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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.
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.
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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
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...
ICO had the same sort of thing going for it, right?
Shame that game is so underground. It was almost perfect.
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.
Richard Adams never went beyond 20-odd words for Lapine. The more I read Watership Down, the more impressed I am that he did create a rich little culture out of so little. Read the "sequel" book of short stories, or any of his other books and you'll find they're just really treacly kids stuff. That was the one book that managed to transcend insipidity, but not on every page...
.. graphic and disturbing though.
In fact the movie was probably even better
I think he created the entire language just so he could have Fiver say "Silfay hraka, embleer hrair" near the end (or was that Bigwig?)
I don't think so. There are several speakers of Esparanto who have had kids together. The oddest result is that now there are about 200 to 2000 "native" speakers of an artificial language.