Why hasn’t anyone brought up the topic of voiceovers for these captivating ancient languages? Languages like Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, Latin, and others. Moreover, is there a way to create voiceover mods or packages? I think that utilizing the AoE II engine could potentially allow voiceover packages for each civilization individually.
8 Likes
It’s difficult, since we don’t know how many of those civs spoke but it could be like this:
Assyrians: Sumerian/Arabic (like the Saracens in AoE 2)
Babylonians: Sumerian/Arabic (like the Saracens in AoE 2)
Carthaginians: Berber
Choson: Korean
Egyptians: Ancient Egyptian (like in AoM/AoEO)
Greeks: Ancient Greek (like in AoM/AoEO)
Hitt1tes: Sumerian/Arabic (like the Saracens in AoE 2)
Lac Viet: Vietnamese
Macedonians: Ancient Greek (like in AoM)
Minoans: Ancient Greek (like in AoM)
Palmyrans: Arabic (like the Saracens in AoE 2)
Persians: Persian
Phoenicians: Arabic (like the Saracens in AoE 2)
Romans: Latin (like their respectives counterparts in AoE 2)
Shang: well Chinese obviously
Sumerians: Sumerian/Arabic (like the Saracens in AoE 2)
Yamato: Japanese
1 Like
what do you mean? I think most of their languages have proper reconstructions already
1 Like
Yea now that it’s in the AOE2 engine there is no reason to not have it. And compared to other things I’d imagine getting some voice actors and replacing some audio files would be relatively straight forward for the devs so no excuse really,
1 Like
I mean that they are very old civs and you would have to rely on modern languages (since their original languages are extinct) to give their respective voices to the respective civs…for example all the civs (mainly from the Middle East) would have to speak Arabic , except Egypt (which would reuse the voices it has in AoM), the Greek civs (which would reuse the voices they have in AoM) and Romans, Persians, Shang, Yamato, Choson and Lac Viet (which would reuse the voices of their AoE 2 counterparts).
While semitic languages were used in Mesopotamia, it wouldn’t be arabic until after the end of AOE1. The only civ who would, are the Palmyreans, but it wouldn’t be medieval arabic, but an older one.
Hittytes spoke an indo-european language, so absolutely not arabic (semitic).
Carthaginians would speak a variant of phoenician, it was a phoenician colony.
Minoans would be tricky as their language was not deciphered. I guess an archaic greek (as opposed to classical greek for the Greeks and Macedonians) would be needed.
For the Romans I have to insist : CLASSICAL latin, not church latin (the name derived from the greek word for “church” is censored…). It also sounds much better IMO
6 Likes
And compared to what modern languages would they be?..
Well, look how different medieval english is from modern english, that shows how much a language can evolve.
But you’d definitely need to call linguists to make it right.
For phoenician/carthaginian, it’s in the same family as hebrew that’s quite well documented (included ancient forms thanks ot the Torah) so it could be a start, at least for pronunciation of ancient texts.
Assyrians and Babylonian : akkadian
Sumerians : sumerian (not associated to any language family)
For these 2, texts exists but pronunciation would need being reconstructed.
2 Likes
Yes, that’s true, but I doubt they’ll find any linguist who speaks Akkadian xd… that’s why I say that it would be more comfortable to reuse languages that are already in AoE 2 even if they aren’t exactly the languages they mostly use… many AoE 2 and AoE 3 civs for example use the modern versions of their respective languages, even if it is anachronistic…
That’s true, I was looking for that they used Aramaic (where Hebrew and Arabic come from)… the Carthaginians also used Punic (where the Berber language comes from, that’s why I put them that they could speak Berber to vary a bit and that they didn’t speak ancient Greek who also spoke)…
Yes, they are extinct languages and there are not so many texts to know their language in full…
2 Likes
Keep in mind, we’re only talking about maybe a dozen lines and not even exact translation of other languages. That’s not even as much spoken text as in Civilization and they managed to get some ancient languages for Gilgamesh (Sumerians), Ashurbanipal (Assyrians), Hammurabi (Babylonians) and Cyrus (Persians). I don’t even count the Roman and Greek leaders as for these 2, their languages are exceptionally well documented.
When it comes to the text, the Sumerians made the Epic of Gilgamesh (oh, it was in babylonian akkadian, I guess it could be used for the Sumerians as well), the Babylonians made Hammurabi’s Code, there should be plenty enough to work with 
1 Like
So my full list :
- Classical latin : Romans
- Classical greek : Greeks, Macedonians
- Archaic greek (if possible, otherwise classical greek) : Minoans
- Phoenician (possibly based on ancient hebrew) : Carthaginians, Phoenicians
- Ancient egyptian : Egyptians : Rosetta Stone
- Ancient arabic : Palmyreans
- Hittyte (or as a second choice, another anatolian language such as lydian) : Hittytes.
- Akkadian : Assyrians, Babylonians, maybe Sumerians : Epic of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi’s Code
- Sumerian (if possible, otherwise akkadian) : Sumerians
- Ancient persian : Persians
- Ancient chinese : Chang
- Ancient vietnamese : Lac Viet
- Ancient korean : Choson
- Ancient japanese : Yamato
Grand total : 12 to 14 languages, depending if 2 of the more ancient ones are well enough documented, or having to settle for a later regional lingua franca.
