Leaders speak their own language

)Zarathustra( said:
lolwut? Since when did Greeks ever spoke latin? They spoke ancient greek, and later it evolved into modern greek.

:eek: Stop mushrooms or buy a history book, dude.

Now, if they pur Brazil it will obviously be Portugese. Same way that if they put Mexicans it would be Spanish, but Aztec would be their native language.
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You're right the ancient Greeks didn't speak Latin. It's been a while since my last philosophy class and I thought that Aristotle was translated from Latin, but it was Greek.

This doesn't change the fact that I disagree with the decision to put atmosphere above practical gameplay. I'm not nor ever have been one to put form over function and that's what this decision does.

Hollywood picks and chooses the times when they use native tongue and when they use the audience language. For movies they want to win awards on, the go native language and subtitles, for movies they want to make money on they go all audience language. The biggest examples of the latter are Star Treck (both the movies and the T.V. shows) and Star Wars. Yes they may have sparsely thrown in some other languages, but those instances were rare. They didn't even have a language barrier when they first met a new species, except when it was needed for the plot.
 
You write that like it's news. The American public are renowned for their hatred of subtitles.
 
cephalo said:
I'm sure they won't get this exactly right, and I'm sure it will be repetitive and annoying. They aren't going to ship 100 GB of dialog.
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No, I imagine they wouldn't ship the game with almost a year :eek: worth dialogues. That would be insane. The point here being that compressed spoken dialogue does not require that much space. 1 GB of space can easily hold 40 hours of dialogue. (Depending on how fussy you get with quality, but it is not like quality of human speech is much effected by loss of high and low frequencies.)
 
WeaselSlapper said:
You're right the ancient Greeks didn't speak Latin. It's been a while since my last philosophy class and I thought that Aristotle was translated from Latin, but it was Greek.

This doesn't change the fact that I disagree with the decision to put atmosphere above practical gameplay. I'm not nor ever have been one to put form over function and that's what this decision does.

Hollywood picks and chooses the times when they use native tongue and when they use the audience language. For movies they want to win awards on, the go native language and subtitles, for movies they want to make money on they go all audience language. The biggest examples of the latter are Star Treck (both the movies and the T.V. shows) and Star Wars. Yes they may have sparsely thrown in some other languages, but those instances were rare. They didn't even have a language barrier when they first met a new species, except when it was needed for the plot.
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Last time I heard d'Artagnan in an American movie saying "One for all, all for one", I almost peed my pants.

Everybody who has a little bit of respect for cinema as an art watch foreign movies with subtitles. I tried to watch Star Wars in french once, it sounded so gross that I stopped after five minutes.

This conservatism and this lack of opening/curiosity may also explain why most Europeans speak currently two / three languages when Americans of our age don't even understand the purpose of mastering anything else than English. And I don't see where reading your opponent's emissary instead of hearing him changes anything to the gameplay. You spend the whole game reading informations.
 
)Zarathustra( said:
This conservatism and this lack of opening/curiosity may also explain why most Europeans speak currently two / three languages when Americans of our age don't even understand the purpose of mastering anything else than English. And I don't see where reading your opponent's emissary instead of hearing him changes anything to the gameplay. You spend the whole game reading informations.
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Hey don't be too hard on the Americans for their langual difficiencies. If Europeans weren't so quick to whip out the English when we visit, maybe we'd be forced to learn somthing! :lol:

I went to France when I was younger. Every conversation went like this:

Me: "uhhh Je... Voudrais...."
Clerk: "This bus goes to Marseille, and that one goes to Aix-en-Provence."
Me: "Thanks."

Pretty much everyone I had to talk to spoke wonderful English. The only exception was a shady looking man who tried to sell me something at the train station. I couldn't understand a word he said but he had the word SCOTLAND tatooed accross his entire forehead.
 
cephalo said:
Hey don't be too hard on the Americans for their langual difficiencies. If Europeans weren't so quick to whip out the English when we visit, maybe we'd be forced to learn somthing! :lol:

I went to France when I was younger. Every conversation went like this:

Me: "uhhh Je... Voudrais...."
Clerk: "This bus goes to Marseille, and that one goes to Aix-en-Provence."
Me: "Thanks."

