Prime Junta
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Says the guy who first presents his argument with the following cool, courteous, and reasonable phrases:
Yep yep. Can dish it out, but can't take it. Cry some more, punk.
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Incline Disco Elysium - The Final Cut - a hardboiled cop show isometric RPG
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Says the guy who first presents his argument with the following cool, courteous, and reasonable phrases:
Yep yep. Can dish it out, but can't take it. Cry some more, punk.
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oh boy, are we having a fight about whether if it's cool or not to use fictional languages in media? i'm almost tempted to ask Haba on whether if Pathologic 2's writing benefits from the conlang made to give the game's fictional universe more flavor and depth. in my opinion, it adds to hypnagogic quality the game has.. which is also a trait Disco Elyisum has.
Question is whether this sort of retardery is the mental product of McComb or if it's just an artefact of the thoroughly stupid and ridiculous tabletop setting that they've chosen for the next Torment game for some unfathomable reason.
I don't agree with Haba on the English thing but Tolkien based his fictional languages on real ones, precisely because they just sound "right" to our ears, they resonate. So the high Elves are Finns, Wood Elves are Welsh, dwarves are underground Jews, horse masters are Saxons and so on. Even if you're not a linguist it just somehow, subconsciously makes sense.
Languages that are just completely made up, like blaa-bli-blaa baby speech, do not have this effect. Usually they sound incredibly lame.
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Prime Junta
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Oh man, back in the 1990s I used to be active on rec.arts.books.tolkien, we talked a lot about this shit.
Tolkien's conlangs aren't really based on any real-world languages, although they are influenced by them. High Elven is phonetically and structurally somewhat similar to Finnish, but there isn't anything a Finn would recognise there – "Aï, laurië lantar lassi surinen / Yeni unótimë ve ramar aldaron" doesn't look or sound at all like Finnish to a Finn, diphthongs notwithstanding. The Finnish cognates are really few and far between, only one I can think of off the bat is "ilmen" for the heavens which is a cognate for "ilma," air, probably by way of Ilmatar, the Kalevalan Lady of the Heavens.
Sindarin is even less influenced by Celtic languages. It is descended from Noldorin the same way modern English is descended from Old English. "A Elbereth gilthoniel / silivren penna miriel" doesn't sound Welsh or Irish or Gaelic to any Celt.
As to the Rohirrim, in LotR Tolkien uses Old English as a stand-in for their language, the same way he uses modern English as the stand-in for Westron, which is the common language in the West of Middle-Earth where it is set. The reason is that the relationship between Rohirric and Westron is similar to Old and modern English, so a Westron-speaker would get a similar "feel" from Rohirric as an English-speaker would get from Old English. Hobbit placenames are derived from Middle English, reflecting the common linguistic roots again – hobbit names are actually "translated" or "transposed" from their language into Middle/modern English. IIRC Meriadoc Brandybuck's real name is something like Kalimak Braldagamba for example – Westron really isn't at all like English. And yes he did go a long way to constructing these languages too, even though they don't even appear in the books.
Tolkien used languages beautifully to manage the sense of familiarity and strangeness in his world. He would use his conlangs as-is if they would have been alien/different enough for Westron-speakers, hence Sindarin, Noldorin, Khazâd, and Black Speech are left untranslated, but Westron becomes English, Rohirric becomes Old English, and hobbit placenames like Michel Delving become Middle/Old English.
Yep, agreed. It's a tricky proposition. You don't need to have fully fleshed-out conlangs though, you can substitute real-world languages or even just phonemes from real-world languages if you're clever about it, the point is that there has to be a purpose to it. If it's just random it's stupid. Robert E. Howard for example didn't create full conlangs but he did use phonemes from real (dead and existing) languages in his place and character names and occasionally in the text too. That worked quite well because he was thoughtful about it. If in his cosmology Gypsies descended from a particular civilisation, Zingara suggests that quite nicely, like Khem and Thoth-Amon suggest Egyptians.
Sailor Woedica
Cipher
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Omg everyone is really knowledgeable about fake language stuff lol it’s something I’ve never even thought about except that it sounds cool in Deadfire when they say ekera or gellarde!
Sure, that's what I mean. Quenya is not Finnish with a twist but superficially it sounds awfully like it and that's enough to resonate with people.
Sure you can make up fictional languages and fictional histories to fictional cultures. The question is whether that seen as a masturbatory experience by the writer or something that feels like a living, natural part of the setting. Pathologic is an artistic experience by design, their use of colang fits into that framework.
