46 réponses à ce sujet

[pseudobunny]

Tevene is less of a thing than I thought it was, according to Patrick Weekes.

And I'm strangely upset by this. Call me a language nerd, but I can't be the only one who was hoping for something that can be spoken natively and fluently, right? With how patriotic many of the existing Tevinter characters seem to be, I would have thought that having their own language would be something they would be proud of and they would make an effort to keep it alive. Or maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. They were a huge, influential empire. So why are they using another culture's language? Ancient Tevene was a thing. Why did it die out? This is a place where "you can walk down a side street and find nothing built during the modern ages". Did they not put the same efforts into preserving their language? It doesn't make sense to me.

 

Edit: I hope no one minds that I changed the title, seeing as there's more than just me complaining about Tevene in here now.

[Ariella]

I think it's an illustration of how far they've fallen. And consider even the Dwarves seem to use the trade tongue more than their native one.

And he does say it's not everyone's main language, which means it may be spoken directly at certain levels and it isn't a 'dead' language like say Latin is.

[Iakus]

Eh, it kinda makes sense.  Especially with that comparison to Victorian London

 

I mean, centuries ago, French was the language of the nobility in England.  Recent centuries, not so much.

[Ashagar]

Languages also shift, the archaic Latin spoken in the roman kingdom and the early republic was not the same  as the classical Latin that was spoken in the late republic and early empire or the late Latin spoken in the 5th though 8th centuries in most of western Europe after the fall of the western empire much less the early romance languages that followed afterwards.

[nightscrawl]

According to Patrick Weekes.

https://twitter.com/...232084619423744

And I'm strangely upset by this. Call me a language nerd, but I can't be the only one who was hoping for something that can be spoken natively and fluently, right? With how patriotic many of the existing Tevinter characters seem to be, I would have thought that having their own language would be something they would be proud of and they would make an effort to keep it alive. Or maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. They were a huge, influential empire. So why are they using another culture's language? Ancient Tevene was a thing. Why did it die out? This is a place where "you can walk down a side street and find nothing built during the modern ages". Did they not put the same efforts into preserving their language? It doesn't make sense to me.

 

You're talking like they made the conscious decision to abandon their language, but that's not how these sorts of things work. The Tevinter Imperium as it is today is about as old as our current civilization, and existed as separate kingdoms for thousands of years before that. Languages evolve, shift, change, grow, and sometimes die out, especially if there is trade and exchange with other cultures as Tevinter had with the dwarves. The same can be said of the dwarven language, for the Trade Tongue is primarily spoken by them as well.

 

The current status of Tevene as a language, and the conclusions that were derived from that in this post are quite logical, and I'm not surprised at all.

[Reznore57]

I'd rather have this than being told something like Orlesians have their own language and never actually seeing or hearing it anywhere.

So yeah my point of view is let's go with everyone speaks common tongue and from time to time you have some relic of ancient language appearing.

[nightscrawl]

^ I know David Gaider said something along those lines on one occasion, but I haven't been able to find it, to my great annoyance.

 

Unfortunately, with Orlesian it may as well just be French. You do hear monsieur, madame, and merde during DAI, and there may be others I can't recall at the moment. I was quite surprised to hear the actual French words. It's one thing to have a culture inspired by a French period with the characters having French accents to enhance the flavoring, but to have actual French spoken seemed an odd choice.

[pseudobunny]

Thank you for the responses! I admit, I probably hope for too much when it comes to languages in video games but only because it's something I'm passionate about.

 

You're talking like they made the conscious decision to abandon their language

*goodbye extra text"

 

I meant more like I'd imagine that they would make a conscious decision to preserve it, similar to l'Académie française. Of course, that's only my take on it.

 

Does anyone know how they handle the use of French as Orlesian words in the French-language version of the game?

[nightscrawl]

Does anyone know how they handle the use of French as Orlesian words in the French-language version of the game?

Hah I'd love to know this too. In fact, I'd love to know how the whole Orlesian thing was handled for the French version of the game. I mean, they wouldn't really sound "foreign" to a French person, would they? I suppose they could do some specific regional French accent to distinguish them from the other people, French-speaking Fereldens and whatnot. They could also use other French-speaking countries, like Belgium and Quebec to have a more distinguished sound.