Pretty much everyone I had to talk to spoke wonderful English. The only exception was a shady looking man who tried to sell me something at the train station. I couldn't understand a word he said but he had the word SCOTLAND tatooed accross his entire forehead.
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:lol: Yes, but look, Brits know that they don't need it for communicating, and they still somehow manage to learn a bit of German or French. They pretend they don't, but I live in London, and, believe me, everybody speaks french. They just hide it very well.
 
Well, French and German are what we learn at school and some people (notably the duty-dodgers on their frequent trips to France) retain more of it from school than most :)
 
)Zarathustra( said:
:lol: Yes, but look, Brits know that they don't need it for communicating, and they still somehow manage to learn a bit of German or French. They pretend they don't, but I live in London, and, believe me, everybody speaks french. They just hide it very well.
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Ya but for the Brits a trip to Germany or France isn't a big deal, where for most Americans a trip to a country that speaks another language is usually a pretty expensive endeavor with the only exception for some Americans being Mexico. So it's more useful for a Brit to learn a language that they are more likely to use. I would guess there are more people in the US that speak Spanish then in all of Europe, including Spain.

I bet if you were to take any European nation and surround it with countries that speak the same language you would have the same % of multilingual people as in the US. Look at a nation like China, nobody bashes them because most Chinese people only speak their dialect of Chinese.
 
)Zarathustra( said:
This conservatism and this lack of opening/curiosity may also explain why most Europeans speak currently two / three languages when Americans of our age don't even understand the purpose of mastering anything else than English. And I don't see where reading your opponent's emissary instead of hearing him changes anything to the gameplay. You spend the whole game reading informations.
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Where I live we have to be fluent in at least one language (usually Spanish)
 
mattigus said:
Remember in CivRev where the leaders spoke in rediculous gibberish?
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Don't insult me by saying I could have played this console thing :p

But I remember Civ4, and from what I've heard it was the actual somehow relevant languages (of course, I can't confirm anything about Mayan or the like).
)Zarathustra( said:
I don't see them bothering with expert in ancient egyptian for Cleopatre voice as nobody would notice the difference.
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Especially as Cleopatra was probably speaking greek :p
 
Akka said:
Especially as Cleopatra was probably speaking greek :p
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That's a damn good point.:lol:

I bet you whatever you want that if they implement her in the game, they won't make her speak Greek, though.
 
The thing I don't understand about this (without wanting to get into the back and forth that's been going on), is why it would really matter to have subtitles. I mean, every Civ game has just had text for diplomacy dialogue, so it doesn't seem like anything is really being sacrificed here. I certainly don't see how it compromises gameplay...

And if it's anything like the dialogue in previous civ games, I will just disregard it. I couldn't tell you what any of the leaders usually say because I just look at what we're offering each other.


I bet you whatever you want that if they implement her in the game, they won't make her speak Greek, though.
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I'll take that bet because I think they'd much rather find someone to translate lines into Greek than ancient Egyptian! This would especially be true since they'd already need someone to be doing it for Alexander or whoever they use for their Greek leader.
 
Actually Cleopatra had a gift for languages. She was reported to have been fluent in 7 to 10 actually.

Her native tongue would have been Greek but she was also the first Ptolemy to actually learn "Egyptian".

So it's not unreasonable for her to be depicted as speaking "Egyptian".

"Well, she was the only Ptolomeic Pharoah to speak the Egyptian language..."

...so there's one.

she would most likely have had to speak Latin (2). Many sources state that Greek was her first language, and notations in greek have been found by her hand on the bottom of several documents (3). Some sources that I have found say she also spoke Aramaic (4), "Ethiopic" (5), and Hebrew (6). Other sources indicate that she spoke Syrian (7) and "Troglodyte" (8). I believe that in this context "trogolodyte" is another (derogatory) term for Ethiopian. Yet another source lists Arabic (9) as one of Cleopatra's languages. "Persian" (10) is also on some lists.

There are several sources for information about the life of Cleopatra. Interestingly the main one, Plutarch, does not mention Latin as one of the languages Cleopatra mastered. I think it would be silly to assume that she did not speak it, though, or at least read/write it. A woman as astute and intelligent as Cleopatra would certainly have wanted to learn the language of the bigest player in the Mediterranean world at the time.

I have seen sources state that Cleopatra kew anywhere from 6 to 9 different languages. I turned up reference to at least 10. The core group seems to be Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian. I posit that Latin should be included as well. Beyond that, suppose you can chose for yourself!

