The Age of Empires III DE team should rework Native American Civilizations

There are some hilarious facts in history when we talk about terms; for example with the peninsula of Yucatan. the Spaniards gave the name of Yucatan to the region because the Mayans answered their questions with the expression “Uh yu ka t’ann”, which in Mayan means: “listen how they speak”, and the Spaniards understood “Yucatan” as the place they were.
However when you are new and open AoE III DE; the team even clarifies that they made changes to some Native American terms because the old ones were offensive or wrong (without sense).

If some peoples dislike the name they are called they can request others to change it though. E.g. Myanmar is no longer called Burma.
They changed “Iroquois” or “Sioux” because some native American groups want to be called by their own endonyms. If one day Germans as a whole request the world to call them Deutsch I believe that will be changed as well.

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No. That can’t work that way. Each langage can’t be change because someone else wants it. I mean, man, literally every city has another name in every langage. Do you literally imagine the ammount of works it needs ?

I’m French, but stop calling me French, I’m français now. ^^

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Well if French ends being an insult or a wrong way, then it should change.

Well, I don’t think reality agree with you. But I can see you have good intentions.

Anyway, the game needs a lot of fixing in the gameplay. Not the historical accuracy which is very secondary.

But Iroquois never was an insult.
It was literally a term of endearment, to be honest. The French merchants simply recognized a speech pattern, and named them after it, because they could not pronounce Haudenosaunee.

In Portuguese, the Dutch are called Holandeses, which could be literally translated into “Hollanders”.
Dutch is simply not a portuguese word. We will never called them dutch, while speaking portuguese.

This is not, however, an insult to the Dutch.

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You can start a petition like that and if most Francais think that’s a good idea, of course you can request that.
There are a lot of demonyms that were not considered as derogatory from the very beginning, but are considered as such. That happens to a lot of languages. Some of them are very well-known and I even dare not type them out here.

I can agree with your pov, but don’t you think forcing people to change their nativ langage to fit to you is derogatory too ?

In France, there’s dozens of sub-langages. More or less spoken. In the single continental France there’s dozen ways to say that word. It’s impossible to change that. Now imagine in the whole world when half the population is still talking about Czechoslovakia. ^^

The name Iroquois (Aár-o-kwoi) comes from the Algonquian name Irinakhoiw, meaning “True Vipers”, “Snake” or “Terrifying Man”. The proper name for the Iroquois is Haudenosaunee, meaning “People of the Long House.”

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No. That’s one of the many suppositions.

This may be the truth

“The name Iroquois is purely French, and is formed from the [Iroquoian-language] term Hiro or Hero , which means I have said —with which these Indians close all their addresses, as the Latins did of old with their dixi —and of Koué , which is a cry sometimes of sadness, when it is prolonged, and sometimes of joy, when it is pronounced shorter”

Was that because they were played by The_Viper, and the Algonquian player was just salty about the Feudal Rush?

This is the actual official explaination in Europe, and the one that makes the most sense, since the European way to pronounce Iroquois, literally uses the french “quois” sound.

So something like: Irro-Qoah.

I can’t see how this is forced.
Someone does not like the name and requests that to be changed, and someone else, which are the dev team of this game, changed it in response. And you can leave a big dislike on steam if you dislike the change. You won’t be sued for that.

Some research just show it’s impossible to know. Cause there’s too much possibilities.

Here’s how some french fishermen referred to other nativs tributs, for another exemple…

“Armouchiquois”, “Charioquois”, “Excomminquois” “Souriquois”… totally possible they named the Iroquois.

Well, just to say. It’s a video game, and Devs have limited ressources. Better focus it on the gameplay that need a lot of fixing left.

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I do agree with you. To be fair if they had illimited ressources I wished they do everything people wants to feel better, cause that don’t affect gameplay.

But right now, I think it’s not a priority at all.

