68 réponses à ce sujet

[Lebanese Dude]

A good 95% of the words in a good 95% of the spoken languages are Latin-based. The ones that aren't are Germanic or African-based (except Afrikaans, which is an offshoot of Dutch).

 

i assume you're talking about the European Romance languages only?

Even so "95% of words" is a little too much credit for Latin.

[agonis]

i assume you're talking about the European Romance languages only?

Even so "95% of words" is a little too much credit for Latin.

 

Yes, indeed, "北方話 / 北方话" is Latin for "Don´t let us start this discussion and derail the thread further.

[o Ventus]

i assume you're talking about the European Romance languages only?

Even so "95% of words" is a little too much credit for Latin.

Please, you know full well what I was getting at. "95%" is obviously not a literal figure, but meant to get the point across. The number IS very high, even if not actually 95%. A majority of languages spoken today worldwide can trace their heritage back to Latin.

[JJDXB]

Just to discuss a point the OP made...

Orlais for whatever reason is at least 70 years into Baroque-equivalent era of Thedosian culture (Judicael I rebuilt the Winter Palace in it's current style, and he died in 8:70 Blessed).  I'm a bit surprised that Ferelden and the Free Marches don't seem to have moved on from Mediaeval. Yes, I know Thedas isn't supposed to be mediaeval, but it's a little jarring seeing everyone stuck in this weird cultural quagmire.  It's too static, there's no evolution.

 

 

Please, you know full well what I was getting at. "95%" is obviously not a literal figure, but meant to get the point across. The number IS very high, even if not actually 95%. A majority of languages spoken today worldwide can trace their heritage back to Latin.

 

Only the Romance languages can trace direct lineage.  English and Dutch to an extent get special mention for descent, but of the 7,000 languages spoken on the planet, I guarantee you it isn't even 10%.  By number of speakers, then you may have a point.  All the native romance speakers + the english speakers represent a sizeable amount of the Earth's population.  But I don't think this number exceeds 40% of the worlds population.

[o Ventus]

 

Only the Romance languages can trace direct lineage.  English and Dutch to an extent get special mention for descent, but of the 7,000 languages spoken on the planet, I guarantee you it isn't even 10%.  By number of speakers, then you may have a point.  All the native romance speakers + the english speakers represent a sizeable amount of the Earth's population.  But I don't think this number exceeds 40% of the worlds population.

I very highly doubt there are even 7000 languages spoken in the world as of right now. Not unless you're accounting for regional dialects with their own invented terms and phrases, which one can argue would not be a different language. As in, "normal" German spoken in Berlin is different from "low" German spoken in Bavaria, but they're both German with the same vocabulary and basic syntax. Likewise, Brits and Americans speak their own versions of English, but they're still both understandably English, and neither a Brit nor an American would need to take any language classes to speak to one another.

 

Also, 40% of 7 billion people is still 2.8 billion. That's a tremendous amount of people speaking languages derived from Latin, compared to languages derived from another source. English (which is only partially Latin-based) alone claims more than 2 billion people (including both native speakers and those who learn it as a secondary language). The 5 most common Romance languages (Spanish, Romanian, French, Italian, and Portuguese) claim close to 800 or 900 million more.

[xassantex]

i found the whole thing kind of amusing..  It is caricature after all. C'mon, Marquise Bouffon ?  

So the accent is ridiculous, the gaudiness of HalamShiral .. not to mention the Orlesian bed you can purchase.. i always buy it because it looks so 

tacky in the Inquisitor's bedroom. The Baroquish soundtrack .. i love it. 

( and French is also my mommy tongue .. ) ..

[pdusen]

As in, "normal" German spoken in Berlin is different from "low" German spoken in Bavaria, but they're both German with the same vocabulary and basic syntax. 

 

Okay, not only is Bavarian German not a Low German dialect, it's on the opposite side of the German dialect continuum from where Low German is spoken.

 

Here, for your convenience, is a map from Wikipedia illustrating the general varieties of German and where they are spoken: http://upload.wikime...c_languages.png

 

You really need to stop. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

[Giantdeathrobot]

Just to discuss a point the OP made...

