Re:Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)
by yumaikas on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @06:43PM
(#17554156)
Can you provide a source for this? I'm very curious, as I grew up speaking Tok Pisin, and played some Riven, and looking up cutscenes online I can't make sense of any of the Rivenese (well, the foreign language bits, I don't know if it's Rivenese or not), at least not in https://youtu.be/-rjfyfuijrc or https://youtu.be/smOzKs1hauM.
Re:Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)
by wool_gather on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @01:47PM
(#17551573)
> Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea
Interesting tidbit! I had thought they were all artificial.
Re:Inventing a Language, from the Guy Who Made Dothraki (2015)
by da_chicken on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @10:29AM
(#17549947)
I mean, filming on location as opposed to on a studio sound stage or lot has often been favored by audiences and directors for greater authenticity, even when it's Vancouver masquerading as another city or Tunisia masquerading as Tattoine. And I don't think anybody is suggesting that conlanging isn't "a legitimate artform like anything else," just that it's duplicating effort. Remember "don't repeat yourself"?
Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.
However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).
Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."