I applaud AOEIV for its new depth of historical immersion - namely the fact that the language spoken in-game by your civilization’s units changes with each age-up, to reflect the evolution of languages over time. Although it’s not perfect (some of the phrases have overly literal translations like what you’d get from Google) and some civs are done better than others, it gives the game some really nice polish.
If the devs keep up this standard when considering new civilizations, which civs do you think would have an easier time getting designed in the game?
For example, Old and Middle Korean and Japanese are largely a mystery, as they used the same non-phonetic Chinese writing system as Chinese, but unlike Chinese, don’t have surviving sister languages which preserve the more archaic features (much of Old and Middle Chinese is reconstructed from the Wu dialect spoken around Shanghai). While they both used techniques to transcribe some of their phonetic features, historical linguistics for these languages isn’t very big and might be hard to find experts to consult on them.
On the other hand, Old Norse is very easy to reconstruct (you can just grab any educated Icelander off the street), and you can trace it easily into the modern Scandinavian languages.