Orlais for whatever reason is at least 70 years into Baroque-equivalent era of Thedosian culture (Judicael I rebuilt the Winter Palace in it's current style, and he died in 8:70 Blessed).  I'm a bit surprised that Ferelden and the Free Marches don't seem to have moved on from Mediaeval. Yes, I know Thedas isn't supposed to be mediaeval, but it's a little jarring seeing everyone stuck in this weird cultural quagmire.  It's too static, there's no evolution.

 

 

To say nothing of the Avaars and Dalish who are even further in the past. I mean, sure it's part of their faction theme, but still. But fantasy does this all the time, admitedly. A Song of Ice and Fire has Greek-type city-states with Hoplite-esque soldiers exist alongside late medieval (Westeros) and even Renaissance-era (Braavos) nations, to say nothing of the Dothraki, Wildlings and Vale clans. 

 

Hey, at least it's not Warcraft where tribal Orcs with stone axes mingle with Goblins building three story tall mechas with lazers. Who somehow get beaten by said stone axes.

[Arakat]

A tricky one to learn, though, as it doesn't use word order to establish sentence structure. Instead, they decline nouns (much like the conjugation of verbs) to denote what element of speech they are, and then word order is used only for emphasis.

 

Actually, Icelandic does use the subject - verb - object word order most of the time, much like the other Scandinavian languages and English, even if the word order is not as strict in Icelandic. But it's true that the nouns are declined, and the best thing is that they decline even proper nouns, meaning the vowels in a name can completely change depending on the role the name has in a sentence.

[Sylvius the Mad]

As in, "normal" German spoken in Berlin is different from "low" German spoken in Bavaria, but they're both German with the same vocabulary and basic syntax.

All varieties of German spoken today are High German. Low German turned into Dutch.

[Mihura]

fake accents then. thank you.

 

Hummm not exactly true, well at least for Josephine.

http://forum.bioware...0#entry17500596

[pdusen]

All varieties of German spoken today are High German. Low German turned into Dutch.

 

Oh, for the love of... NO. http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Low_German

 

Guys, this stuff is not hard to look up before you talk about it.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Oh, for the love of... NO. http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Low_German

 

Guys, this stuff is not hard to look up before you talk about it.

It did occur to me that I should confirm that before posting it.  Then I didn't.

 

Given the similarities, you can see why I thought it resembled Dutch.

[pdusen]

It did occur to me that I should confirm that before posting it.  Then I didn't.

 

Given the similarities, you can see why I thought it resembled Dutch.

 

Granted.

[Gilli]

On Topic: I'm playing in German, so I can't say how the Orlaisian accent sounds in English, but at least you have an accent. In German I don't hear a difference when I talk to an Orlaisian. The only thing I notice are some French sentences and the French names of some charas, otherwise, there's (for me) no difference in their way of speech.
 
Off Topic: The whole fake accents stuff reminds me of these scenes from Asterix Versus Caesar
 

 
Decurio: Ruhe! (Silence)
Briton: What he says?
Decurio: Was sagt er? (What does he say?)
Briton: What he says?
Decurio: Was sagt er? (What does he say?)
Goth:* Ich glauben, er fragen was du sagen. (I think, he ask what you say.)
Decurio: Ich sage: RUHE! (I say: SILENCE!)
Briton: What does he say?
Decurio: RUHE!!
Obelix: RUUUUUHEEEE!!
--
Centurio: *holds a long boring speech, so everyone leaves except for the Briton* Und ihr werdet frischen Mutes beweisen, dass euer Pflichtgefühl... (And you will prove with your valor, that your sense of duty...)
Briton: What he says?"
Centurio: Euer Pflichtgefühl! (Your sense of duty!)
Decurio: Ahahaha "what he says" ahaha... 
 
* The Goth is supposed to be the equivalent of a German, so he should have a German accent, but because the Romans are talking in perfect German, he's talking in German with a bad italian accent. (he's using the basic forms of the verbs instead of the form he should and his word order is a bit off)

[Das Tentakel]

It did occur to me that I should confirm that before posting it. Then I didn't.

Given the similarities, you can see why I thought it resembled Dutch.

