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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."
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.
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
One of the main reasons they made up this language is so that they didn't have to pay different actors to speak every single line of dialog for every piddling NPC. They just have a few different tracks of gibberish for different moods, genders, races, etc. and loop those depending on the character and the way the conversation is going. Drove me nuts in KOTOR, and was well on its way to doing so during the time I played Jade Empire.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Hell, there are probably conlangers out there who would do something like this for free.
To me, a cost of $2000 over four months sounds like free with a rounding error. Small price to pay for some professional work I think.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Ah, but you see, many of the words in the english language are actually tied to specific historical events:
the - first used by Bob the blacksmith of london in 1398.
it - Shakespeare.
a - monkeys.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
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.
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.