Civilization 7 Leaders Dialogue Translations

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

I tried searching for the Lac language on Wikipedia and got Lac Viet (aka Luoyue in Chinese). I assume they were Austro-Asiatic speakers? Maybe even proto-Vietic would be appropriate for Trung Trac to speak, but I don't expect reconstructed proto-languages to be used in a game like Civ7.

Not too much of them speaking, but a little bits of dialogue there and here. I'm trying to bump up this thread to prevent it from being buried.

And I tried searching for Lac via contacting several historical linguists based in Southeast Asia and having long conversations about its origins and speculative reconstructions! The consensus seems to be that various people want to place it in various categories for various reasons (academic fame, nationalistic pride, etc), but quite simply there's no record of it, so any such speculation isn't useful for our purposes. Mon-Khmer/Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kradai... we simply don't know, and historical/linguistic speculation past a certain point is more about the desire to categorize than what you'd actually hear.

I used Lao for a placeholder in-house before we got translations into Vietnamese simply because it helped to have something there as dialogue, but that certainly wasn't correct.

 

[notNamed]

I tried searching for the Lac language on Wikipedia and got Lac Viet (aka Luoyue in Chinese). I assume they were Austro-Asiatic speakers?

We don't know what language they spoke, period. From the historical standpoint, it ends at "there's no preserved evidence we could use to make a real call".

 

[Guandao]

We don't know what language they spoke, period. From the historical standpoint, it ends at "there's no preserved evidence we could use to make a real call".

I guess it's the same boat as the Huns, the Xiongnu, and numerous other ancient peoples.

 

[TyrannusRex]

I guess it's the same boat as the Huns, the Xiongnu, and numerous other ancient peoples.

Yeah, Hunnic is completely lost save for three words, unfortunately, excepting several proper names. I like the idea that it may have been Oghuric Turkic, and they used Chuvash in Civ V because of that, but... neither the actor nor the writer really knew Chuvash.

 

[Guandao]

Yeah, Hunnic is completely lost save for three words, unfortunately, excepting several proper names. I like the idea that it may have been Oghuric Turkic, and they used Chuvash in Civ V because of that, but... neither the actor nor the writer really knew Chuvash.

I remember it well, the broken Chuvash of Vitali.....Now it would be even harder to get the cooperation of native Chuvash speakers because of the relationship between Russia and USA....

I looked at a thread in Civ subreddit about what language Xerxes is speaking in Civ7. And Sarah confirmed it was "Avestan". I assume Avestan is better documented than Old Persian?

 

[Zaarin]

I assume Avestan is better documented than Old Persian?

Much. There are a handful of rock wall inscriptions of Old Persian. There's an entire scripture in Avestan.

 

[Guandao]

So we got Machiavelli in the game, and I assume he's speaking relatively modern Italian?

 

[Lord Lakely]

He speaks at version of Italian, yes, from what I can tell. I would likely assume it's a Florentine variation, but I'm sure Andrew will break no NDA clauses if he discloses that bit of information here

 

[Siptah]

He seems to speak modern standard Italian, at least it is easy to understand for me. Modern standard Italian took a lot from the Tuscan dialect. Maybe he speaks an older Tuscan variant, but it isn‘t noticeable in the one line that we can hear clearly, at least for me as a non-native speaker.

 

[untitledjuan]

Isabella seems to be speaking with some form of Medieval Castilian accent, which could perhaps be closer to what she spoke in real life than her portrayal in CIV5, where she spoke modern European Spanish.

 

[Guandao]

Is Charlemagne speaking Frankish?

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Is Charlemagne speaking Frankish?

Probably? It's Germanic. His first line sounds like "Might is better than Wisdom, but Wisdom is better than..."

 

[Zaarin]

Is Charlemagne speaking Frankish?

A German-speaking friend suggested it was Old High German. Definitely not Old French. Listening again, I don't think it's Frankish, either, though I couldn't rule out the possibility for certain from such a brief clip. Frankish was more closely related to (in fact, ancestral to) Dutch than to German.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Is Charlemagne speaking Frankish?

Either lower German or Old Dutch. It's intelligible for me. It is also NOT the same language Barbarossa spoke (High German)

"... better than wisdom. However, wisdom ..." is the snippet in the FL.

The way he pronounces his vowels and fricatives suggests his VA is native to Flanders, the area around Maastricht or the area around Aachen.

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Frankish was our goal.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

A German-speaking friend suggested it was Old High German. Definitely not Old French. Listening again, I don't think it's Frankish, either, though I couldn't rule out the possibility for certain from such a brief clip. Frankish was more closely related to (in fact, ancestral to) Dutch than to German.

A contemporary biographer of Carolus magnus Rex (Einhard) refers to his 'native tongue' as a form of German, and modern scholars have narrowed this down to 'probably' a form of Rhenish Franconian, the ancestor dialect of the German spoken along the Rhine north of the Black Forest. That same biographer also recounts that he was 'functionally bilingual' in Germanic and Romance dialects, and also 'formal' Latin and could understand, and possibly speak, some Greek. On the other hand, the modern consensus seems to be that he was no more than nominally literate, since Einhard says that he only attempted to learn to write late in life and makes no direct mention of him ever reading.

 

[TyrannusRex]

A contemporary biographer of Carolus magnus Rex (Einhard) refers to his 'native tongue' as a form of German, and modern scholars have narrowed this down to 'probably' a form of Rhenish Franconian, the ancestor dialect of the German spoken along the Rhine north of the Black Forest. That same biographer also recounts that he was 'functionally bilingual' in Germanic and Romance dialects, and also 'formal' Latin and could understand, and possibly speak, some Greek. On the other hand, the modern consensus seems to be that he was no more than nominally literate, since Einhard says that he only attempted to learn to write late in life and makes no direct mention of him ever reading.

True, but boy did he promote education within his realm. Never let it be said you're too old to improve yourself.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

True, but boy did he promote education within his realm. Never let it be said you're too old to improve yourself.

The 'Scientific' Attribute they gave him is a nod to this, but they could easily have given him an alternate Persona devoted to science. learning, and consolidation of the Civ. After all, he not only established schools for the children of the nobility and anybody else that could get in, in his reign the curriculum of European education was set for the next 1000 years and the 'standard' symbols and ceremonies of royalty was set for European monarchs for almost the same period. As an example of how pervasive his influence was, the modern Russian word for 'King' - korol (король) is simply the Russian transliteration of his name in Latin: Carolus

 

[stealth_nsk]

The 'Scientific' Attribute they gave him is a nod to this, but they could easily have given him an alternate Persona devoted to science. learning, and consolidation of the Civ. After all, he not only established schools for the children of the nobility and anybody else that could get in, in his reign the curriculum of European education was set for the next 1000 years and the 'standard' symbols and ceremonies of royalty was set for European monarchs for almost the same period. As an example of how pervasive his influence was, the modern Russian word for 'King' - koroly (королй) is simply the Russian transliteration of his name in Latin: Carolus

Just a minor correction - in Russian it's "король" (reads as "korol" with soft "l" in the end). In Serbian it's similar word "краљ", which reads as "kral" also with soft "l".

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Just a minor correction - in Russian it's "король" (reads as "korol" with soft "l" in the end). In Serbian it's similar word "краљ", which reads as "kral" also with soft "l".

Thanx. Corrected. I knew the words were similar in Serbian and several other Slavic languages, but don't have any fluency at all in any but Ukrainian, and that's very limited.