The naming of places

Alinestra Covelia · May 13, 2001, 02:47

Just a little cultural note that I thought I'd mention, in case nobody has done so earlier.

I noticed that all the Chinese city names in Civ2 are named as per the transliteration of the Cantonese, eg "Hangchow", "Canton". This is hardly a gamebreaking observation, but from what I can gather, the Chinese themselves have a slightly different spelling for these, in accordance with the (much more logical) Pinyin system, which goes by the Beijing pronunciation and is universally understood by the Chinese.

If Firaxis are willing to go that final mile with the authenticity of names (as they did with renaming Provost Saratov into Provost Zakharov) then I can heartily recommend they rename the Chinese leader to "Mao Zedong" and Chinese cities to Hangzhou, Yangzhou, Tianjing instead of Hangchow, Yangchow, Tientsin.

Most good international maps display the Chinese towns' names in Pinyin, so it's not esoterically difficult to get hold of them. It would be nice to be able to move from the Cantonese pronunciation to the official Beijing pronunciation - could you imagine a foreigner calling place names in Britain by the Liverpool or Birmingham dialects?

Enough to make the eyes water

Anybody else have any authenticity suggestions about similar improvements for other civs? I believe the Indian nationality now refers to place names in slightly different terms as well, eg Bombay -> Mumbai.

Cyberbugs · May 13, 2001, 07:14

Ahm...sorry, but I'll just make a little of-topic-comment, which however has to do with naming places.
It would be really easy to implement a little function that enables you to name certain areas of the land within your borders. For example, if you have a lot of mountains at one place, you could name the area "The Alps" or, if you are a bit selfish, just "King Fredriks mountains" or whatever.

This is just a very minor addition to the game, but I think some players would find it fun.

Henrik · May 13, 2001, 10:22

quote:

Originally posted by Cyberbugs on 05-13-2001 07:14 AM
Ahm...sorry, but I'll just make a little of-topic-comment, which however has to do with naming places.
It would be really easy to implement a little function that enables you to name certain areas of the land within your borders. For example, if you have a lot of mountains at one place, you could name the area "The Alps" or, if you are a bit selfish, just "King Fredriks mountains" or whatever.

This is just a very minor addition to the game, but I think some players would find it fun.

This was in SMAC

Sava · May 13, 2001, 10:38

Did you know you can name cities whatever you want?

Just asking...

Plus maybe for the Cantonese version of the game you can have the Cantonese spelling.

Alinestra Covelia · May 13, 2001, 15:27

Yeah, you can name things the way you want, but if they got it right in the first place you wouldn't have to name them.

Firaxis strikes me as being a company willing to take great care to make their games realistic and feasible - hence the name change from Saratov to Zakharov. They then went on to make the mistake of calling the Hive Chairman "Chairman Yang" when actually his surname would be "Sheng" (Chinese surnames come first, followed by given names).

From this, I deduce that Firaxis make every effort to be accurate, but sometimes they have to be told where they can improve their plausibility. Hence this entire thread - name changes are after all a very minor thing to get right, and whilst it is admittedly something we could do easily if we wanted to, it's also something Firaxis could do very easily so that we wouldn't have to rename them in the cities.txt file.