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Real Language In Jade Empire
HamOperator writes "Tho Fan is a made-up language spoken by unreal people in the XBox game Jade Empire. The New York Times has an interview with the creator of the language." From the article: "...they wanted to avoid using Chinese or any other Asian language that might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events. At the same time, they did not want to resort to unintelligible nonsense."
Instead, they resort to unintelligible noises that make no sense.
Hell, there are probably conlangers out there who would do something like this for free.
English is easier said than done.
But i wonder why chinese won't do, or some of the dozen almost extincted languages out there ?
Very similar to the Panzer Dragoon games
I'd go insane.
And I'd buy it! I never could grasp elven... That's a new language to add to my list.
1. Klingon
2. Elven
3. Newspeak
4. Japanese
and now...
5. Jade Empire language
You have been warned.
I've read, watched, listened to and played thousands of media works that used the english language but which did not feel that use shackled them to any particular version of history or even basic reality.
"We want to do it cause it seemed cool" would be a perfectly valid reason. "Not wanting to shackled to actual historical events" sounds like some post-modern(?) excuse to make their choice sound more important than it really was.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Say the inventor of these languages wrote and then translated some stories (say, 50 or 100 of them). Say he also transcribed his invented histories. Further, let's assume his stories and invented history told tales of gods, their mythical deeds, and other such fabulous things.
Now say he printed this in a book or series of books, and someone bought it, and promptly buried it, only for it to be found, oh, 5000 years later.
It could make for some interesting theological and anthropological discussion, eh?
B
definutely sounded like unintelligible nonsense to me someone actually got paid to make it up ouch!, why go through all the trouble of making a game based on Ancient China then use a made up jibberish language instead of Chinese??? not to mention using voice overs by people who sound like they are from California.
what's next ??? Guide to Jade Empire language Pick-up lines ?? I agree that gaming does goe far these days...but this thing is goes too far
sounds like some post-modern(?) excuse to make their choice sound more important than it really was.
"Post-modern(?)" is right, as you apparently have no idea what postmodernism is.
Postmodernism is the reason why "We want to do it cause it seemed cool" would be a perfectly valid reason.
Like it matters what they speak, everyone is going to skip the movies and any talking event anyway.
Sega did this already with the Panzer Dragoon games. It's a weird hybrid language of Japanese and German, but it's definately not real.
What's also funnny is that the words "Tho Fan" incorporate two phonetics that are pretty difficult for many asians to grasp, the 'f' sound and the 'th' sound. In Korean, for instance, there is no direct phonetic equivalent for either. I'm not as familiar with Chinese, but a quick google showed a site saying they don't have 'th' and that there are some issues with the 'f' sound as well...
not sure if i agree 100% on the "f" sound part, but th, yeah. i dont speak korean, but i hear it enough to be sure they dont have it. japanese also doesnt have anything like that.
100% sure on f and th for Korean. Don't know about Chinese, though.
ICO had the same sort of thing going for it, right?
Shame that game is so underground. It was almost perfect.
So much discussion, so little real knowledge. I'm disappointed, but then again, I'm not surprised that there are no Asians here that are interested in this stupid game. I'm only reading this /. entry because languages are a hobby for me.
There is no hard "f" sound in Korean or Japanese, but it exists in Chinese (very common sound in Cantonese). Anybody pronouncing an "f" sound when speaking Korean or Japanese is mispronouncing the approximate equivalent, a breathy "h" pronounced at the absolute front of the mouth with slightly pursed lips, not using the teeth or tongue.
There is no "th" sound in any of these languages, and in any East Asian language that does have a "th," it is rarely pronounced the same way as in English.
The name "Tho Fan" sounds, at best, like something that would be at least pronouncable in Southern Chinese dialect, or Vietnamese, or a number of the Indo-Malayan languages.
As for what I think about this in the first place, I think it's stupid. The game is clearly 5 parts Chinese mythology, 2 parts Japanese mythology, with a whole lot of romanticism and little else. They should have left well enough alone, by using all English place names ("Temple of the Seven Furies" romantic bullshit, etc.) and Korean-derived character names (because they are short and more or less easy for Westerners to pronounce). Westerners have been doing this for centuries when it comes to Asian-based fiction, why change that and introduce something that will likely cause translation problems later _anyway_? All you have to do is avoid being as embarrasing as those fucking Midway idiots who created Mortal Kombat. That is not difficult to do (falling out of bed is harder), but I can't even tell whether these Jade Empire guys have succeeded at that. All for no reason.
And next generation games are rumored to be £50 because of "production cost"?!
Maybe if they spent less time inventing languages and more time making fun games they would have that problem!!!!