Or I suppose the Fereldens could speak French with an English accent, while the Orlesians have no accent, and things like that. And of course there will still be the regional types, the educated types, the lower class types, and so on.

[Gervaise]

It could well be that the Altus use their own language in private and it could even be a matter of pride that they still could converse in it if they wished and do so at those private parties we hear about, where they also show off their secret magical discoveries to favoured friends.    However, when dealing with the lesser classes they use the common language.   In other words the lower orders aren't worthy of being spoken to in the ancient language.  The other place where using the old language might be useful would be in the world of espionage.   

 

Often a group of people place more store about retaining their native language when they are being oppressed by a foreign ruler who tries to impose their own language upon them.    Speaking the native language then becomes a matter of national pride and cultural identity.     The Tevinter have never experienced this problem because they have never been conquered, so they haven't felt the same need.    

 

Another explanation could be that Hessarian did supress old Tevene at the same time as he ousted the old Altus families and priesthoods of the old gods.   Since Tevinter still follows Andrastrianism, the old language is still shunned in public (as I say above it could be different in private).     If that was the case, then you would expect Cory to have spoken old Tevene and it to be favoured by the Venatori.     However, may be like the Dalish, the majority didn't know the full language but only a few phrases and words.    As for Cory, presumably he wanted his potential worshipers to understand him so helpfully kept to common speech.

 

As I've mentioned over on the Dorian thread, the real reason is that the writers couldn't have Tevene being the everyday language of Tevinter because it would create enormous problems considering we are probably heading there next game.    Hence saying that they only retain a few words in everyday speech.  

[QueenCrow]

Booooo, Patrick Weekes, boooooo!

[pseudobunny]

Hah I'd love to know this too. In fact, I'd love to know how the whole Orlesian thing was handled for the French version of the game. I mean, they wouldn't really sound "foreign" to a French person, would they? I suppose they could do some specific regional French accent to distinguish them from the other people, French-speaking Fereldens and whatnot. They could also use other French-speaking countries, like Belgium and Quebec to have a more distinguished sound.

Or I suppose the Fereldens could speak French with an English accent, while the Orlesians have no accent, and things like that. And of course there will still be the regional types, the educated types, the lower class types, and so on.

 

I think part of the thing about Orlesians having French accents is playing up to some stereotypes of French people, like the whole "posh snobs" idea, so perhaps the accents in French just reflect their status. In contrast, people from Ferelden may have lower class accents or something.

 

 

It could well be that the Altus use their own language in private and it could even be a matter of pride that they still could converse in it if they wished and do so at those private parties we hear about, where they also show off their secret magical discoveries to favoured friends.    However, when dealing with the lesser classes they use the common language.   In other words the lower orders aren't worthy of being spoken to in the ancient language.  The other place where using the old language might be useful would be in the world of espionage.   

 

I may have heard someone suggest that it could be similar to the divide in Norman England with upper class/French and lower class/English but as you said, that was a different situation and Tevinter wasn't conquered. Maybe that could create something like English where more common words are from the Trade Tongue and more "sophisticated" words are from Ancient Tevene? Or even the other way around?

 

 

Booooo, Patrick Weekes, boooooo!

 

Cross my fingers hope for retcon

 

Also, would it be worth changing the title to the "Thedas language thread" or something? Is it even possible to change it?

[Bleachrude]

Wouldn't the default "French" version be the Quebecois accent?

[RoseLawliet]

If you try hard enough, you can find the French version of cutscenes on Youtube. In general, you can search "dragon age inquisition" and "FR" or "VF". Here's someone's playthrough of Wicked Eyes, Wicked Hearts (Yeux sombres et coeur cruel).

 

To my ear (I've studied French for over 8 years, and I'm decent, but not exactly fluent), the Fereldans like Cullen don't exactly sound different. On a non-academic note, however, it is hilarious to hear Cullen speak in French. And even weirder in German.

[RoseLawliet]

As for Tevene, hearing Dorian tell Sera it's not really a thing anymore made me sad. I love languages. But I also have to wonder just when it started dying out, because Corypheus somehow has been sleeping for one thousand years and can perfectly understand Hawke and co.'s modern speech. I know language shift can't really be portrayed (and how anti-climactic would it be if Hawke and Corypheus just stood around, staring at each other?) but this is something that I cannot accept. I can't turn off the linguistics part of my brain!