Look at it from this point hosting a game of Planescape and having your players learn to speak Planescape slang v.s. having your players learn to speak Klingon. You could play PST without looking up the words or having an in-game wiki. They make sense in the context and fit with the rest of the spoken language of the game. That's why (for normal cases) I advocate using English, as the majority can infer the meaning without knowing the word.
Similarly you can have an immigrant use loan words (like in DE) while still talking in English. Feels natural. Get a voice actor who speaks that language and they can even pronounce everything (while having a natural accent in English).
But imagine a setting where everyone speaks some variant of English language, but they call the queen Héamecwyn. Even if you make up a fictional language, you have to think about how the people in that fictional world would adapt to encounters with that language. If that word for queen was in daily use, probably they would adapt it somehow. You know, unknown language v.s. unknown language adapted to English, still following English grammar.
For all the effort Tolkien put into Elvish languages, he used them very sparingly. The whole Lord of the Rings wouldn't exist without the language, so in that case Tolkien is really an outlier. It is completely on its own level.
Now average fantasy writers aping Tolkien make up their own languages, but they don't understand the absurd amount of effort he put into it. If the end result is that you make up a few funny words to replace already existing words, I'd much rather you spent the time to enrich the main language your text is in.
Prime Junta
Guest
^
OK so now this makes complete sense, once you stopped the juvenile woofing about beating people up with mallets. If you want to have a reasoned discussion it helps to discuss in a reasonable tone, bruh.
For example:
I entirely agree with this. The way Josh's conlangs were used in dialogues in both Pillars games was just clumsy and bad. "Fucking pidgins, how do they work."
But to get from that to "USE ENGLISH or something that closely resembles English" is a bit of a leap. And to get from that to edgelording about Disco just makes it look like you left your fly unzipped and your agenda hanging out.
Because Disco does use made-up words, loan words, foreign phrases, and accents in an intelligent and intentional way, to communicate all kinds of stuff about the world organically, without loredumps. It's not random at all.
OK so now this makes complete sense, once you stopped the juvenile woofing about beating people up with mallets. If you want to have a reasoned discussion it helps to discuss in a reasonable tone, bruh.
For example:
I entirely agree with this. The way Josh's conlangs were used in dialogues in both Pillars games was just clumsy and bad. "Fucking pidgins, how do they work."
But to get from that to "USE ENGLISH or something that closely resembles English" is a bit of a leap. And to get from that to edgelording about Disco just makes it look like you left your fly unzipped and your agenda hanging out.
Because Disco does use made-up words, loan words, foreign phrases, and accents in an intelligent and intentional way, to communicate all kinds of stuff about the world organically, without loredumps. It's not random at all.
honestly I think de vs poe2 is like the hyperexample of how to do it vs how not to do it. de in part because it's used sparsely and to express stuff vs poe2 where it is littered across every single npc all the time as if to constantly shove the thing of it in your face. "look we made this thing isn't it cool." as with so many other things it comes to restraint and subtlety in the end, if you use it for something vs. if you use it just to use it
Harthwain
Arcane
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Not really. 1eyedking tried to say that using "boiadeiro" instead of "cowboys" is somehow "needlessly convoluted", not that Disco Elysium uses made-up words/language.
Ekera!
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The cant of Planescape: Torment is taken directly from the Planescape campaign setting, where David Zeb Cook borrowed from English thieves' cant of the early-modern era:
Late to this one but how can you have been on this forum so long without realizing this is DR's base m.o.: overly apologetic about stuff he likes (ELEX, Shadowrun), overly critical about stuff he does not. It also makes the part about rationalization kindda ironic considering DR's sharp wit and intellect is exactly what enables him to do just that in aforementioned cases
Still the love the guy so what can you do
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Prime Junta
Guest
Siim-Kosmos? :D
Both satisfied with and disappointed in the ending.
The moment with your ex was utterly painful and beautiful, expertly written in all aspects. Even small things like her having her luggage - a fairly blunt metaphor for her escaping your grasp - was so well executed and without just batting you over the head with the imagery. While the tribunal was very... vanilla but ultimately satisfactory. I was afraid the game would dive too much into its postmodernist side with the facts and go into Lost-territory, pussying out of answering the questions of its own mythos because it had too little structure. Glad it did not do this. There's a lot untold, of course, but almost everything relating to the main story *is* answered, the story has purpose, it was not just postmodernist masturbation.
As a postmodernist work, it is, thankfully, more Paul Auster than modern deconstructivism. In fact, it is very little of the latter, which is ironic considering much of the criticism in this thread. Many times it is the opposite - earthbound, concrete and almost sincere to a fault (for instance, the culmination of the cryptozoology quest being a very banal point about whether Morell's love for Lena is a result of things outside of "herself" (her having seen the phasmid) or actual love of her) or the utterly straight played side-quest of the dead drunkard on the pier.