We've already got Esperanto, a made up language nobody uses.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
One of the really cool things about Age of Empires II was how the people spoke appropriate languages; the Teutons, for example, spoke German, the Spaniards spoke an archaic dialect of Spanish, the Japanese and Chinese spoke their languages, the Saracens spoke Arabic, and so forth. And yes, the Britons spoke Old English, with a bit of Latin mixed in; the British monks speak all Latin in Age of Empires. In fact, most of the European languages represented in the game have a lot of Latin thrown in.
Wasn't always perfectly accurate -- most of the Byzantines would probably have been more comfortable in Greek than in always speaking Latin, but on the other hand, they were the eastern half of the Roman Empire and considered themselves Romans, so it isn't that far a leap. And hey, Latin's cool.
Never played the game (ok, for a few minutes, then became fedup with it) so I would not know if the (seemingly) incoherent babbling makes some sense.
I remember vaguely reading somewhere about it, but can't be arsed to google it.
You know, irony's just lost on some folks.
An invented language that never got off the ground; I can't remember who the guy was that invented this back in the seventies but the developers could have gotten this language with samples of it spoken for free I am sure.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you wanted to get people to adopt an invented language a great way to do it would be to build a MMORPG(gotta love the acronym) that responds to voice control rather than mouse and keyboard. If enough people got hooked a la EQ or FFXI you'd have a population base.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
well, i speak japanese. not korean or chinese.
but yeah, the made up language is retarded. the game overall is on the edge of being completely retarded. sure, they pull from all kinds of asian mythology, but being asian myself, this shit comes off as being round eye bullshit. i dont know about anyone else, but it sure doesnt FEEL asian to me.
(It's a fascinating game, btw, though quite difficult--not least because of the need to sort out what the various aliens were burbling at you. I suspect this is the reason the language was sacrificed in two graphically resplendent but dumbed-down '90s sequels).
More info can be found on the web--notably at: http://argnet.fatal-design.com/bluddian.htm
Peter
Try in the 80s. As in 1887.
It's gotten off the ground as well; estimates have the number of proficient speakers ranging from 100,000 to 1,600,000 people. (Not unsurprisingly, people who like Esperanto tend to go for the 1.6 million while those who hate Esperanto go for the 100 thousand.)
The real problem with it for this context is that it's mostly based on slavic and romance languages--it doesn't sound very Asian.
There is no "th" sound in any of these languages, and in any East Asian language that does have a "th," it is rarely pronounced the same way as in English.
Oh, I assumed he was using "th" to represent an aspirated "t". Reading TFA I see you're probably right, and he really is ignorant.
Yeah, that part of the article made me sigh just a bit, even though I know it's just a fake language.
My intention isn't to make this one guy look like some kind of horrible person who doesn't know what he's doing (especially since he was probably trying to avoid creating a language too similar to Chinese in the first place), just that the whole reasoning behind creating a new language just for a game with this kind of Asian theme seems kind of lame, and that a potential to offend people exists in this fabricated language that could have been avoided if they'd stuck to English, or even a real East Asian language, in the first place. But still, on top of that, the sample words that are referred to in the article sound so different from all of the East Asian languages that I'm familiar with, so I can imagine that hearing this language being spoken while playing this game would break the suspension of disbelief for me very easily. And despite what the developers think, East Asian players of the game _will_ see the obvious parallels to their own cultures, regardless of in-game language.
For all I know, the creator of this language could have been a cool guy, and he's probably pretty smart, but the developer's decision to retain his services in the first place just make very, very little sense to me.
Anyway, I look forward to the next Japanese-created video game inspired by the American Old West (cowboys and the old west have been the foundation of some of Japan's coolest pop creations in recent years). Hopefully they will take a page out of BioWare's book, and maybe they'll create something that sounds like Arabic just so that we Americans don't get in a hissy fit about our history. That would make about as much sense as what BioWare has done with Jade Empire.
but not irony fist
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The Japanese "fu" is a voiceless bilabial fricative, while the normal "f" sound in English is a voiceless labiodental fricative.
As the original poster said, they have different points of articulation. There are no voiceless bilabial fricatives in English, though, so "fu" sounds like "f" to people who haven't studied Japanese (and to many who have), just as the Japanese have a difficult time distinguishing between "r" and "l" in English speech.
I should actually say that "fu" is not by itself a voiceless bilabial fricative, but the consonant part of it is. Japanese phones come in consonant-vowel pairs, except the solitary "n," though there could be some other exceptions that I don't know.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Yes, but not to a rude little worm like you. Go read a book, or, better yet, search Google.
I have no training in languages, and don't know any Japanese, so people in the know should please forgive me if I get this totally wrong. (And should definitely correct me if I do.)
The descriptions of these two sounds can be found on Wikipedia: voiceless bilabial fricative and voiceless labiodental fricative.
It seems like the Japanese 'f' is made approximately like the English 'f', except that instead of using the upper lip and lower teeth to constrict airflow and make the sound, you use both lips, probably by pressing them close together.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
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