There's a fine line to be walked when creating a fantasy game when it comes to the languages involved. On the one hand you want to use enough in the background to make it really seem like the people in The Land of Make Believe aren't just speaking English with a goofy-ass faux-Elizabethan accent, but on the other hand it's easy to go overboard and make it so omnipresent and onerous that it's difficult to communicate anything.
Case in point: Kroviy, the land of the fantasy game I'm making. I've mentioned before that Kroviy is inspired by both Arthurian and Slavic themes, and for me one of the key components of the Arthurian mythos is that Arthur and his men are fighting to preserve the fading Romanitas of the fallen Roman Empire -- that is, ideas that were brought from the outside and found to be good and worth preserving, even in the face of adversity. I have than dynamic in this game too: the Kroviyans were a bunch of barbarians prior to their conquest by the Thegan Empire, and then the Empire fell they had been civilized and wanted to keep what was best from their former masters. The tension and conflict between native Kroviyan culture (including language) and Thegan culture (again including language) is going to be one of the central themes of the game.
As one could pretty much guess, the Kroviyan language is strongly based on Slavic tongues (particularly Polish, since it uses the Roman alphabet and is easier to read than Russian, and I found a kickass online translator here), and what comes with that is all the things one would expect from Polish: letters in unfamiliar combinations, tongue-twisting consonants, that sort of thing. For the tongue brought by the imperials I selected not Latin, but rather the the Greek of the Byzantines -- I did this for two reasons: one, the Byzantine culture is intimately tied to the Slavic and it made it easier to adapt a lot of other linguistic things, especially names, and two, the Byzantine and names are sufficiently obscure to most gamers to sound "alien."
And here's where it gets tricky. I have both Slavic and Greek-inspired names floating around and I want to use them to give Kroviy a definite sense of place and culture, but how much is TOO much? Noble horsemen won't be called "knights," they'll be called "rycerz" and the former ruler of the land will be Krol Holleb rather than King Holleb, that much is clear. But the politics of the land is dominated by great houses/clans -- is it better to call them Houses to keep it familiar, or to call them Hala (a Polish word for House) to get the flavor? Is it better to call the lowest subinfeudinated unit a manor or a dwor? Where do I draw the line? Where does it cross from being immersive to irritating? My sense is that really common words should just be English -- I don't think I want to be in the position of correcting people by saying, "You're not crossing a bridge, you're crossing a pomost" or "No those aren't peasants, they're wloscianin." I mean I don't want to LEARN Polish or expect my players to.
So, where's the line? Anyone have any thoughts?
And let this be a lesson to me: just because I write it doesn't mean anyone gives a damn.
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3 comments:
I think I would suggest using ordinary English for most common things/objects/institutions--such as houses and manors and bridges, to use some of your examples--although possibly employing the game-world name when using proper nouns. For instance, in the real world I would consider "The Pont Neuf is a bridge in Paris" to be a perfectly reasonable sentence. Similarly, I think "Hala Krakovna is the greatest of the Great Houses" would also be reasonable. That metal structure you use to cross the St. Croix River on the highway is a bridge, but the Pont Neuf is the Pont Neuf.
I still believe it adds flavor when we use terms like "Hala" instead of "house", etc. But it can be limited to a set of words where it doesn't feel obstructive to the game. For instance, I'd still rather call "horse" and "apple" by their English names, but would rather call "king", "house", "castle", "knight", and maybe "sword" and "ax" by the names appropriate to the culture.
Yeah, I think use english for most of the common words. Keep the foreign words for actual official titles. A city is a city. But New York "City" (whatever the word is), as it were.
Maybe distinguish the 'foreign' influence by using more of the foreign words on thier end.
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