CK2 Dev Diary #70: The Art of the East

[just_a_beaver]

妈妈骂马的嘛吗？

I understood 3 of those *pats self on back*

 

[Karlingid]

I understood 3 of those *pats self on back*

To transcribe:

Mama ma ma de ma

 

[just_a_beaver]

Or "mother, something, horse, something, something, Chinese equivalent of question mark when speaking to someone".

 

[JodelDiplom]

Yeah but there are many ways of saying the same 'pronounciation'. There is, for example, a bunch of ways of saying "ma". If you pronounce it one way, you are talking about a mother, another way, a horse, and you can use it in the end of a sentence when speaking to make a question. This example is fairly intuitive as the character for these all look similar, but for other characters they will not.

If you don't know the pronunciation then you don't actually know the name.

Thankfully, any source you might use to generate a list of the 100 or 200 most common Chinese surnames will include the pronunciation and/or also the character. Like here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Family_Surnames

 

[LowTartare]

Chinese coats of arms are great!

 

[raistlin_wizard]

I'm pretty sure if you know Chinese it would be as ugly as the House 'de Normandy' with a coat of arms with 'Windsor' on it...

I agree, that would bother me too. The thing is they are both wrong, but different levels of wrong. Having the Windsor sigil on the "de Normadie" is wrong, but at least it's just a wrong sigil, but still a sigil. The correct comparison for having a panda as a noble family's sigil would be having a baguette on the de Normadie House because hey, baguettes are tipically french, aren't they?

(By the way, I don't speak Chinese per se, but I do know some characters. If they put 萌 or 眼 instead of 明 for Ming I would notice it right away. Having the wrong character is the lesser evil to me).

 

[Keizer Harm]

The correct comparison for having a panda as a noble family's sigil would be having a baguette on the de Normadie House because hey, baguettes are tipically french, aren't they?

*cough*
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blason_La-Seyne-sur-Mer.svg
Yeah, agreed on your point, but I have to say: people put literally everything on their arms. Even breads, slave heads and testicles. If there was a European culture in China, they would definitely have panda head arms.

 

[Admiral Boysen]

Even breads, slave heads and testicles.

{{citation needed}}

 

[Keizer Harm]

{{citation needed}}

La-Seyne-sur-Mer:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blason_La-Seyne-sur-Mer.svg

Sardinia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe..._Sardinia.svg/2000px-Arms_of_Sardinia.svg.png

Colleoni family:
http://www.castellodithiene.com/static/upl/img/StemmaColleoniL(3)_bgal(1).jpg

 

[raistlin_wizard]

La-Seyne-sur-Mer:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blason_La-Seyne-sur-Mer.svg

Sardinia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe..._Sardinia.svg/2000px-Arms_of_Sardinia.svg.png

Colleoni family:
http://www.castellodithiene.com/static/upl/img/StemmaColleoniL(3)_bgal(1).jpg

Well, I wouldn't have expected that lol. I was about to say a cock, because it's the french National Animal, but I thought that it would be likely to have had some as sigil at some point, but I would've never expected bread.

(I don't speak italian but I feel that "Colleoni" may actually mean "testicles", though).

 

[Keizer Harm]

(I don't speak italian but I feel that "Colleoni" may actually mean "testicles", though).

I heard that too. It was a real family though, so it makes me wonder which use of the term came first.

 

[Bearnest]

(I don't speak italian but I feel that "Colleoni" may actually mean "testicles", though).

It does sound like a cognate for "cojones," although the Italian word actually is "coglione."

BTW, the bread and fish seems like Jesus' miracle of multiplying food.

 

[classicist]

(I don't speak italian but I feel that "Colleoni" may actually mean "testicles", though).

It's a case of 'canting arms', essentially. Colleoni sounds a bit like coglioni ('testicles'), but they've also put lions there because of leoni, and coloured one of the respective scrota red, so that an alternative derivation (or folk etymology) from cor-leoni ('lionheart') could also be covered.

EDIT: Alternatively, one might of course argue that the gules/argent scheme of tinctures requires one of the ballsacks to be red. I may have over-interpreted that part.

 

[Sol717]

If you don't know the pronunciation then you don't actually know the name.

