Egypt - Cleopatra Thread

[AriochIV]

If you exclude leaders who are not natives of the country they rule, you rule out about half of the monarchs in history.

 

[Staler87]

Hey at least Nicholas II is a saint. Literally.

 

[Krajzen]

Hey at least Nicholas II is a saint. Literally.

You could use that argument for roughly half of the historical leaders as a lot of them were nominally god's incarnations, saints, heads of church, great shamans, religious leaders, great spirits etc etc - including the most incompetent, failed, boring or depraved heads of state

 

[Iapetus303]

For Russia, how about going real old-school, and having Rurik the Viking,?

 

[Staler87]

I'm actually being serious here. He is a martyred saint in the eastern Orthodox church, the highest level of sainthood possible. In the Russian Orthodox church he is a lower level saint. This was considered after his death (in the Russian case many, many years after) and was actually deserving. It was past the time when sainthood was handed out for political reasons or to people undeserving. I wouldn't put him in the game though. As a leader he was fairly incompetent, but as a religious figure he is kinda worthy of admiration.

 

[Morningcalm]

Back on topic--is Cleopatra's language in-game modern Coptic, or older? How'd they find someone to speak it?

 

[Chinese American]

should have went with King Tut as the Mummy King if they really wanted to draw attraction to kids and laymen. seriously how cool would that be to be negotiating with the Mummy King.

 

[Thormodr]

So, when Cleopatra declares war, she will always swear by Amun Ra? Even if she is Buddhist or Taoist?

 

[Cyon]

That wouldn't have fitted this game...

 

[m15a]

Back on topic--is Cleopatra's language in-game modern Coptic, or older? How'd they find someone to speak it?

In the E3 demo walkthrough live stream, the developers said "ancient Coptic" was the language. From a quick Google search, I don't think Ancient Coptic is an official name of a language, so they possibly mean some earlier form - or else they were mistaken and it's actually the most modern form.

If it is an earlier version of the language, they probably consulted some early language expert who could also do voice acting.

 

[Groucho Marx]

Back on topic--is Cleopatra's language in-game modern Coptic, or older? How'd they find someone to speak it?

Isn't Coptic a dead language in the first place?

 

[Zaarin]

Back on topic--is Cleopatra's language in-game modern Coptic, or older? How'd they find someone to speak it?

The Coptic language has been extinct for about 1300 years, when it was replaced by Arabic, but it remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. How did they find someone to speak it? Well, since the fact that Cleopatra is a woman rules out a priest, the other two options are that she's voiced by a linguist/scholar or simply by a voice actress who's had a dialect coach. Or simply by an ethnic Copt who has learned Coptic, either out of interest in her heritage or to understand the liturgy. Writing dialogue in dead languages isn't really that hard if you have access to a linguist familiar with the appropriate language; being a liturgical language, Coptic would be no harder than Latin.

 

[Thormodr]

The Coptic language has been extinct for about 1300 years, when it was replaced by Arabic, but it remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. How did they find someone to speak it? Well, since the fact that Cleopatra is a woman rules out a priest, the other two options are that she's voiced by a linguist/scholar or simply by a voice actress who's had a dialect coach. Or simply by an ethnic Copt who has learned Coptic, either out of interest in her heritage or to understand the liturgy. Writing dialogue in dead languages isn't really that hard if you have access to a linguist familiar with the appropriate language; being a liturgical language, Coptic would be no harder than Latin.

It certainly hasn't been extinct for 1,300 years. It was still spoken as a day to day vernacular until about 300 years ago in upper Egypt.

The Decline of the Coptic Language

The Coptic language is the last phase of the ancient Egyptian language but is written in the Greek alphabet plus seven Demotic letters.57 The Copts or the Christian Egyptians employed it as their spoken and written language in their daily lives as well as in their churches for several centuries before the Arab conquest. After the invasion of the Arabs in 642 A.D., Arabic gradually began to replace the Coptic language, especially in 705/706 A. D. when the “Umayyad Viceroy ‘Abd-Allah Ibn ‘Abd-al-Malik issued the hazardous and untimely decree substituting Arabic for Coptic in all state Affairs.”58 Thus, the native scribe had to learn Arabic, which is attested by the number of bilingual documents written in different centuries.