But the actual ending - talking with the deserter and the phasmid - left much to be desired I felt. There might be a few things I'm missing, but I felt as a metaphor the deserter was too much "reflection of Harry if he refuses to let go" and too little commentary on ideology and ideas. The latter I felt was severely missing from the midgame and forward. The game opens up with the seeming ambition of discussing ideas and ideology - not so much the specific ideologies it pokes fun at, but how much man is idea and how much he is impulse and material. How much ideology is a reflection of world analysis and how much it is simply aspects of personality and perspective. It seems to abandon this altogether in favor of its core story about Harry, the case and more easily accesible discussions about personal feelings, loss etc. The latter I think works very well, but it does feel like it fails to conclude much on its discussion of ideology. As such, ideology is reduced to a compelling part of the game's atmosphere - it fails to provide much thematic substance.
I realize it does attempt some discussion of ideology with the deserter as a centerpiece, but it feels more like ideology here is just a vehicle to talk about absolutism and lack of personal honesty (him being motivated by jealousy, shame and his personal failings rather than the lofty ideology he professes to be the cause), there's not much debate on idea/ideology in itself.
Mechanically, I also think the game falls short of true greatness - though it is certainly fantastic. It is not reactive enough to be called a masterpiece, but it does come close with the wealth of downright amazing ideas it pulls off. Which, in itself, is massive praise.
As a postmodernist work, it is, thankfully, more Paul Auster than modern deconstructivism. In fact, it is very little of the latter, which is ironic considering much of the criticism in this thread. Many times it is the opposite - earthbound, concrete and almost sincere to a fault (for instance, the culmination of the cryptozoology quest being a very banal point about whether Morell's love for Lena is a result of things outside of "herself" (her having seen the phasmid) or actual love of her) or the utterly straight played side-quest of the dead drunkard on the pier.
But the actual ending - talking with the deserter and the phasmid - left much to be desired I felt. There might be a few things I'm missing, but I felt as a metaphor the deserter was too much "reflection of Harry if he refuses to let go" and too little commentary on ideology and ideas. The latter I felt was severely missing from the midgame and forward. The game opens up with the seeming ambition of discussing ideas and ideology - not so much the specific ideologies it pokes fun at, but how much man is idea and how much he is impulse and material. How much ideology is a reflection of world analysis and how much it is simply aspects of personality and perspective. It seems to abandon this altogether in favor of its core story about Harry, the case and more easily accesible discussions about personal feelings, loss etc. The latter I think works very well, but it does feel like it fails to conclude much on its discussion of ideology. As such, ideology is reduced to a compelling part of the game's atmosphere - it fails to provide much thematic substance.
I realize it does attempt some discussion of ideology with the deserter as a centerpiece, but it feels more like ideology here is just a vehicle to talk about absolutism and lack of personal honesty (him being motivated by jealousy, shame and his personal failings rather than the lofty ideology he professes to be the cause), there's not much debate on idea/ideology in itself.
Mechanically, I also think the game falls short of true greatness - though it is certainly fantastic. It is not reactive enough to be called a masterpiece, but it does come close with the wealth of downright amazing ideas it pulls off. Which, in itself, is massive praise.
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Is the drunk on the pier always dead, even if you go there as soon as you can?
KVVRR
Learned
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- Apr 28, 2020
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What little spanish was in DE was decently done and well put within the game so I just assumed whatever non-english and non-spanish words there were were just from another language and not made up.
Props to them for putting in the effort, though. Call-me-mañana wasn't as good, but I could inmediatedly tell the Crabman was a spanish speaker from the first line he says to Harry. Lots of games and even acclaimed media with heavy use of the tongue just don't bother and just try to teach a (albeit good) actor some lines in spanish, and it never ends up good. Anybody who knows spanish and has heard Gustavo Fring try to be menacing in it knows this pain.
La Puta Madre is a great name for a mobster too. Cheesy but it works.
Props to them for putting in the effort, though. Call-me-mañana wasn't as good, but I could inmediatedly tell the Crabman was a spanish speaker from the first line he says to Harry. Lots of games and even acclaimed media with heavy use of the tongue just don't bother and just try to teach a (albeit good) actor some lines in spanish, and it never ends up good. Anybody who knows spanish and has heard Gustavo Fring try to be menacing in it knows this pain.
La Puta Madre is a great name for a mobster too. Cheesy but it works.
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