A couple of good sources for this info:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/cleopatra/whocleo5a.html
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa082801a.htm
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http://askville.amazon.com/Cleopatra-spoke-languages-idea/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8436468


From Plutarch Life of Mark Antony 25.5-28.1, 29. 2nd cent. A.D. G

27. The next day he invited her in return, and he considered it a matter of honour to exceed the magnificence and care of her entertainment, but when he was outdone and vanquished by her in both respects, he was the first to make fun of himself for his bombast and rusticity. Cleopatra saw the soldierly and common nature of Antony's jokes, and she used the same soldier's humour towards him in a relaxed and confident manner. For (as they say) it was not because her beauty in itself was so striking that it stunned the onlooker, but the inescapable impression produced by daily contact with her: the attractiveness in the persuasiveness of her talk, and the character that surrounded her conversation was stimulating. It was a pleasure to hear the sound of her voice, and she tuned her tongue like a many-stringed instrument expertly to whatever language she chose, and only used interpreters to talk to a few foreigners; usually she gave responses by herself, as in the case of Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, Parthians, and she is said to have learned the languages of many other peoples, although her predecessors on the throne did not bother to learn Egyptian, and some had even forgotten how to speak the Macedonian dialect.[5]
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http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/wlgr-publiclife175.shtml
 
When you said that Troglodyte probably means Ethiopian I thought they were from different sources. But since your quote list them in a same list, I think it's hard for them to mean the same thing. It could happen only, I think, if Plutarch copied other documents without any reasearch. I am not really versed on ancient writers, and don't know if it's his style doing that, it just struck me as odd.
 
zehcoutinho said:
When you said that Troglodyte probably means Ethiopian I thought they were from different sources. But since your quote list them in a same list, I think it's hard for them to mean the same thing. It could happen only, I think, if Plutarch copied other documents without any reasearch. I am not really versed on ancient writers, and don't know if it's his style doing that, it just struck me as odd.
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The first quote is not from Plutarch. It is someone's opinion and I gave the sources that he used to formulate that opinion. (The 2 links) One of the links mentions Troglodyte. So the person's opinion is that Troglodyte is likely Ethiopian.

The second quote is from Plutarch.
 
Sorry, I meant to say that I think the thought exposed on the first quote is odd, because of what I saw in Plutarch's. I mean, it's like saying that in the same list of languages you'd have French and Froggish [the most harmless derogatory term I found]. Well, summing up: I thought the opinion emitted in the firsr quote was odd given that it assumes, IMO, that Plutarch just wrote down Troglodyte without even knowing what that was. Again, I'm not versed in Plutarch, but I know he is very renowned to this day, making it hard to believe that he would make such a mistake.
 
That was impressive foe the least, Thormodr.

I would still cry if Cleopatra strarted to speak to me in latin or in greek. Although I think we probably have absolutely no idea whatsoever about how Egyptian sounded.
 
Has any one played Sid Meier's Pirates?
They do speak, but in a fantasy language !
It is not that bad, and it avoids misunderstandings.
English is not my language, but I always play the games in English as
1- playing the original language reduces the "original" bugs
2- it facilitates patching
3- it is 99.99% of the time the only language available when purchasing the game in some non English-speaking countries... so better to get used to it!

Pirates has everything written, and I was very fine wirh this.

My wife is Thai. She plays games in English as Thai speaking games are not very common, especially when you do not live in thailand! And it allows us to share the computer (I can't read Thai... can you?...)
However, playing games where characters speak (English) and no subtitle is close to impossible: she can't understand as they speak too quickly and with a US accent that is too "heavy" for her level of understanding.

I think uniformizing the language by simply letting historical people speaking what is supposed to be their mother tongue is not a bad idea. Subtitles will always allow defavorised or challlenged people to catch up with the story/topic.
 
Arakhor said:
You write that like it's news. The American public are renowned for their hatred of subtitles.
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Don't make generalizations about US and I won't make any about the UK. I am not the only American who doesn't hate subtitles. Not only that I never have a problem with following the action of the story and reading of subtitles.

Also Weasel I am 100% certain that there will be a mute button for the voices. They have it in Civ IV they will have it for Civ V.
 
I want Jeanne d'Arc back in the game now. Isabella would be ok too, but French is nicer and Napoleon won't do it...

Are there any other languages that are good on the ears?
 
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