[Evamitchelle]

Hah I'd love to know this too. In fact, I'd love to know how the whole Orlesian thing was handled for the French version of the game. I mean, they wouldn't really sound "foreign" to a French person, would they? I suppose they could do some specific regional French accent to distinguish them from the other people, French-speaking Fereldens and whatnot. They could also use other French-speaking countries, like Belgium and Quebec to have a more distinguished sound.

Or I suppose the Fereldens could speak French with an English accent, while the Orlesians have no accent, and things like that. And of course there will still be the regional types, the educated types, the lower class types, and so on.

 
From what little I've heard, they didn't really try getting actors with different accents. Everyone has a rather neutral (Metropolitan) French accent, including characters like Josephine and Cassandra.

[RoseLawliet]

 
From what little I've heard, they didn't really try getting actors with different accents. Everyone has a rather neutral (Metropolitan) French accent, including characters like Josephine and Cassandra.

 

Yeah, that. I've also seen some of the romance scenes, and it seriously freaks me out that all the love interests keep calling you "vous" in French and "Sie" in German. These are the formal words for "you", something we don't exactly have in English. I guess the closest thing would be if your significant other called you (completely seriously and straight-faced, by the way) "sir" or "madame".

 

In Inquisition, though, they should have been able to avoid this completely. Romance scenes are content not everyone is going to see, and they're also private and intimate. The whole Inquisition isn't standing around watching you talk with Josephine or Cullen or anyone, and I don't think anyone would be too freaked out about their superior being familiar with their lover anyway. So in private you could be "tu" and "du", but in public it's still "vous" and "Sie". Am I making sense?

[Andraste_Reborn]

That's weird. I have a hard time seeing the Inquisitor's friends still calling them 'Sie', let alone their lovers. Especially people like Sera and Varric!

 

I imagine Cullen, Josephine and Cassandra would be a bit more formal and you've have to politely ask them to duzen you.

[Evamitchelle]

Yeah, that. I've also seen some of the romance scenes, and it seriously freaks me out that all the love interests keep calling you "vous" in French and "Sie" in German. These are the formal words for "you", something we don't exactly have in English. I guess the closest thing would be if your significant other called you (completely seriously and straight-faced, by the way) "sir" or "madame".
 
In Inquisition, though, they should have been able to avoid this completely. Romance scenes are content not everyone is going to see, and they're also private and intimate. The whole Inquisition isn't standing around watching you talk with Josephine or Cullen or anyone, and I don't think anyone would be too freaked out about their superior being familiar with their lover anyway. So in private you could be "tu" and "du", but in public it's still "vous" and "Sie". Am I making sense?

It's quite common in medieval fantasy and historical fiction. The formality is supposed to make the setting more 'authentic'. That's why characters also regularly use tenses that aren't that common in modern French anymore (i.e. passé simple instead of passé composé). 

[Patchwork]

I can understand a having common/trade/everyone speaks it language from a game makers perspective but with what we know about Tevinter I can't imagine them not holding on to their native tongue even if at this point it's more of a legalese/upper class only thing. 

 

Same for Orlais, a language that easily distinguishes the rich from the poor seems exactly their sort of thing. 

[nightscrawl]

I can understand a having common/trade/everyone speaks it language from a game makers perspective but with what we know about Tevinter I can't imagine them not holding on to their native tongue even if at this point it's more of a legalese/upper class only thing. 
 
Same for Orlais, a language that easily distinguishes the rich from the poor seems exactly their sort of thing.

 
Yepper, I agree completely. Then again, it IS just a tweet response that was barely expanded upon, so I think it's difficult to draw too much from what he said.

 
There are also instances like this...

Hi.

You're not missing the banter between Solas and Blackwall about elven beardlessness because of the banter bug. It was pulled out of the banter array and made to not trigger because it actually contradicts Word of Gaider (i.e. canon).

So, what happened was I wrote a bunch of banter while tired and obviously confused about the state of elven facial hair. The banter I wrote got voiced, and then one day, just to be sure, I checked with David Gaider about elven beards. The conversation went kind of like this:

"Hey, can elves grow beards?"
"No."
"Er, really? I wrote a banter referencing elf beards."
"You should probably delete it."
"I will."

