Spanish_Broomaker 说:
Amman de Stazia 说:
I'm not sure about this actually. I like the idea of an 'older' feel to the language, for colour, but I also like the fact that the vocabulary of Calradia is fairly contemporary to our own.
William the Bastard might have called Harold Godwinson 'an ungodly cur' in 1065, but in 2005 he would be rather more likely to call him 'a lying f****r'.
I think that it helps immersion when the language is your own - hence the success of the many other language versions. There is such a lot of subtle content in a choice of words, which can make a great difference.
"A lying f****r" does not have the same meaning as "an ungodly cur."
So now because you don't understand Shakesphere or the KJV we won't have it?
I would like that the old English be implemented so that the player feels he is in a foreign world.
Of course it doesn't MEAN the same. Insults very rarely get used in accordance with the true meaning of the word.
The point I was making is that people take a lot of additional information from the subtleties of language.
Differences of tone and context and vocabulary can provoke amusement, annoyance, anger and despair.
I am as happy with shakespeare or grimmelshausen as with tolkien or remarque, but I don't think that using archaic language per se would be an advantage.
People study shakespeare more than they read it for pleasure. When Dumas wrote his musketeer periodicals, he used the language of his day and not that of 250 years previously: The same goes for Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, for the Nibelung Not and indeed for Shakespeare's Macbeth. These examples were all best-sellers in their day, and written for enjoyment, in the language which clearly excellent writers considered to be the most conducive to this enjoyment...
I fear that there would be too much use of cliches, of the 'famous' terms and phrases. 'ye' for example. There is a school of thought which holds that 'ye' (as in ye olde taverne) was pronounced 'thee' - the y-letter was simply used as a combination th-sound.
Shakespeare is credited with the introduction of over 6,000 new words and phrases to the english language. The language spoken in 14th c. england was very different to what is spoken these days. Basically the nobility spoke middle french, and the peasants middle english. It was only later that these two different languages were combined to form the modern english of shakespearean times.
While I am confident that most english speakers would understand shakespearean english from the context, I doubt that genuinely 14th-century language would be accessible to the majority. I would therefore ask what is the point: Setting the game in the 13th/14th c. and using the language of the 16th/17th c. is not realism, it's gimmickry.
The player might well feel awed and foreign if they had to cope with unfamiliar language, but to what end? Would it be better for immersion or gameplay? I doubt it, because the player would unlikely become immersed in a game where they understood little of the dialogues. Try some of the foreign-language mod.s if you don't believe me!
Would it be a learning experience for the player? Also unlikely, as there would be no reinforcement or opportunity to practice the language learned.
To give Calradian language a 'flavour', I would rather suggest that the dev.s appoint one person each per nation to come up with dialogue according to their own taste. That way, if you were responsible for the Swadian texts, you could throw in some 'thou' and 'ye cad': I would write the khergit texts and all the insults would be based on the reproductive habits of goats.... etcetera.
Anyway, far too much ranting !
just had a bit of time on my hands at work....