The decline in the use of Coptic was also linked to the widespread acceptance of Islam, with many Christians adopting the new religion in order to work as officials in the Islamic government. Evidence of the decline of Coptic can be seen in a text from the tenth century urging the preservation of the Coptic language. From this we can deduce that Arabic had begun to replace Coptic in most parts of the Nile Valley in this century.

The grip of the Coptic language grew weaker even though it continued to be used as a spoken and liturgical language until about the thirteenth century A.D. until the thirteenth century, when Arabic became the written and spoken language and Copts began to write their theological books in Arabic. However, in Upper Egypt, Coptic was still in use until the seventeenth century. When the language began to fade, Copts wrote it in Arabic letters, some manuscripts of which we have indicating this usage.59

The Arab writer Al-Maqrisi, who lived in the fifteenth century, mentioned that the monks in some monasteries were still using the Coptic language and most of the wives and children of Christians living in Upper Egypt used Coptic in their daily speech. In addition, Maspero stated that the inhabitants of Upper Egypt were speaking and writing the Coptic language until the early years of the sixteenth century A.D. By the eighteenth century, the Coptic language was considered dead even though it is still employed in the many prayers and liturgies of the Coptic Church to this day and some of its vocabulary has been mixed into the Arabic in the modern, common spoken Arabic of Egypt.60

http://www.coptic.org/language/boulosayad.htm

There are also a few speakers left (around 300 apparently) but supposedly only one household in Egypt that still speaks it regularly outside of the church. Perhaps they got the housewife in the story to speak the parts.

EXCLUSIVE: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE ONLY EGYPTIAN FAMILY THAT STILL SPEAKS THE COPTIC LANGUAGE INSIDE EGYPT

- There are only four families who speak the Coptic language, and most of the members travel to Canada, Australia, or the United States.
- The number of people who speak Coptic reaches around 300, an no one is still in Egypt except the family of Titti Mouris. At home, their children speak Coptic.
- Titti Mouris: Egyptians must learn their mother language, which is Coptic that has been developed from hieroglyphics, besides keeping their Arabic language.
- When we are in a midst of a group of people, and one of my children does something bad, their father speaks to them in Coptic and smiles because no one understands what he is saying to them – but the children understand and behave themselves.

The Coptic language counts to be one of the lost languages – it does not exist in the Coptic life and is only used in European Universities and academic associations except Egypt, which is the source of this language. While there are still some people who speak this language, this is the only family in Egypt who inherited this language generation after generation. They still use it as the communication language between them. It is noteworthy that the Egyptian modern language kept a lot of words from the Coptic language, which is still in use until now. This is despite the impression, which some people get, that this is a religious language. However, Titti Mouris Abdel AlMessih, the housewife, is the only housewife who speaks Coptic. She and her children live in Alexandria, and she denied that the Coptic language is a religious language. This is clear in her dialogue with us and she exposed how much she loved this language, and the reasons why they use this language until now.

http://www.copticassembly.org/showart.php?main_id=838

 

[stealth_nsk]

The Coptic language has been extinct for about 1300 years, when it was replaced by Arabic, but it remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. How did they find someone to speak it? Well, since the fact that Cleopatra is a woman rules out a priest, the other two options are that she's voiced by a linguist/scholar or simply by a voice actress who's had a dialect coach. Or simply by an ethnic Copt who has learned Coptic, either out of interest in her heritage or to understand the liturgy. Writing dialogue in dead languages isn't really that hard if you have access to a linguist familiar with the appropriate language; being a liturgical language, Coptic would be no harder than Latin.

There's quite a problem with old languages - we can't reconstruct their sound unless we have rhymed poetry (or some words referenced directly from another language having such poetry). That's why we don't know whether "Caesar" starts with "k", "ts" or some other sound - roman poetry wasn't rhymed. As far as I'm aware, Coptic don't have such sources too, so we're likely to see modern Coptic interpretation.

