Obscure, irrelevant things you find odd in Sonic games

Esta hidrociudad no es suficientemente grande para los dos.

The multilanguage manual translates the -city part as a city, not as a suffix; pronounce it however you like, but it's a city and not a trait.

Also, I thought english language used the -o- between consonants when making composite words as a conjunction, not as part of either word. I know it's not the same as will-o-wisp, but then we have veg-o-fortress or laundromatic.

 

I had never ever ever thought of Hydrocity as a portmanteau of Hydro + Velocity. Probably because there are very few Sonic stages whose name refers to a quality or a situation rather than a physical location, and most of them are in Sonic CD.

• Palmtree Panic
• Collision Chaos
• Tidal Tempest
• Metallic Madness
• Sky Chase
• Doomsday Zone

Have I forgotten anything?

(Which led me to notice something obscure and irrelevant about just how Sonic CD is dedicated to describe itself as completely insane, anxiety-riddled and devoid of chill)

 

"Hydro City" is just "water city". The word "hydro" describes the type of city. "Hydrocity", said altogether, is supposedly a pun on the word "velocity". Neither of those 2 popular interpretations involve suffixes, so I don't understand what you mean in all honesty.


@ the second point, those two uses of -o- are not the same and that's not an English convention at play. Will-o-wisp was actually will-o'-the-wisp, which means "will o(')f the wisp" and literally translates to "Will of the torch".
"Laundromat" was coined as a combination of the terms "laundry" and "automatic", the "o" is a part of the second word and "mat" is not a word anyway so the "o" wouldn't be linking them together. I see what you're thinking of with "veg-o-fortress" or something like "carb-o-nator", it seems to be a trend when naming fictional inventions or products, similar to the famous "-inator" suffix a la Dr. Doofenshmirtz... but I actually don't know where that originated from or why so many cartoons and sci-fi shows use it. I don't think that's the kind of thing they intended with a Sonic level though


Also Palas that's a good point, and Sonic CD really does have no chill. But yeah, and it's also true that every other zone in Sonic 3 is two separate words, which suggests that Hydrocity is a typo because they forgot the space. But it then raises the question of how they never fixed such a relatively simple mistake in QA or just while working on the game, or why various official sources continue to use the name thereafter. Again, not really on one side or the other, but I think both sides have their reasons for saying it the way they do. I think "Hydro City" is much more likely to be the truth, but I'm also a firm believer in linguistic descriptivism, so I think if a ton of people grew up saying "hydrocity" then that is equally valid and cool and pog. My way is still unequivocally correct(hid-raw-kitty), so the point is moot.

 

I don't know what else to say, so let's recap:

1) "Hydro" comes from greek, and "city" as both a separate word and a suffix comes from a similar age that has nothing to do with english until it adopted them.

2) -city in fact is from latin, where water is "Aqua" and the word that puts both together and is also adopted by english is "aquosity".

3) Multilanguage manuals use the "population" meaning of "city" for every language included.

4) You're running through a place, not a concept. Plato may be greek but he wasn't involved in this.

5) This is not "interpretation", is etymology and official intent put together.

6) It actually requires more effort to read "hydrocity" as "watery speed" than anything related with the pronunciation itself.

I think it's enough. Again, pronounce it however you want, but it is what it is. If you don't want to believe me, ok, but I'm cutting the "language wars" here because it's offtopic and won't go any further anyway.

 

edit: I think I severely misread a bit of that. I see what you mean about the multi-language manual now, which I did not know existed until today lol. The entire interpretation of your reply rested on whether I understood what you mean by "multi-language manual" and I thought you were just being snooty about etymology, but yeah that makes sense to me

 

I thought you were adamant in saying the meaning of the zone's name couldn't be the "population" one if both words were put together, and, since I had explained everything to say that's the intended meaning, thought recapping clearly would be the only way to finish this. Also, the "waterspeed" interpretation came out of the blue and I was confused too. I precisely told you that I don't care if you pronounce it one way or another, because that's an english thing I of course line up with the pronunciation related to its ethymology but pronunciation is already english territory, so I'm ok with it. Ethymology wasn't, and that's where I considered there was a "language war". I thought I was the only one confused, so my apologies if I handled this in an unexpected way that hurt you in any way.

And it's because of this I felt the need also: you wrote those "if"s and there's no "if" because we know the official stance, and you may like the pun (that's ok and wonderful) but it doesn't mean anything supports that possibility. Again, my apologies if this affected you beyond the argument itself.

