a great problem: Persians are not arabs!

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tripedius said:
A yes, Iranians and the truth, that is often not a very good combination. [....] But I guess everyone from the west is a stupid writer, eh?
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Stop being a armchair politico jerk. I would think most Iranians are not idiots like Ahmadinejad, most are likely pretty well educated. There is likely some miscommunication here and it likely affects the tone but Cyrus hasnt been accusing us of anything. Moreover I think we all learned something.

Rat
 
Great Cyrus said:
2.why ramesses speak arabic?!
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Ramesses speaks Arabic because there are so few people who speak Egyptian anymore. They probably could not easily find someone to speak it. He speaks an Egyptian dialect of Arabic. Obviously, not what he would have spoken back then, but it is what they speak now.

If they had Cyrus in the game, I would support making him speak Persian. But Darius made the official language Aramaic. I think this is proof of how great a leader he was, since he knew more people spoke that language than they did his language. He wanted to make the Empire easier to rule, not to have Persia control every part of it.

Lyondri said:
I just downloaded Hammurabi yesterday. What an awful character he is !! Is he just a drunkard with a broken voice in his hellish green palace ??
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He is speaking Akkadian. Since it's a dead language and isn't as well-known as Latin, whoever is speaking it definitely tried to keep his phrases as short as possible. It makes Nebuchadnezzar (not Hammurabi) seem a bit brutish, though.

I also think they're going for the craziness attributed to him in the bible.
 
Hi everyone!

I am persian (background) and i have no problem with Darius speaking aramaic. Yes it would have been nice if he spoke persian, but i certainly do think that the devs tried to accurately depict the language darius would have communicated with his various satraps (states) at the time

I just wish this thread would dissapear and that we could focus more on gameplay!

Happy gaming :)
 
Louis XXIV said:
Ramesses speaks Arabic because there are so few people who speak Egyptian anymore. They probably could not easily find someone to speak it.
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They could have found a Coptic speaker quite easily. For instance, by contacting the Coptic church in the USA. They were just trying to save time and money I suspect.
 
MadRat said:
Stop being a armchair politico jerk. I would think most Iranians are not idiots like Ahmadinejad, most are likely pretty well educated. There is likely some miscommunication here and it likely affects the tone but Cyrus hasnt been accusing us of anything. Moreover I think we all learned something.

Rat
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It's not like I started it. Iranians have a disadvantage, information is not free in their country. This combined with nationalistic state mythes like in any country that suppresses it's people can easily confuse even the brightest minds.

But I'm not here for political discussions, but got annoyed with the comparison to barbarians and western writers being bad (something the Iranian government would agree with).

But I'll leave it at that, main point Darius I speaking Aramic is fine and correct.
 
tripedius said:
It's not like I started it. Iranians have a disadvantage, information is not free in their country. This combined with nationalistic state mythes like in any country that suppresses it's people can easily confuse even the brightest minds.
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Authoritarianism is not necessary for a lot of people to believe in ridiculous myths. :mischief:
 
MadRat said:
Stop being a armchair politico jerk. I would think most Iranians are not idiots like Ahmadinejad, most are likely pretty well educated. There is likely some miscommunication here and it likely affects the tone but Cyrus hasnt been accusing us of anything. Moreover I think we all learned something.

Rat
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The problem is dictatorships tend to make people leave the country what I think is the reason why so many Iranians live in Europe or the USA.. :(

--> Iranian Intelligence nowadays comes (for the greatast parts) from people living in the "exile".
 
calgacus said:
They could have found a Coptic speaker quite easily. For instance, by contacting the Coptic church in the USA. They were just trying to save time and money I suspect.
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You keep making this ridiculous statement. A) Not everyone who belongs to the Coptic church speaks Coptic. Of the 15 million or so members of the church, only a couple hundred of them speak Coptic. It would not surprise me in the slightest if there was not a single Coptic speaker in the US. B) Those couple hundred speakers generally are clergymen, not video game voice actors. Voice actors are largely unionized, you can't just hire someone off the street. Even if they weren't, do you really think you could just call someone out of the blue and say "Hey, want to fly out to our office and record some voice work?"
 
With hard work it's possible to reconstruct Coptic. Just hire linguists with acting talent and give them time to study. There will be an accent and the language might be stiff, but it's more possible than you think.
They could even fakely reconstruct Ancient Egyptian if they wanted (of which only the consonants are known). I visit non-English mainstream forums and I have seen two Egyptologists discussing the Ancient Egyptian language. There are even people who study dead languages just because they get a kick out of it.
 
I don't know all the other languages but I am sure that Wu's spoken Chinese is pretty authentic.
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The problem is they spoke Middle Chinese at that point in time.
 
factorial said:
You keep making this ridiculous statement. A) Not everyone who belongs to the Coptic church speaks Coptic. Of the 15 million or so members of the church, only a couple hundred of them speak Coptic. It would not surprise me in the slightest if there was not a single Coptic speaker in the US. B) Those couple hundred speakers generally are clergymen, not video game voice actors. Voice actors are largely unionized, you can't just hire someone off the street. Even if they weren't, do you really think you could just call someone out of the blue and say "Hey, want to fly out to our office and record some voice work?"
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Thanks for your opinion, factorial, but you need to be more civil when addressing fellow-forumers.