6 Likes
Assyrians - maybe just Akkadian language, Assyrian is somewhat a dialect of Akkadian Assyrian
Babylonians - Akkadian language; East Semitic
Carthaginians - maybe similar to Phoenicians or just late Punic language
Choson - [Old Korean] 古代朝鮮語を朗読してみた
Egyptians - Ancient Egyptian language
Greeks - ancient Greek or like Mycenean Greek
Hitt1tes - [Hitt1e language](YouTube Scms xS0Sr4w)
Lac Viet - Proto-Vietic but no video / Proto-Kam-Tai, but the video is not exactly the Proto-Kam-Tai [Ancient Yue](youtu.be: wq dm Wf N9 nc E)
Macedonians - Macedonian Greek - Pellan Dialect
Minoans - Minoan language
Palmyrans - Ancient Semitic VII: Aramaic
Persians - Old Persian
Phoenicians - Phoenician language
Romans - Latin with Classical pronunciation
Shang - Archaic / Old Chinese language
Sumerians - Sumerian language
Yamato - [Old Japanese language](YouTube 4mW zhIcbQls ); 古代日本語会話講座-上代日本語で喋ってみた
5 Likes
Good for Bronze and Iron ages, but would be anachronistic for Stone Age. Also, I like the grunts of my strong cavemen villagers in the Paleolithic lol
1 Like
AOE4 has different languages per age but AOE2 does not. Nothing says if the engine would allow changing spoken line upon age up.
Also, before writing it’s extremely hard to reconstruct languages, it was possible for proto indo european because of the wealth of successor languages (and still it’s not guaranteed to be exact) but for less broad languages groups, good luck with that.
But alright, if possible keep the grunts in the stone age 
1 Like
Good point, yes it can be…
Yes, it works for me… and if not last, we reuse voices from AoE 2 and AoM and that’s it…
Sure, like Empire Earth, Stone Age grunts and Bronze languages onwards…
Yes, we would have to see if that is possible…
I hope you know they spoke an Indo-European language and a fairly well documented one at that
1 Like
Yes, but since I saw that it was extinct, I ended up opting for Arabic xd… although Hittite would be something like this…
Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language,[20] yet it lacks several grammatical features that are exhibited by other early-attested Indo-European languages such as Vedic, Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Persian and Old Avestan. Notably, Hittite did not have a masculine-feminine gender system. Instead, it had a rudimentary noun-class system that was based on an older animate–inanimate opposition.
Hittite inflects for nine cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative-locative, ablative, ergative, allative, and instrumental; two numbers: singular, and plural; and two animacy classes: animate (common), and inanimate (neuter).[21] Adjectives and pronouns agree with nouns for animacy, number, and case.
The distinction in animacy is rudimentary and generally occurs in the nominative case, and the same noun is sometimes attested in both animacy classes. There is a trend towards distinguishing fewer cases in the plural than in the singular and a trend towards distinguishing the plural in fewer cases. The ergative case is used when an inanimate noun is the subject of a transitive verb. Early Hittite texts have a vocative case for a few nouns with -u, but it ceased to be productive by the time of the earliest discovered sources and was subsumed by the nominative in most documents. The allative was subsumed in the later stages of the language by the dative-locative. An archaic genitive plural -an is found irregularly in earlier texts, as is an instrumental plural in -it. A few nouns also form a distinct locative, which had no case ending at all.
The examples of pišna- (“man”) for animate and pēda- (“place”) for inanimate are used here to show the Hittite noun declension’s most basic form:
Animate Inanimate
Singular Plural Singular Plural
Nominative pišnaš pišnēš pēdan pēda
Accusative pišnan ############### Ergative pišnanza pišnantēš pēdanza pēdantēš
Vocative pišne – –
Genitive pišnaš pēdaš
Dative/Locative pišni pišnaš pēdi pēdaš
Ablative pišnaz pēdaz
Allative pišna – pēda –
Instrumental pišnit pēdit
Verbs[edit]
The verbal morphology is less complicated than for other early-attested Indo-European languages like Ancient Greek and Vedic. Hittite verbs inflect according to two general conjugations (mi-conjugation and hi-conjugation), two voices (active and medio-passive), two moods (indicative mood and imperative), two aspects (perfective and imperfective), and two tenses (present and preterite). Verbs have two infinitive forms, a verbal noun, a supine, and a participle. Rose (2006) lists 132 hi verbs and interprets the hi/mi oppositions as vestiges of a system of grammatical voice (“centripetal voice” vs. “centrifugal voice”).
Mi-conjugation[edit]
The mi-conjugation is similar to the general verbal conjugation paradigm in Sanskrit and can also be compared to the class of mi-verbs in Ancient Greek. The following example uses the verb ēš-/aš- “to be”.
Active voice[edit]
| Indicative | Imperative | |
|---|---|---|
| Present | ēšmi | |
| ēšši | ||
| ēšzi | ||
| ešuwani | ||
| *eštani | ||
| ašanzi | ašallu | |
| ēšt | ||
| eštu | ||
| ēšuwani | ||
| ēšten | ||
| ašantu | ||
| Preterite | ešun | |
| ēšt | ||
| ēšt | ||
| ēšuwen | ||
| ēšten | ||
| ešer |
Syntax[edit]
Hittite is a head-final language: it has subject-object-verb word order,[22] a split ergative alignment, and is a synthetic language; adpositions follow their complement, adjectives and genitives precede the nouns that they modify, adverbs precede verbs, and subordinate clauses precede main clauses.
Hittite syntax shows one noteworthy feature that is typical of Anatolian languages: commonly, the beginning of a sentence or clause is composed of either a sentence-connecting particle or otherwise a fronted or topicalized form, and a “chain” of fixed-order is then appended.
Why is that relevant? Do you want all civs to speak extant languages even if they are unrelated to the civs?
No, they can speak at least recognizable languages…
But they don’t need to.
4 Likes