That’s another problem. Even for such fixes they can put more efforts and come up with better ideas that overall feel consistent.
The community plaza is just a cheap design.
The new voices for the natives are of poor quality. I mean, it’s a brilliant idea to have real native speakers (the Japanese and Chinese voices were so bad that they re-done it for the local release; the new Chinese voices are good though), but they seem to make a quick work just to avoid controversies and do not care about the quality.

Just saying, I don’t know how many, but there’s players using a mode to have the old TAD voices for the game. So yeah.

I see people using old voices for the natives, but not the Chinese.

There are actually three versions of Chinese voices: the original one (really bad, most of them do not sound native), the Chinese-release one for the legacy, and the re-done one for DE.
I only see the mods with the second version. Though it is not the best one, they at least sound more accurate than the first version.

The Japanese voice right now is not good either, but the Japanese release version is brilliant.

I come from Poland.
It is often assumed that all of the above names derive from the name of the Polans (Polanie), a West Slavic tribe which inhabited the territories of present-day Poland in the 9th-10th centuries. The origin of the name Polanie is theorized to be descendend ultimately from Proto-Slavic. It may derive from the word pole, Polish for “field”.

Many ancient tribes in Europe derived their names from the nature of the land they inhabited. Gervase of Tilbury wrote in his Otia imperialia (“Recreation for an Emperor”, 1211): Inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia, sic dicta in eorum idiomate quasi Campania.(translation: “Between the Hunnic Alps and the Ocean there is Poland, thus called “Countryside” in their idiom.”) Polans may have used Polska to describe their own territory in the Warta River basin. During the 10th century, they managed to subdue and unite the Slavic tribes between the rivers Oder and Bug River into a single feudal state and in the early 11th century, the name Polska was extended to the entire ethnically Polish territory. The lands originally inhabited by the Polans became known as Staropolska, or “Old Poland”, and later as Wielkopolska, or “Greater Poland”, while the lands conquered towards the end of the 10th century, home of the Vistulans (Wiślanie) and the Lendians, became known as Małopolska, or “Lesser Poland.”

In Polish literature, Poland is sometimes referred to as Lechia, derived from Lech, the legendary founder of Poland. In the 17th-18th centuries, Sarmaci (“Sarmatians”) was a popular name by which Polish nobles referred to themselves (see Sarmatism).

It sounds similar in Slavic languages, but East Slavic and Bulgarian have a different overtone - Pol’sha, in Russian.

In Latin, Poland is Polonia, in English it is Poland and in French it is Pologne.

The ancient name of Poland, derived from its legendary founder Lech, is Lechistan.

  • Persian لهستان‎, Lahestan. The word combines Lah with a common Persian suffix -stan, which means “The land of”.

  • Turkish Lehistan. It is now considered obsolete and replaced by Polonya.

  • Armenian Լեհաստան, Lehastan was also borrowed from Persian.

  • Lithuanian Lenkija

  • Hungarian Lengyelország

  • Hebrew פּוֹלִין‎, Polín

  • Irish An Pholainn

  • Japanese ポーランド, Pōrando

  • Chinese 波兰 (simplified) or 波蘭 (traditional), Bōlán

  • Korean in South Korea 폴란드, Pollandeu

  • Vietnamese Ba Lan

This shows that the name of the country may sound completely different in another language. Hence, naming problems can arise. I believe that the best solution is the English name civ + original name in brackets, e.g .:

Swedes (Svenskar) and Russians (Rossiyane)

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Bit of a highlight that I can give you, although I know next to nothing about the Haudenosaunee - the Sioux were changed to Lakota because the people presented in-game speak Lakota, have Lakota art on their tipi, have a Lakota figure as their AI, and use a Lakota tribe as their homecity.

So they’re Lakota. Calling them Sioux in the first place didn’t make any sense. Everything about them (except the Dog Soldiers) was Lakota.

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Its a game, history plays a big part, but its not a simulation.

I cant say much about the Inca’s but the Aztec architecture still looks pretty much like Aztec architecture. And like I said its a game, for gameplay purposes they dont have corn and shizzle. Btw where do you see that they dont have corn already? The farms seem to produce just food and the Aztecs did just hunt.

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