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Real Language In Jade Empire

Posted by Zonk on from the great-jobs dept.

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."

3 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. A hypothetical situation by NewWazoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:A hypothetical situation by Jerf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Like this?

      Not quite your scenario, but the likeliest explanation for that document is basically what you outline, and the result is exactly what you anticipated. A lot of people have gotten very excited about it, but the simplest explanation that fits the facts is that somebody just faked the whole thing for kicks.

  2. Age of Empires by JeffTL · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.