My pet peeve with Diablo 4: Careless borrowing from other languages
My pet peeve with Diablo 4: Careless borrowing from other languages
Many of names in various Diablo 4 regions are heavily inspired by existing cultures. The NW of the map is a Slavic land. NE is British Isles, Southern areas are Turkic/Persian, etc.
What I noticed a lot is many of the NPC names are borrowed from other cultures. They are, however mostly pronounced wrong. It's almost as if the names were picked at random from a text source without anyone verifying how the words are originally pronounced.
Early in the story we encounter the widow of man named Julek. It's a common name in Poland (where I am from), but it should be read as Yulek. Instead, the voiceovers feature the same J sound as in John or James.
Yonca is a common Turkish name, but once again the pronunciation is all wrong. Her name (meaning "clover") should read more like Yondja - but instead we are served with Yonka.
There are a whole bunch of these all over the place, and I am only touching on Polish/Slavic and Turkic/Persian influences that I am personally familiar with. No idea if Celtic and Nord words are butchered in equal measure.
The whole situation reminds me of that old Super Nintendo game Fighting Baseball where some Japanese developer was tasked with coming up with plausible-sounding US names. These are the ones on the attached image.
Rant over.
I really like Diablo 4. I just wish the multicultural influences received the same level of polish and attention as the graphics, mechanics and other areas.
I can't get too worked up over this.
For one thing, there are countless languages and dialects in the world today where similar words get pronounced differently. Take a name like José. Spanish speakers tend to make the J sound closer to an English H, while Portuguese speakers will use a more English-like J.
Moreover, pronunciations evolve over time. A lot. My own surname centuries ago sounded nothing like how I pronounce it today.
Diablo is it's own world which may or may not be connected to ours. Usually, fantasy narratives are loosely based on the past, though I was reading some Terry Brooks and discovered his fantasy realm is actually post-apocalyptic Earth. Kind of clever how he tied that in. Anyway, all I'm saying is that both distance and time can distort language quite a bit.
it doesnt get any more american than bobson dugnutt
I found the names of the towns/regions to be pretty confusing and they felt out of place in the Diablo universe compared to how places were named in the previous games.
I wasn’t surprised that the J letter is pronounced wrong, it’s not readily apparent unless you have some knowledge of the languges, and I dont blame the (mostly)American devs for going with pronunciation that feels natural to them.
I just wish developers stopped lumping all slavs with Russians when using slavic-inspired elements. Especially when it comes to architecture. Though it was nice seeing some Czech and Polish inspired names in game.
Lol I had to read all the way through your post to understand that the screenshot above was not a connection of names from Diablo IV formatted in a retro font for some reason.
They generally didn't put a whole lot of effort in the voice acting, not even for the player characters, which I find way worse.
Sobbing NPC: "Please, everything is terrible, all my family is dead, you must help me!"
Female rogue in a chirpy tone: "Oooookeeee!"