(no subject)

[leticia]

Okay, you all know I love Exalted, right?

WEll, this is me being mildly snarky about their OMG JAPANESE roots.

I was glancing through the writing in Creation section at the back of the 1e PG, and lo and behold, it's basically Kanji-free Japanese (as far as the they go to explain it). The characters are (I presume, but honestly, I wouldn't know a Japanese squiggle from a made up squiggle) different, but they use the same sort of syllable based construction. There's a side note as to how the names of many of the great houses of the Realm don't work so well in this construction.

And I'm sitting here going, "So why the devil are the names of the ruling families breaking the language?" Cynis, Mnemon, Nellens, Peleps... are there ANY great house names that work in that sort of syllabary language?

It's like the only did it because OMG JAPANESE.

Also, it's bloody inconvenient when you want to use the alphabet so provided to spell words in english out. :p ENGRISH.

Anyhow. Night!

Comments

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

I don't think any of the House names work in the given syllable-set except... Ragara. Maybe Cathak if you assume that's really Cathak'; I think they had a "tha" syllable. With V'neef as the worst offender, because dude, where the hell did the random apostrophe come from?

I suspect they only did it because everyone knows Old Realm is supposed to have kanji, and kanji are a pain to transcribe, so they made High/Low Realm hiragana when they got around to the PG and forgot it when writing the original book. >_>

Also, entirely agreed, on trying to spell things with their alphabet. [snrks] I think there was a generator somewhere that'd convert to "nearest approximation" and pull up the characters for you, though?

[letiwolf.livejournal.com]

Beh. Kanji forbears do not require the adherance to a strict syllabic language which the names of the founder of the culture's children do not mesh with.

They're just going with the OMG JAPANESE thing.

Ah, well.

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

No, no, that's what I mean. Everyone knows Old Realm is Chinese/Japanese kanji. But it'd be a pain to write up a primer on kanji, so High/Low Realm can't be kanji if they're doing a primer. The logical next step is hiragana/katakana, which splits the difference between kanji (pretty characters that stand for things!) and letters (we just need to build an alphabet, we don't need to build a dictionary) very well.

...now, granted, their decision to stick with the Japanese consonant-vowel or consonant-consonant-vowel syllables only is very stupid in light of the fact that next to no Realm names are constructed that way, and there's only so far you can handwave with "Well, it's really Pe-le-psu, with a silent u" before it just gets silly. But I don't think they necessarily just went OMG JAPANESE == COOL when picking it; they could've easily went "Okay, how do we avoid using kanji while still doing something interesting?" and decided it didn't matter if the existing names broke their new rules as the existing names are clearly the dub translations.

And the one I was thinking of was http://rpg.divnull.com/exalted/script.html . [grins]

[letiwolf.livejournal.com]

Also, if you have any idea where I should start looking for said generator, I'd appreciate it. ^^

[letiwolf.livejournal.com]

Nevermind! Think I found it! ^^