Tinto Maps #13 Maghreb Feedback

[Pavía]

Also is Touat supposed to represent the entity led by the current Marinid Sultan, Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman's brother? Who was named Abu Ali
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Yes, exactly.

 

[Pavía]

Oh i see then i think the dynasty should probably be changed back to Marinid seeing as he was his brother and all unless im mistaken. Am i also right to assume they are at war with the main Marinids like Tlemcen is?

Additionally i thought Abu Ali the rebellious brother was supposed to be based out of Sjiilmassa but it doesent seem like he owns the location?

Oh, I meant Tafilalt, not Touat, which already is shown as part of the Marinid dynasty.

 

[Aldaron]

I'll add that Midelt, Ayt Dawud, Azilal, Tawrirt, Tafedna, Tednest, Afsu are also Amazigh towns or fall within Amazigh regions today, so unless there is a compelling reason for them to be Arab Moroccan I think their culture should be changed. Especially given that some of them currently have no significant minorities.

Zenati - Afsu, Tawrirt (the latter with a large Moroccan minority)
Sanhaja-Zenati mix - Midelt, Azilal
Masmuda - Ayt Dawud, Tafedna, Tednest

The screenshot is probably done with "owner" localization.

All keys have been renamed to standard Wikipedia English names, plus added dynamic localizations in Arabic and a large list of Amazigh names too. Morocco having Arabic as official language ingame has its locations named in Arabic regardless of their culture (because as I said I presume Pavía has the option of "owner" language activated).

 

[Aldaron]

Yes, exactly.

Oh i see then i think the dynasty should probably be changed back to Marinid seeing as he was his brother and all unless im mistaken. Am i also right to assume they are at war with the main Marinids like Tlemcen is?

Additionally i thought Abu Ali the rebellious brother was supposed to be based out of Sjiilmassa but it doesent seem like he owns the location?

Actually no.

Tafilalt represents the Marinid Brother. Touat is meant to represent the area controlled by Tribes that Ali relied on militarily and that later revolted. Since they were somewaht autonomous and the base of Ali was around Sijilmassa I decided to represent them as vassals of him.

 

[Aldaron]

Thanks for the reply, but I was taking about pop culture in the locations, not the name localizations?

Sorry I misunderstood your post.

Pops have not been worked on as has happened with other regions due to some issues with our tools. Pavía has already spoken about it.

In any case, thanks for the heads up.

 

[Aldaron]

Ah, pop culture in the region is still wip? I feel more hopeful now.
Have you taken any final decision on what to do with moroccan/algerian/tunisian as cultures?

No decision has been made that it is final.

 

[Aldaron]

I have to say I'm disappointed the Chaus province wasn't renamed to (el-) Haouz.

There has not been given any reason apart from some sound similarity that justifies the change of name. I am well aware that Chaus is clearly a transcription from the arabic sound. However, Chaus, while imperfect, is well documented in more than one source.

Haouz region is not even close to the geographical place represented by Chaus (they are in different sides of the Atlas) so it is not likely that they are the same place.

 

[Aldaron]

Can I ask what word Chaus is based on? The reason I said this was because I thought it was taken from a map (attached) which labeled the region الحوز /lħawz/, and that Chaus was a confusing and inconsistent way to write that. With this spelling, it looks like it should be pronounced /ʃaws/ and be written شوس in Arabic. If it refers to another name entirely from الحوز, I will retract my comment.

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الحوز on this map is not anywhere near the modern el Haouz, true, but I assumed it was your basis for calling it Chaus because the other provinces with obscure names also fit (Habat, Kert, Azghar). And I hadn't heard of "Chaus" anywhere else. It is not the same place as modern Haouz, but it appears they had the same name.

If it is based on that and you guys want to stick with it anyways despite the inconsistent spelling just because it's more common, so be it, it's not the end of the world.

Ok, for what I see there was a miscomunication.

My source was a map in roman alphabet, which means that I never had the original and I just noted that I was aware that, because of that, the transcription could be perfectly wrong.

This means that I have/had no idea how it was written in arabic, so that made trying to transcript it more faithfully impossible.

If you add to this that there is a Haouz region that is nowhere close to this, it seemed to me unlikely that the "Chaus" region would be Haouz too.

As you are one of those people in this forum that I have read several times and know things about you, I remember that you spoke arabic. So in this case I think, with this map strengthing your claim, that you were right all along.

THis means that on Monday I will update the name of this province to Haouz. Can you tell me how it would be this in latin alphabet with the proper diacritics? I think we are going to use the ISO rule for arabic but we are still debating it. Still it would be rather close either way.

 

[Aldaron]

Thanks for the reply. I just wanted you to be as informed as possible. I believe the proper ISO transliteration would be Al-Ḥawz. El Haouz (or El Ḥaouz, with the proper diacritic) would be a more local-looking alternative that would fit with most of the spellings you have elsewhere in the Maghreb right now, though it would risk confusion with the modern Haouz. It's your choice, depending on style.

Honestly, you guys could even keep it as Chaus if you feel that is historically accurate, it's just that it'd use a totally different pronunciation system from pretty much every other Arabic placename in the game. It looks like how a Dutchman or maybe German would spell it, while right now the vast majority of Arabic placenames are a mix of modern academic transcriptions and French and English-aligned orthography.

By the way, according to that map Habat should also receive the Al- prefix, but that's of minor importance. There are also a few diacritics to add in the other province names, if you want to be consistent.

When I reviewed the Maghreb map I tried to change all the names to English (wikipedia standard) as a base and localized as many as I could in dynamic arabic localisation using Modern Standard Arabic (and in some cases the DIN rule as it is the closest), trying to homogeneize them all. We are aware that despite this effort, there are still some inconsistencies and we plan to further standardize it in the future, however, it is not trivial so we would like to as you all to not report this things for a while as we are aware of them being improvable.

I am going to definitely change Chaus to Al-Ḥawz as we want to get things the most standardized as possible (yes, again, we are aware that there are inconsistencies to this rule across the map, but again it is not as easy as it seems and we are doing it in iterations, so this is an ever-going effort).