So I went off and tried to make sure that this mistake of mine would never see the light of day. Of course, people dug around in the files and found the soundclips.

I would urge you to interpret that banter as Solas trolling Blackwall.

So, as much as I love to have developer quotes that are the answer to whatever question, even they make genuine mistakes and errors. So while I think that dev responses can be taken at face value 95% of the time, there is also that other 5% where they could be in error. And this isn't due to laziness or whatever else, but simply a result of there being SO much content, that a random question by a random player might not get an answer that is 100% accurate.

 

And of course, this example of something being in the game files that is not reflective of the actual fact is something that I certainly DO like to pull out in response to players who INSIST that some random thing they found in the files is "proof" of whatever argument they are trying to make.

[Gervaise]

Another thing to consider is that languages do change over time.   Take English.    At school I was forced to study Chaucer in the English of his time and it was like a foreign language to me.    Ditto when I bought a book in the original English of Shakespeare's time.    We still have some of the words from that time in regular use but on the whole our language sounds and is spelt differently, even though it is English, just not old style English.    If people tried to use the old style English in modern conversation, people would think them odd or pretentious.     I guess that is what PW was trying to suggest with Tevene.  There is old Tevene and modern Tevene (trade language).   

[Ashagar]

Anglo-Saxon aka old English might make a better comparison its also separated by a thousand years from the English we speak today, that's without going to more modern confusions like how ye would have been spoken as the because the y was simply being used to replace a English letter known as a thorn that doesn't exist in other languages or now modern written English and the printing types that the English were importing from Germany.

 

Also at least with 16th, early 17th English you can get a idea of what it would sound like from American English which preserved much of the old ways of speaking and pronouncing things because of isolation from the rest of the English speaking world which also caused it to miss the great vowel shift that hit the rest of the English world. It was pointedly a British complaint around the time of the American Revolution that the American colonists sometimes spoke so archaically it they were sometimes difficult to understand to understand them.

[nightscrawl]

I guess that is what PW was trying to suggest with Tevene.  There is old Tevene and modern Tevene (trade language).

I'm not so sure about that. I believe that when Tevinter started trade with the dwarves that the modern trade tongue was developed that is the common tongue in use by all people in Thedas today. I don't know if it originally came from the dwarves or what.

I'm sure that Dorian is able to read Tevene -- he is highly educated -- just as many educated English people in the Georgian and Victorian periods could read French, Greek, and Latin, but few of them could speak it fluently, especially the case with Greek and Latin. The important and necessary works were in those languages, and if one were to study the classics you had to read them. And of course you would have phrases and various words that would come into popular use, the Tevene festis bei umo canavarum, and so forth, that would hang around in popular speech, just as many Latin phrases have stayed around -- carpe diem, et cetera, deus ex machina (for the writers here), and numerous usages in the legal and medical profession.

 

One has only to read a work like Jane Eyre to see how people of a certain class viewed learning French. That novel is peppered throughout with various French phrases, Jane learns French as part of her education, and it is a selling point for her services as a governess, which I'm sure also applied to Charlotte Bronte herself, who was also a governess.

 

In fact, if Tevinter were more a part of Thedas than it currently is, that is, with pretty much everyone else wanting nothing to do with them, I would suggest that someone like Josephine would have also learned some Tevene as part of her education, for the same reasons as Jane Eyre did. That's not the case, unfortunately, but could change in the future.

[Iakus]

I'm not so sure about that. I believe that when Tevinter started trade with the dwarves that the modern trade tongue was developed that is the common tongue in use by all people in Thedas today. I don't know if it originally came from the dwarves or what.

I'm sure that Dorian is able to read Tevene -- he is highly educated -- just as many educated English people in the Georgian and Victorian periods could read French, Greek, and Latin, but few of them could speak it fluently, especially the case with Greek and Latin. The important and necessary works were in those languages, and if one were to study the classics you had to read them. And of course you would have phrases and various words that would come into popular use, the Tevene festis bei umo canavarum, and so forth, that would hang around in popular speech, just as many Latin phrases have stayed around -- carpe diem, et cetera, deus ex machina (for the writers here), and numerous usages in the legal and medical profession.

 

Well, as Brander Mathews once said: "A gentleman need not know Latin, be he should have at least have forgotten it"