Re: Conlanging in the news

Herman Miller wrote:

> I thought about getting that game the other day, but I'm not yet done
> with Sly 2, Paper Mario, or Baten Kaitos, so I passed it up for the
> moment. Maybe I should go ahead and get it anyway just to check out the
> language.
So yesterday I stopped on my way home from work and got a copy of the
game. There aren't a whole lot of Xbox games that have looked
interesting to me, and Jade Empire was one I was eventually wanting to
get anyway. Most of the dialogue at the start of the game is in English,
but there are a couple of characters who speak Tho Fan.

(While googling for Tho Fan, I ran across this interesting link: could
be the source of the language's name? http://www.1coolpc.com/tho.htm)

It's hard to tell much about the language from the handful of lines of
dialogue that I've heard so far, but my initial impression is that it
does a pretty good job of sounding like a realistic language and not
much like English. Some of the lines are quite a bit shorter than their
English translations, which makes me wonder if the English was rewritten
after the lines were recorded (which would be one advantage of using a
language that no one speaks) or if the Tho Fan lines were kept short to
save disk space. There were a couple of cases where names were mentioned
in the English text, but I didn't notice the names being used in the Tho
Fan speech. If the translations don't match, who's going to know, right?
Then again, maybe I'm just not listening closely enough.

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