grammatical savoir! This has ALWAYS bugged me! nice job!

I have had the game 2 years and never had a pet run away so I suppose this would not prove useful for me. However I'm so glad there are people out there that care about grammar. I am really sick of hearing the words Irregardless and Over Exaggerate. I also have a serious peeve with people who eat Samiches at the Libary on Valentimes day LOL.
BTW MTS2 seems to think Irregardless is proper because the spell check does not turn it red for me. Thanks for this and If I ever start to have naughty pets I will DL this.

Grammar is important...thank you for this. Let's not forget the improper use of thier, there, and they're too LOL. Oh, and may I "axe" you a question too?

Supposably....

Thankyou fakepeeps .

swampcandy, I'll happily fix any other errors that bug you, but I don't play often so I haven't noticed many of them myself. Now that I have the content of 600 text strings stored as 600 txt files, though, finding and fixing these should be a simple matter. Request away!

Ooh, also - MTS2 doesn't have a spellchecker. That's your browser. And you're right, "irregardless" is a stupid pseudo-word, like "burglarize" (both of which my spellchecker objects to ).

No, because "has run" is another way of saying "ran." For pluperfect tense, you'd say "had run." But you'd never say "has ran."

Teehee, this is great for grammar freaks like mwa. Have you also noticed the memory for vampire bites? "What will this sim do now that I have bit them?" GAH that one drives me bonkers

LOL! What a grammar discussion here! As a former English teacher, I am glad so many are inquiring about (and correcting!) Maxis's "bad" grammar! Lovely little fix, btw! Thanks!

OMG thank you! I just had multiple pets run away after a fire and those stupid pop-ups nearly drove me insane >_< Yes, those tiny little errors bug the heck out of me. I once wrote to a cereal (not serial) company (at the age of 10) because they had issues with their/there/they're *snickers* You put a ton of work into this for a small fix and I am thankful!

The deal is this: English verbs have four basic forms from which their other forms derive. If you know these four parts, you can form any verb tense even for "irregular" verbs (except for "have" and "be", which have additional irregular forms that have to be memorized).

Stem (for this verb, "run"), simple past ("ran"), past participle ("run"), and present participle ("running").

The past participle form is used after the auxiliary verb "have" to make perfect tenses, and the present participle is used after the auxiliary verb "be" to make progressive tenses. This gives you the following forms, among others: I run, I ran, I have run, I am running.

The form in this particular dialog is present perfect, so it should be "has run".

Having said all that, I'm not gonna bother with this hack, since it seems perfectly plausible to me that service Sims speak non-standard English Therefore "errors" in dialog don't concern me.

I'm much more bothered by errors in "official" game text. Whoever writes the family intro stories for Maxis families tends to pluralize family names with an apostrophe: "the Contrary's" etc. There's a trend among today's youth to put apostrophes in all kinds of plurals of words that aren't ordinary common nouns ending in a consonant, including names, acronyms, numerals, and words ending in a vowel. This is NEVER standard English; there's no case in which a plural (that isn't also a possessive) should have an apostrophe.

BTW, while we're on the subject of grammar, I find it hilarious that if you tell a sim to put away leftovers, sometimes you'll choose "put leftovers away" and sometimes "put away leftovers". The program apparently chooses completely randomly between these two, which means somebody noticed that they were equally appropriate and actually wrote a randomizer for it Linguists have debated long and hard about what the difference in usage is between the two forms (I even wrote a research paper about it back in the eighties which got some attention ). Basically IMO it relates to whether "the leftovers" is given information in the discourse context. But in a game menu there IS no discourse context, so there's no way to choose

Bless you! There are some serious errors with the dialogue for the phone and for excursions to community lots when you select other sims to come along. I don't suppose you could take a look at that, too? It's been bothering me FOREVER.

Actually, I noticed this the other day, and tested it out. Apparently, it all depends on whether you click on the food or on the plate. I can't remember which is which, though.

I can't believe the level of ignorance on display here, people! That was not a mistake made by Maxis employees. The I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER cats wrote that! They were subcontracted to write some of the text popups for the Pets game. My cat Donut knows one of the cats who was on the team. The only reason so much of the writing looks grammatically correct to humans is that the writers were stoned out of their fuzzy little heads on catnip that Donut smuggled to the writing sessions.

"I has ran away to getz mah cheezburger." My cats say that all the time. That's just how they talk. Embrace the linguistic diversity, hoomans, er, humans. Sheesh! I gots to go now and answer a call of the litterbox. Er....I mean I have to use the toylet. Byze.

whaha :D
Thanks

Thank you. Grammar FTW.

Has ran is the correct one...The three forms of the verb are run-ran-ran...

I beg to differ, 6akalaka1 -- and the dictionaries agree :O "run, ran, run, run·ning"

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/run

Of course there may be some dialects with the pattern you describe. Language is changing all the time, and ESPECIALLY irregular verb forms, which tend to change to become more like other verbs by the process of analogy. But I think there's no question what the standard is.

Really, Igoolik? :O I'll have to check that I'm disappointed, I loved the idea of a programmer going to the trouble to randomize it

Thank you! I spotted this in my game the other week and was going to fix it but decided against it for some reason. I don't think I could decide whether it was wrong or not. Now I know.
If you are going to do any other text corrections then you might want to check out my profile. I've already created a few corrections myself so it would save you work if you know which have already been done.

I've been through your profile recently Menaceman, adding lots of your stuff to a new section on the Content List .