Anyway, no, Coptic speech is not widespread. But, yes, there are plenty of people with enough Coptic, learned for liturgical usage (hence the US Coptic Church), to do what fixaxis needed. In fact, give me a grammar and dictionary and I could do it. The voice-actors, if they are different, obviously do not need to know the language. It's really no different from the Aramaic deal that firaxis went out of their way to do despite the world having millions of modern Persian speakers.
 
calgacus said:
They could have found a Coptic speaker quite easily. For instance, by contacting the Coptic church in the USA. They were just trying to save time and money I suspect.
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Total Coptic speakers are 300 worldwide. With the exception of a few (who try to hide their identity out of fear of government discrimination in Egypt), most speak it for religious reasons and consider it a sacred language. Are they going to want to speak the language for a video game?
 
Louis XXIV said:
Total Coptic speakers are 300 worldwide. With the exception of a few (who try to hide their identity out of fear of government discrimination in Egypt), most speak it for religious reasons and consider it a sacred language. Are they going to want to speak the language for a video game?
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Like I said, there are plenty in the US with liturgical knowledge, in the same way as Hebrew was virtually dead until resurrected very recently; there'd be no religious issue about speaking it, any more than Aramaic. Plenty of scholars too who could do what was needed. Trust me, this was easy to do if they'd wanted it.
 
CPCMaxwell said:
Same here.

His acting skills are not the best though, and his tone is very familiar and arrogant, talking to me as if I were a kid playing a video game instead of the ruler of an Empire - ho wait...

But the guy who dubbed him is incontestably french.
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Why? I'm with the Quebecois theory. It sounds precisely like a Quebecois parody of French arrogance. You do know that there is a whole Quebec industry of actors who speak perfect Parisian French when they dub American films (and video games too, I would think...). Don't you? Seems, for some reason, the Americans would rather work with Canadians. So the Canadians deliver the required accent.

The incessant use of 'tu' really ticks me though. Did your average turn-of-the-nineteenth century Corsican dictator really talk like this? I think not.
 
Louis XXIV said:
Ramesses speaks Arabic because there are so few people who speak Egyptian anymore. They probably could not easily find someone to speak it. He speaks an Egyptian dialect of Arabic. Obviously, not what he would have spoken back then, but it is what they speak now.
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Egyptologists are a dime a dozen, they could have had any one of them tell them how the words would be pronounced. They dug up dead languages like Akkadian and Aramaic and they could have done the same for Egyptians. Secondly Ramesses is speaking formal arabic, like Haroun Al-Rashid. I could only find a single letter in his speech that he pronounces the 'egyptian way'. If he is going to speak Arabic, they were right to make it formal instead of colloquial, since that is how Arabic-Speaking Egyptian leaders would address people at formal functions.

I only mentioned it as an example of an inaccuracy. I don't really care since I always play as Egypt, and as such never see Ramesses appear on screen. The only times I have seen it have been playbacks on the Civ 5 website before the game was launched.
 
MadRat said:
Stop being a armchair politico jerk. I would think most Iranians are not idiots like Ahmadinejad, most are likely pretty well educated. There is likely some miscommunication here and it likely affects the tone but Cyrus hasnt been accusing us of anything. Moreover I think we all learned something.

Rat
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i wondered and i thank you for your defending!:crazyeye::goodjob:
 
Louis XXIV said:
He is speaking Akkadian. Since it's a dead language and isn't as well-known as Latin, whoever is speaking it definitely tried to keep his phrases as short as possible. It makes Nebuchadnezzar (not Hammurabi) seem a bit brutish, though.

I also think they're going for the craziness attributed to him in the bible.
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It's was pretty wierd to build his throneroom in a leftover dungeon from Age of Conan, though. Father Set digs the crazy mood lighting!
 
calgacus said:
Thanks for your opinion, factorial, but you need to be more civil when addressing fellow-forumers.

Anyway, no, Coptic speech is not widespread. But, yes, there are plenty of people with enough Coptic, learned for liturgical usage (hence the US Coptic Church), to do what fixaxis needed. In fact, give me a grammar and dictionary and I could do it. The voice-actors, if they are different, obviously do not need to know the language. It's really no different from the Aramaic deal that firaxis went out of their way to do despite the world having millions of modern Persian speakers.
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First off, how exactly am I being uncivil? I called your statement ridiculous, something I stand by, but in no way is that any sort of personal attack.

Second, you seem to still be confusing Coptic speakers and the Coptic church. The mere existence of a Coptic church in the US in no way implies Coptic speakers. Coptic speakers make up a fraction of a fraction of a percent of members of the Coptic church, and the Coptic speakers are primarily clergymen, as I've already pointed out. The idea of having some dude who doesn't speak the language and has never heard the language try to read it off a card is horrible, and would be worse than having no dialogue at all.

And how on earth can you compare Aramaic to Coptic? There are over 2 million people who speak Aramaic in the world compared to less than 500 that speak Coptic. That's just not a reasonable comparison.
 
factorial said:
First off, how exactly am I being uncivil? I called your statement ridiculous, something I stand by, but in no way is that any sort of personal attack.
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It is incivil, whether you think it's justified or not. If you want to talk to people like that ... see what you get. :p

factorial said:
Second, you seem to still be confusing Coptic speakers and the Coptic church. The mere existence of a Coptic church in the US in no way implies Coptic speakers. Coptic speakers make up a fraction of a fraction of a percent of members of the Coptic church, and the Coptic speakers are primarily clergymen, as I've already pointed out. The idea of having some dude who doesn't speak the language and has never heard the language try to read it off a card is horrible, and would be worse than having no dialogue at all.
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Coptic is well known among members of the Coptic church, which you would have picked up if you were reading what I wrote. In fact, you say "Coptic speakers are primarily clergymen, as I've already pointed out" ... ... I "pointed this out" to you. :lol:

I have no idea whether they had the actor reading classical or modern Aramaic, but classical Aramaic AND Latin are both dead except in modern liturgy. We still have plenty of people knowledgeable though.
 
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