If I was angry I wouldn't have replied to you this way.

EDIT: Just read your edit, and I don't think you needed to delete your previous text, you were totally right in calling me out if I made you uncomfortable.

 

I've edited my reply above, it was actually me who misunderstood the entire premise of what you were saying, which made me read it in a way that seemed really angry. When you said "The multilanguage manual translates the -city part as a city, not as a suffix", I for some reason did not register that you were saying the multi-language manual for the game literally translates it that way; rather, I somehow registered it as saying "-city means city, it's not a suffix, because I said so" and I was like "...when did I ever say it was a suffix?", so then the rest of it naturally didn't make sense and I thought you were just being snooty defining simple words like "city", because I didn't know you were talking about the way the words are literally defined and translated as per the manual. I wasn't kidding when I said I was confused lol, I just kept re-reading until it clicked and suddenly the entire tone changed

I am super sorry for probably coming across as incredibly rude and / or contentious, I'm gonna try to read more carefully next time and maybe not jump to conclusions off of 2 words I didn't register in my brain. Thank you for apologizing for doing nothing wrong

 

Language mixture always produces this kind of results, that's why a while ago I said everything would have been easier and clearer if they named the zones "hydropolis" and "sand city". I have a lot of quirks with languages, anyway; for example, I refuse to write the phonetical transcription of whiskey in spanish because it's still a UK word and seeing it written as "Güisqui" irks me despite being the correct way under the language rules, I write the original word in italics instead.

 

Hydrossity sounds cooler and I will die on this hill

 

Random level design knowledge:
I'm sure most people playing S2-2013 (and Origins i guess) already know of the added top path in HTZ1 that needs flight or glide climbing to access. But did you know there's another 2013 path at the bottom like that?



Found it months ago when I was playing the MD version (which I don't normally do) and died in the beginning hole like a dumbass (which I normally do) and was all like "why is this very familiar place so unfamiliar??"



these holes now have purpose, yay

 

What a great point. Never thought about it. Yeah CD has insane level design and they even titled the zones to emphasise how nuts they are.

Okay minor pedantic point but 'city' does not come from Latin. The Latin word for 'city' is 'urbs'. I'm a Latinist so couldn't help myself lol.

I guess city derives from civitas but not exact!

 

I said the suffix comes from latin, not the actual word. In any case, you may be forgetting "civitas".

 

I mentioned civitas. It specifically means community rather than city but I guess the word city is probably a derivation. Still a different word.

What do you mean by suffix? The word city is not a Latin word. Hydro-city are the English words Hydro and city just put together. Hydro derives from hydor but is still an English word.

Am I going completely off tangent here? Sorry I'll stop.

 

There's people pronouncing "hydrocity" like it was a trait and not a place, like they would pronounce "atrocity" or "aquosity". In those words, -city and its variations are a suffix, hence the reference in my arguments against that take on the word.

Sorry, I skipped that last line, my fault. In spanish we can use "urbe" (coming from "urbs") but the usual word is "ciudad" (coming from "civitas").

I was talking about the origin of the word, not saying it isn't allowed to be an english word. "Water" has nothing to do with greek or latin, and "city" is evolved enough, while "hydro" is almost taken as is. I made that distinction only to make my points, especially when I mentioned "hydropolis" and "sand city" would have saved us a lot of headaches if those where the names of the disputed level names.

This language debate has all been off-topic, but it's been a nice change considering how "looped" are most topics in this forum recently. Also, I studied latin in high school for three years but couldn't learn greek because there wasn't enough people interested, so I was forced to pick history of art instead, and I'm now jealous you did learn that (I mean, art is interesting but not what they wanted me to learn from it).

 

And I guess that it's technically my fault to begin with, since I was the one who started talking about -polis in my crusade against the stupid "SOZ" acronym, perhaps these posts can be split into a separate topic?

 

I was pissed of by that too, but I'm more pissed off about all those acronyms because I have to make a lot of guesses even with the right context and there's some that just blend or can refer to various zones. I don't think they should split this because this topic was quite inactive before discussing all of this and I think we're done with it anyway.

 

The one takeaway from the discussion is that I'll stop using shorthands and acronyms altogether whenever possible because sometimes y'all go "no because in JBZ" and I have to recollect every single zone in existence in order to find out what the acronym is for

 

That's what I was talking about. And we're fortunate modern games don't use the "zone" add-on, because there's tons of additional acronyms lurking in modern games to mess everything up even more.