But the pronunciation depends on the dialect (and Chinese dialects are really more like languages, making Chinese a language family); e.g. 馬/马 is pronounced:

Mandarin: (Pinyin) mǎ /ma²¹⁴/
Cantonese (Jyutping): maa5 /mɑː¹³/
Hakka: (PFS) mâ /ma²⁴/
Min Nan: (POJ) bé /be⁵⁵⁴/
Wu/Shanghainese: /mo²³/ (Shanghainese has no commonly accepted transliteration)

Middle Chinese (Baxter): *mæX */mæ⁵⁵/ (asterisk indicates reconstructed pronunciation)
Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart): */mraːʔ/

 

[JodelDiplom]

But the pronunciation depends on the dialect (and Chinese dialects are really more like languages, making Chinese a language family); e.g. 馬/马 is pronounced:

Mandarin: (Pinyin) mǎ /ma²¹⁴/
Cantonese (Jyutping): maa5 /mɑː¹³/
Hakka: (PFS) mâ /ma²⁴/
Min Nan: (POJ) bé /be⁵⁵⁴/
Wu/Shanghainese: /mo²³/ (Shanghainese has no commonly accepted transliteration)

Middle Chinese (Baxter): *mæX */mæ⁵⁵/ (asterisk indicates reconstructed pronunciation)
Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart): */mraːʔ/

Well yes you're right, I was simply assuming everyone was talking about standard mandarin.

BTW how comes the old Chinese reconstruction is such an awful orcish sounding language? The youtube language demos I listened to sounded nothing like any living language I have ever heard.

 

[Sol717]

I was simply assuming everyone was talking about standard mandarin.

The issue is that is anachronistic. In the CK2 era, Middle Chinese is appropriate.

BTW how comes the old Chinese reconstruction is such an awful orcish sounding language? The youtube language demos I listened to sounded nothing like any living language I have ever heard.

Partly because all of the reconstructions are crappy (there isn't really enough data to work with), but partly because you haven't listened to enough living languages to break your stereotypes.

 

[Karlingid]

Well yes you're right, I was simply assuming everyone was talking about standard mandarin.

BTW how comes the old Chinese reconstruction is such an awful orcish sounding language? The youtube language demos I listened to sounded nothing like any living language I have ever heard.

One theory for how tones develop is that they appear when consonants are dropped from words (producing many identical-sounding works) but inflections are retained. The old inflections, thus, become essential to differentiating the words. It is roughly at this point that they become what we know as tones, though they probably undergo a sort of leveling out while transitioning into modern forms of languages.

Old Chinese thus had such consonants, and began dropping them. This is why Chinese sounds as it does today. While there are certainly languages in the world that sound similar, we must keep in mind that Old Chinese was not yet too far removed from Tibetan and Burmese, and that their most recent common ancestor likely had its own fair host of consonants and clusters to make sense of its descendants. Suffice to say, your perception of Chinese is likely shaped by the modern form, which is why the Old Chinese language sounds so alien in comparison.

There's not really a way to explain why some languages have some consonants as they do. Old Chinese doesn't actually have too many things different from the clusters you might find in English, though. English has frequently been compared to "the barking of a dog" by groups who first experience it historically. Clusters like "Nd" might trouble some with no exposure, for instance. "Squirrel" is one often used to trip up foreigners. Would you then describe English as Orcish and Doglike?

As an additional side note, many youtube recordings read Old Chinese with exaggerated pronunciation. It's good for getting a feel of the language, but it is not what it would've sounded like when spoken aloud. I'd recommend this for perhaps a better feel for the language, as the reading is more subdued, and people in the comments remark its similarity to Tibetan and even the unrelated Thai. In essence, it appears to be more a more naturalistic way of speaking without abandoning the actual pronunciation.

 

[Lord Hoosier]

We will be getting Chinese unit models and Tibetan holding models. If a dlc is made in the aftermath adding Tibetan units and Chinese holding models, I would be willing to pay for it as a stand-alone DLC (Regardless of whether or not they should have been included from the get-go).

But the most glaring need for new art, in all of CK2 is the desperate need for NEW Arab portraits and units (I have been wanting to use the Persian ones for Arabs since that dlc was released. The Pretty Units mod fixes the units at least.)

Middle-East 2.0 expansion next? (New Arab portraits, Berber portraits, Sufi society, new Crusader mechanics, Knights of Lazarus, Templars as joinable society, Ghazi holy order, 5th Crusade bookmark w possible Crusader Kingdom of Egypt forming or Francis of Assisi converting Sultan al-Kamil as special event.) Yes, please!

Edit: Idea for a temporary mod for new arab portraits
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...sian-portraits-for-arabs-mod-request.1049580/

View attachment 305246

Edit nr.2: The actual mod, all complete:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1164768974

The base game models either looked like potatoes if they were Christian, or sweet potatoes if they were anyone else!

 

[alfian]

I hope paradox make us free gift (mongol face revamp).