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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."
Hell, there are probably conlangers out there who would do something like this for free.
English is easier said than done.
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."
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
It means that they're going to be selling the game in asia, and they want to make sure they don't offend everyone in a certain country (by "mocking" their history).
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.
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.
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.
It isn't unintelligible. I have noticed some definite matches between the subtitles and what's being said. If they talked a bit slower, I could probably start matching words with their translations.
The point isn't China, the point is that they're trying to sell it in Japan.
Ever noticed that many Japanese RPGs take place in a very slightly altered version of the real world and/or real mythology? Many identifiable things, familiar names and themes, but it's never quite authentic. Things aren't quite as they would be normally. In Valkyie Profile, Odin was half human, Frei was a woman, and Freya wasn't a slut. In the Final Fantasy games, Shiva has somewhat fewer arms than you see in tradidtional statuary. In Xenogears, God was a giant world killing weapons system and bishops fed little boys into a machine that processed them as food. There's enough there to identify the source, but not enough there to say it's true to that source.
Jade Empire is doing the same thing. There's enough there to see that it's primarily Chinese mythology, but there are elements of Japanese (I've only seen multi-tailed fox spirits in Japanese myth, anyway), Indian (those elephant demons look an awful lotlike Ganesh to me), and even Jewish (golems) mythology, and a good deal of creative thinking thrown in, and well as a movie-theater treatment of martial arts. It's not a faithful treatment of Chinese mythology, but it is a lot like Valkyrie Profile's treatment of Norse mythology or Xenogears treatment of Catholicism.
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.