Slashdot Mirror
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."
RTFA
"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."
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.
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.
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.