Honestly, I'm totally ok with modern language interpretations, as long as it don't have too much words from the outside. Hearing "Emperor" from Montezuma in Civ5 was quite funny Although that's not enough to bother me, of course.

 

[Zaarin]

There's quite a problem with old languages - we can't reconstruct their sound unless we have rhymed poetry (or some words referenced directly from another language having such poetry). That's why we don't know whether "Caesar" starts with "k", "ts" or some other sound - roman poetry wasn't rhymed. As far as I'm aware, Coptic don't have such sources too, so we're likely to see modern Coptic interpretation.

Honestly, I'm totally ok with modern language interpretations, as long as it don't have too much words from the outside. Hearing "Emperor" from Montezuma in Civ5 was quite funny Although that's not enough to bother me, of course.

Completely untrue, and we know that <c> was /k/ in Classical Latin. Obviously it palatalized before front vowels in Vulgar Latin, either to /ts/ or to /s/. We don't need rhyming poetry to deduce sounds; indeed, the chief use of poetry in philology is to deduce stress, and Latin's stress pattern is well known: penultimate if heavy, otherwise antepenultimate. Sounds can be deduced from orthography, spelling errors, transcription of foreign names and words (hence our understanding that Phoenician voiceless plosives were aspirated: Greek transcribed them as <&#966; &#952; &#967;> rather than <&#960; &#964; &#954;>, which they used to transcribe Phoenician's emphatic consonants), and knowledge of modern forms where applicable. We have a very good idea how many ancient languages were spoken, including Latin, Coptic, Akkadian, Gaulish, etc. even down to their allophony. Ancient Semitic and Egyptian languages are more complicated because of their lack of transcribed vowels, but aside from loanwords in Greek and Latin we have some clues in Coptic for Ancient Egyptian and Neo-Punic for Punic and Phoenician, plus Tiberian Hebrew for Hebrew, etc.

tl;dr: There are many methods to reconstruct an ancient language's sounds, and we can be quite confident about both Latin and Coptic.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Completely untrue, and we know that <c> was /k/ in Classical Latin. Obviously it palatalized before front vowels in Vulgar Latin, either to /ts/ or to /s/. We don't need rhyming poetry to deduce sounds; indeed, the chief use of poetry in philology is to deduce stress, and Latin's stress pattern is well known: penultimate if heavy, otherwise antepenultimate. Sounds can be deduced from orthography, spelling errors, transcription of foreign names and words (hence our understanding that Phoenician voiceless plosives were aspirated: Greek transcribed them as <&#966; &#952; &#967;> rather than <&#960; &#964; &#954;>, which they used to transcribe Phoenician's emphatic consonants), and knowledge of modern forms where applicable. We have a very good idea how many ancient languages were spoken, including Latin, Coptic, Akkadian, Gaulish, etc. even down to their allophony. Ancient Semitic and Egyptian languages are more complicated because of their lack of transcribed vowels, but aside from loanwords in Greek and Latin we have some clues in Coptic for Ancient Egyptian and Neo-Punic for Punic and Phoenician, plus Tiberian Hebrew for Hebrew, etc.

tl;dr: There are many methods to reconstruct an ancient language's sounds, and we can be quite confident about both Latin and Coptic.

Cool, thanks!

 

[smartcanuck1988]

In the new builders vid it looks like Thebes is the capital? Makes more sense to me than Giza. Not sure if that has been confirmed previously?

 

[Krajzen]

Not sure where I read it but I recall someone saying there can be few possible initial capitals of a civilisation, so it doesn't always start with the same one.

 

[Monado]

Not sure where I read it but I recall someone saying there can be few possible initial capitals of a civilisation, so it doesn't always start with the same one.

Thats cool. I've played Civ V with mods to completely randomize city lists every game. Seeing the same few (especially in V where I only ever built max 5) names is tiring.

Maybe I won't need it for VI

 

[AriochIV]

Also, you've always been able to manually change the names of cities.