To add some confusion - and writing as a Dutch person whose native dialect is, technically, Low German (Nedersaksisch as we say here) - the Dutch themselves used to call their language 'Nederduytsch' or 'Low German'. The distinction between the two - Dutch and Low German - is actually highly artificial and at least partly politically motivated. Until well after World War II, the language frontier between Dutch and German did not exist - there was a political frontier and standard Dutch and High German were quite distinct, but the dialects on both sides of the frontier were very similar or practically identical and still spoken by a majority of the people.
That language frontier has 'hardened' since, particularly on the German side. Some of the main Low German dialects are practically extinct.

 

Of course, there are some holdout areas...which can sometimes lead to tragic situations.

 

[video][/videos]

 

To say nothing of the Avaars and Dalish who are even further in the past. I mean, sure it's part of their faction theme, but still. But fantasy does this all the time, admitedly. A Song of Ice and Fire has Greek-type city-states with Hoplite-esque soldiers exist alongside late medieval (Westeros) and even Renaissance-era (Braavos) nations, to say nothing of the Dothraki, Wildlings and Vale clans. 
 
Hey, at least it's not Warcraft where tribal Orcs with stone axes mingle with Goblins building three story tall mechas with lazers. Who somehow get beaten by said stone axes.

The approach is sometimes called the 'patchwork' method of worldbuilding. It can apply to the world as a whole, sometimes also to individual countries or cultures in a fantasy setting.

 

There are big differences in how they are applied, however. Martin's approach for instance isn't too anachronistic - phalanxes like those of the Unsullied existed in several cultures during different periods, the Free Cities resemble European medieval city-states circa 1300-1400 as much if not more than they resemble Greek city-states, Westeros also seems to be vaguely 1300-1400. The Wildlings and the lands beyond the Wall don't so much resemble ancient or medieval Scotland, but are more like a northern Scandinavia (Lapland) meets outlaw wilderness that is deliberately cut off and isolated - there's no good real-world parallel here, although the Wall itself is of course inspired by Hadrian's Wall.

 

But there are also some very crude examples, particularly with some of the more generic RPG universes. Forgotten Realms is notorious for having ancient Greece and Egypt, a very generic (neither ancient nor medieval nor early modern) China, two fantasy Arabias etc. next to some vaguely feudal and early modern European kingdoms and city-states, Vikings and some ueber-generic barbarians.

 

Here's what Aliette de Bodard, a French fantasy writer (she writes in English, though) wrote regarding patchwork fantasy and 'filing off the serial numbers':

 

 

It’s a com­mon (and human) process to derive SFF soci­eties from exist­ing ones, and mix and match bits and pieces from a vari­ety of places and times–what I call the patch­work process. Again, it’s a process that makes a lot of sense, because it’s hard to com­pletely make up some­thing from scratch (and some­thing that’s indeed com­pletely made up runs the risk of hav­ing no con­nec­tion to how things map out in real­ity). You take a caste soci­ety from India, and put it together with a man­darin exam­i­na­tion sys­tem like in China; and add a blood­thirsty reli­gion sim­i­lar to the Aztecs into the mix. Or you set your story in a world exactly like China, except that it has drag­ons. Or you imag­ine how mod­ern Viet­nam could give rise to a space-faring soci­ety.
The prob­lem is… in most cases, the sources of that inspi­ra­tion are still vis­i­ble. And this then becomes prob­lem­atic if you’ve fudged it too much but haven’t filed off the ser­ial num­bers enough. This can hap­pen if you’re set­ting a near-future story in India (where obvi­ously you can’t file off ser­ial num­bers too much, but have to use a caste sys­tem that can’t have evolved too much from the cur­rent one); or if you’re set­ting a fan­tasy in a his­tor­i­cal British Raj India (again, it’s hard to file off ser­ial num­bers). But there are more sub­tle occur­rences: if f your caste soci­ety is a car­i­ca­ture of the Indian one, but has kept the basic con­cepts and is still prac­ticed by peo­ple with Indian-sounding names on space sta­tions, then your inspi­ra­tion is trans­par­ent to every­one, and this can be a prob­lem. Like­wise if the pseudo-Chinese in your fan­tasy are all mar­tial arts mas­ters or mys­ti­cal sages. Thing is, you’ll say, “it’s just fic­tion, I made it all up, it doesn’t mat­ter”. But it does mat­ter. It does affect peo­ple. It can and does hurt.

