LIKE any play, movie or TV show, a video game needs a script. But what do you do when that script is in a version of a language which hasn’t been spoken since the Stone Age?
This was the challenge facing the team at Ubisoft developing the video game Far Cry Primal, set in 10,000BC.
Originally the plan was to have the game’s dialogue in English, but after testing the designers realised it just wasn’t working and the decision was made to come up with something authentic to the time period.
Lead writer Kevin Shortt said the spoken language in the game is all invented.
“There’s no modern language whatsoever,” he told news.com.au.
“There’s many parts of the game where you have to read subtitles and this raised a lot of questions for us; ‘how is this going to affect playability’, ‘is it going to be immersive or disruptive’, and ‘how the hell are we going to write this?’,” he said.
“That was the thing we were really wondering about.”
Mr Shortt said the first order of business was finding language specialists.
Accordingly, the team contacted University of Kentucky assistant professor of linguistics Andrew Byrd and assistant professor of modern and classical languages Brenna Byrd to help craft a language which would fit the Mesolithic-era setting of Far Cry Primal.
“We needed to make sure players knew what was happening as best they could,” he said.
The husband and wife linguistic academics enthusiastically explained that Proto-Indo-European, the foundation for the game’s languages, was actually a real language.
“It is the source of everybody’s mother tongue in this room — so English, German, French, Spanish; all of those languages were, at one point in time, thousands of years ago, the same thing,” he said.
Each of the game’s three tribes — Wenja, Udam and Izila — speak an enhanced form of Proto-Indo-European. Wenja and Udam are effectively identical aside from pronunciation differences, while Izila is slightly more complicated, befitting the tribe’s somewhat more advanced technological situation (by Stone Age standards, at least).
“We created grammar, we made sure the languages sounded very different and I think you can hear that,” he said.
“The Wenja language and the Udam language are very rhythmical, the rhythms were designed to be like a drum.
“Izila, on the other hand was designed to be sing-songy and flow. This went along in the large part with the Izila character.”
The languages all follow a subject-object-verb structure and there is also no differentiation between past, present and future tense in the languages, but it is possible to conjugate verbs.
Mr Byrd said they tried to strike a balance between authenticity and realism for the game when designing the languages.
“For example, sometimes we needed to make things a little easier to say, sometimes we needed to shorten our words,” he said.
Mr and Mrs Byrd were helped in this by three friends from the UCLA graduate school, and ended up translating about 40,000 words for the game.
“For every single word, we had to make recordings that were used as audio references for the game,” he said.
Mrs Byrd, who was the language coach, said the audio recordings were vital for helping the actors, who were working with cinematics director David Footman, to prepare their lines.
“We didn’t just coach them on how to pronounce things. They didn’t just memorise things exactly things as we said them,” she said.
“Most of the actors, especially anyone who had a cinematic scene, wanted to know exactly what they were saying.”
One of the challenges was coming up with words for concepts which did not exist in Proto-Indo-European.
Mr Byrd said the first thing to do was to see if the word was in the etymological dictionary for Indo-European.
“Oftentimes it’s not, so what you do is you go to a dictionary of Latin, Greek, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Hittite — the oldest languages, those are the best ones because they’re the ones that are going to retain the oldest features,” he said.
“You say, OK, does this concept exist in those languages? Oftentimes it does and you say OK, well there’s some sort of consensus here.
“If there’s not, then you have to decide which one works better for the languages — does one of these conflict with another existing word we already have within the lexicon?”
Even with Mr Byrd’s pre-existing knowledge of Proto-Indo-European, developing the languages was a lengthy process involving the Byrds and fellow linguists Chiara Bozzone, Jessica DeLisi and Ryan Sandell.
“We would have these long discussions online about ‘what do you think about this word?’ — everyone brought some expertise to the table and I think that really helped us be true to Proto-Indo-European; it kept us honest,” she said.
With the language developed, the English-language script was then translated into the Wenja and Izila, which proved to also be a more complex process than one might think.
Mrs Byrd said that to translate something into German professionally, it might take her about an hour to do a good translation of about 700 words.
“And we had 40,000 words to translate into languages we don’t speak every day, we’re not fluent, we had to create the lexicon ... It’s a much more challenging task,” she said.
With the script translated, the actors then learned their lines in Wenja or Izila, under the guidance of Mrs Byrd and with Mr Byrd’s assistance.
It was obvious the pair had thoroughly enjoyed working on the project and they both agreed they would leap at the chance to work on another video game.
They also said they were delighted with the end results and the thought potentially millions of people would experience the language they had created for the game was fantastic as well.
“I think the cool thing is people are really digging this,” he said.
“I think this shows that you can do a game, you can do anything in another language if it feels real, it feels authentic.”
Royce Wilson travelled to Montreal as a guest of Ubisoft