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."

This is exactly what we need more of.

Hell, there are probably conlangers out there who would do something like this for free.

Re:This is exactly what we need more of.

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.

Quite nice,

But i wonder why chinese won't do, or some of the dozen almost extincted languages out there ?

Re:Quite nice,

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."

If they make a book about this language....

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

Re:If they make a book about this language....

Please don't breed.

Re:If they make a book about this language....

Please don't breed.

I believe his interest in pretend languages pretty much assures that.

Say what?

...they wanted to avoid using Chinese or any other Asian language that might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events.

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.

Re:Say what?

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.

Re:Say what?

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.

A hypothetical situation

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

Re:A hypothetical situation

Like this [voynich.nu]?

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.

ROFl

what's next ??? Guide to Jade Empire language Pick-up lines ?? I agree that gaming does goe far these days...but this thing is goes too far

This has been done before

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.

What about ICO?

ICO had the same sort of thing going for it, right?

Shame that game is so underground. It was almost perfect.

Languages!

And next generation games are rumored to be £50 because of "production cost"?!

Maybe if they spent less time inventing languages and more time making fun games they would have that problem!!!!

Why bother?

We've already got Esperanto, a made up language nobody uses.

Age of Empires

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.

The Sims (2) ?

Doesn't The Sims (2) also have a language ?
Never played the game (ok, for a few minutes, then became fedup with it) so I would not know if the (seemingly) incoherent babbling makes some sense.

I remember vaguely reading somewhere about it, but can't be arsed to google it.

Can you say "Esperanto"?

An invented language that never got off the ground; I can't remember who the guy was that invented this back in the seventies but the developers could have gotten this language with samples of it spoken for free I am sure.

Actually, now that I think about it, if you wanted to get people to adopt an invented language a great way to do it would be to build a MMORPG(gotta love the acronym) that responds to voice control rather than mouse and keyboard. If enough people got hooked a la EQ or FFXI you'd have a population base.

Captain Blood was there first.

Developed by a French outfit called Exxos (later--and better--known as Cryo), that 1988 adventure incorporated a rudimentary iconograhic (but also spoken) language called Bluddian with dozens of words.

(It's a fascinating game, btw, though quite difficult--not least because of the need to sort out what the various aliens were burbling at you. I suspect this is the reason the language was sacrificed in two graphically resplendent but dumbed-down '90s sequels).

More info can be found on the web--notably at: http://argnet.fatal-design.com/bluddian.htm

Peter

Re:shoulda been in chinese anyway

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...

Re:So...

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.