There’s a line. Or sev­eral ones. There is a dif­fer­ence between get­ting your details wrong when you’re depict­ing a present-day or near-future India, and when you’re depict­ing a fan­tasy world derived from India: it’s obvi­ously much less dam­ag­ing to get things wrong in a fan­tasy world (at least as far as I’m con­cerned. Other people’s opin­ions might dif­fer), because there is less pre­tence of stick­ing to things that exist. Like­wise, there is obvi­ously a huge dif­fer­ence between a deriv­a­tive uni­verse per­pet­u­at­ing hor­ri­ble cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion (a book set in a his­tor­i­cal China entirely pop­u­lated by karate mas­ters, nin­jas and dragon-hunters [3]), and a uni­verse that puts together enough patch­work and bits and pieces to cre­ate some­thing entirely new and not appro­pria­tive (like Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Dark­ness, or even Kate Elliott’s Cold Steel, which is an alter­nate his­tory hugely depart­ing from our world and dif­fer­ent enough to avoid the deriv­a­tive issues). Prob­lem, of course, is it’s not a line. It’s a mov­ing and weav­ing tar­get; and every­one will have dif­fer­ing opin­ions of where to put it.

 

 

I'm not French, but I get it when some Francophones aren't impressed by Orlais and how it is portrayed; it can very easily be seen as a pretty crude patchwork of a caricature of Louis XIV's court and of the Venetian carnival.

 

Anyway, Witcher III will have an expansion ('Blood and Wine')  that takes place in the Duchy of Toussaint which appears to be French-inspired. It will be interesting to see how it compares to Orlais.

[Sylvius the Mad]

To add some confusion - and writing as a Dutch person whose native dialect is, technically, Low German (Nedersaksisch as we say here) - the Dutch themselves used to call their language 'Nederduytsch' or 'Low German'. The distinction between the two - Dutch and Low German - is actually highly artificial and at least partly politically motivated. Until well after World War II, the language frontier between Dutch and German did not exist - there was a political frontier and standard Dutch and High German were quite distinct, but the dialects on both sides of the frontier were very similar or practically identical and still spoken by a majority of the people.
That language frontier has 'hardened' since, particularly on the German side. Some of the main Low German dialects are practically extinct.

The end of WW2 did this a lot. Note the language spoken today in what was Lothringen.

[Das Tentakel]

The end of WW2 did this a lot. Note the language spoken today in what was Lothringen.

 

It's not really anything directly involved with the end of World War II, more that the assimilation of local dialects to the standard national language accelerated as a result of modern education, full literacy in the standard language and modern media. French has been able to gain some territory in Belgium and France itself at the expense of German, Dutch, Breton, Basque, Catalan and Italian, thanks to (standard-) Francophone cultural dominance, but that's basically something that goes back to the 19th century (and before, but things really accelerated then).

 

The 'political' angle to the distinction between Dutch and Low German has another background - it occurred more or less simultaneously with the replacement of 'Nederduytsch' / Nederduits (Low German) as a term by 'Nederlands' ('Netherlandish'). This occurred in the years after the German unification, and it's not hard to guess why this happened. Best not to give our relatives next door funny ideas...

[Sylvius the Mad]

It's not really anything directly involved with the end of World War II, more that the assimilation of local dialects to the standard national language accelerated as a result of modern education, full literacy in the standard language and modern media. French has been able to gain some territory in Belgium and France itself at the expense of German, Dutch, Breton, Basque, Catalan and Italian, thanks to (standard-) Francophone cultural dominance, but that's basically something that goes back to the 19th century (and before, but things really accelerated then).

The 'political' angle to the distinction between Dutch and Low German has another background - it occurred more or less simultaneously with the replacement of 'Nederduytsch' / Nederduits (Low German) as a term by 'Nederlands' ('Netherlandish'). This occurred in the years after the German unification, and it's not hard to guess why this happened. Best not to give our relatives next door funny ideas...

Those ideas are enshrined in their constitution evem today. The means for a neighbour to join Germany are clearly laid out in German law.