Tuesday 10 December 2002

Pic of the day: Yes, another of my innumerable characters from DAoC. But this is slightly less about DAoC than about foreign languages. In this case German. And a little bit of Sanskrit.

Wir fahren gegen ... Albion??

Am I addicted to Dark Age of Camelot? I think that is too harsh a word. We are just friends. (How come, whenever we are just friends, I end up paying the bill?) Since the American servers were down for an upgrade, and since I am already insane in my head for various other reasons, I created a character on the German-language servers Stonehenge. (No, they did not translate the name.)

I don't like Germany, as such. I have not forgotten what they did to us in 1940. (Just because I wasn't there doesn't mean I don't remember. All Norwegians are bound to remember the 9th of April 1940.) I also want to remind you that Hitler was democratically elected, unlike George W. Bush for instance. So I don't really like and trust Germany as a nation or Germans as a people. But that doesn't mean I hate them as individuals. There are decent people among all nations, even one so morally corrupted as to have the same verb for "to receive" and "to wage war".

My first surprise was the character creation screens. These were completely in English and no different from the American version. I almost expected the game to be the same except for the characters speaking, but that would have been too simple. As soon as I ventured into the game proper, I was immersed in German.

***

I guess I should mention that we had German as a fourth language in school for three or four years. (My first two languages being the two Norwegian languages, and the third being English. French was the fifth, and due to the severely reduced mental faculties of our old teacher it never got much of my attention. I can only understand simple French and then only when the topic is something I am familiar with, such as Christian doctrine.) The short of it is, I can understand German in writing and sometimes in speech, but I cannot use it. I know the gender of only a few words, and sadly there are few ways to guess a noun's gender unless it ends in the letter -t. Having to end all your nouns in - t puts some severe restrictions on casual conversation.

They have not just translated the English text. They have expanded on it. The German version is more verbose, and not just because German words are generally longer. They also use more of them, and tell things that don't need to be told or that may even be just plain wrong. For instance when the English version broadcasts a message that "X was just killed by a bandit", the German version broadcasts that X was just killed, a bandit was stronger. This is kinda extra humiliating when you defeat some über monster and survive just barely, only to be killed by some stray fledgling monster that aimlessly wandered into the fight. Also the names of equipment are much longer, often too long to read it all in your inventory screen.

Still, it was all good until the other players started to speak to me. I had forethinkingly (so that's not a word but it should have been) created a character with an extremely foreign looking name: Dharmaksatriya. It's a reasonable transcription of a Sanskrit word meaning "knight of the doctrine" or even "defender of the faith". (Dharma is used in both Hinduism and Buddhism as a general word for the religious lifestyle, in addition to being the word for religious lore. Ksatriya is the warrior caste of India, the people born into the military. I gracefully picked these words up from the commentaries to Bhagavadgita.)

Now, I was playing a Saracen (a character of middle eastern descent, in pre-medieval Britain this should certainly be foreign enough) and with a name like that you'd think people would let me alone. But nooo. As soon as I returned to the Station with my first load of loot to sell, some person enlisted my help to transfer various objects to a new character of his. Luckily I understand German, even if I don't speak it, otherwise I would probably have sold his property to the nearby merchant. It was all objects I had no use for. He talked a lot during the process. I guess I came along as the shy and silent type. ^_^

***

As I came to the Camelot hills and peacefully hunted for small skeletons, yet another guy came and wanted to group with me. Luckily the computer froze and I had to turn off the power. Saved by the bell.

It kinda grows on you, at least if you understand it a bit. It's kinda funny to see that a flint dirk is called "Feuersteinkatzbalger"... but I guess it's all in the eyes of the beholder. ^_^ If I play it some more days, I may even be confident enough to make short sentences. At level 10 we can choose last names, and I kinda played with the thought of "Ausländerin" for this character. With the exotic looks and exotic name, it would be easy to roleplay a foreigner in the lands ... especially since that alone would be true, while nearly nothing else about the character is. (I'm not actually a middle-eastern chic in studded armor killing bandits in the name of God. Good thing too.)

I played my character all the way to level 5 and paladinhood, and managed to get by with "danke" and "bitte". There's really no need to go into details about the game here – there are plenty of entries about that – but I think I can recommend it as a way to immerse yourself in a foreign language at no extra cost (if you already own the game) or at a reasonable cost compared to actually going to a German-speaking country. Of course, this kind of immersion will lead you to graduating with a thorough knowledge of German medieval weaponry and armorcraft, but very little about everyday items of the 21st century ...

Then again, I still don't know what some of my real-life clothes are called in English.

(The title is a pun on the German song, popular during WW2, and means roughly "We are going against England". The Allies referred to it as "Niegelungenlied", which means "never accomplished song", itself a pun on the great drama Niebelungenlied, the song about the Niebelung. Yes, I love puns.)