Why do Invidians Speak Balok?

[DocBeard]

Don't feel as though you have to, dude. Personally I use "Common" when running Ravenloft simply because my PCs don't want to spend all of their time pantomiming at each other.

[Sorti]

Moreover, the name "Invidia" is Spanish (envy), and the few other Invidian words we've seen (Il Duce?) are Spanish/Romance derived.

"Invidia" is envy in Italian as well, and "Il Duce" was Mussolini's title (just like Hitler was "Die Fuhrer"). Since Malocchio is called the Duce and leads a fascist gipsy-hating dictatorship, I see many more parallelisms with fascist Italy than with Spain.

[Agamemnon]

Invidia is definitely meant to be Italian-inspired, not Spanish. As Sorti said, "invidia" is also envy in Italian.
Il Duce is Italian, meaning "the Leader"; the Spanish title would be El Caudillo, meaning "chieftain" or "leader." That was also, coincidentally, the title of Francisco Franco, dictator of crypto-fascist Spain.

Malocchio means "evil eye" directly translated from Italian. I suppose it would be "malojo" in Spanish, but I am not sure, as my Italian is definitely better than my Spanish. This is a further indication of the Italian roots for the fictitious tongue of Invidia.

As for why they suddenly speak Balok, I cannot say. This wasn't actually spelled out before the Domains of Dread, was it?

On another note, Balok is described as a language of "unusual consonant combinations," which would fit a Slavic tongue, such as Serbo-Croatian, better than Romanian, which is closely related to Italian. Romanian does not have the same consonant "crashes" as many Slavic tongues do, e.g. as in the names Vrukovic, Srebrenica or Srbska.

I think Balok is identified as Romanian to accommodate a more "Transylvanian" feel to Barovia, and that somewhere along the line someone mistook Romanian for a Slavic tongue, because Romania is in a predominantly Slavic region.

[Baron Zamedi]

Minor nit-pick, envy in Spanish is "Envidia" with an "e". Still close enough but grammatically and phonetically different.

[ewancummins]

Invidia is definitely meant to be Italian-inspired, not Spanish. As Sorti said, "invidia" is also envy in Italian.
Il Duce is Italian, meaning "the Leader"; the Spanish title would be El Caudillo, meaning "chieftain" or "leader." That was also, coincidentally, the title of Francisco Franco, dictator of crypto-fascist Spain.

Malocchio means "evil eye" directly translated from Italian. I suppose it would be "malojo" in Spanish, but I am not sure, as my Italian is definitely better than my Spanish. This is a further indication of the Italian roots for the fictitious tongue of Invidia.

As for why they suddenly speak Balok, I cannot say. This wasn't actually spelled out before the Domains of Dread, was it?

On another note, Balok is described as a language of "unusual consonant combinations," which would fit a Slavic tongue, such as Serbo-Croatian, better than Romanian, which is closely related to Italian. Romanian does not have the same consonant "crashes" as many Slavic tongues do, e.g. as in the names Vrukovic, Srebrenica or Srbska.

I think Balok is identified as Romanian to accommodate a more "Transylvanian" feel to Barovia, and that somewhere along the line someone mistook Romanian for a Slavic tongue, because Romania is in a predominantly Slavic region.

I inclined towards an Italianate version of Invidia for all the reasons that you mentioned. I was also thinking of how my version of Borca is not based on Italy.

I agree about Balok's 'unusual consonant combinations' as being intended to evoke 'Slavic' - only most of our Balok words lack such combinations and are clearly Romanian.

Balok could be based on Romanian, but with a strange accent and the addition of many loan-words. Barovia has multiple ethnic groups. Perhaps there has been a lot of cross-pollination in language?

Balok= Romanian
Thaani= Albanian
Gundarakite= Magyar
Forfarian=Scottish Gaelic, although there appears to be some Welsh in the mix.
Patterna= Romany

My question is this: where would Slavic influences come from? Indeed, is there anything especially Slavic about Barovia, aside from a few Slavic names tossed in the mix?


Forfar is a real town in Scotland, BTW. Forfarians would be people from Forfar.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I agree that Invidian speak Balok most likely for the game balance reason of not adding yet another language to the Core for people to learn. Balok is most certainly meant to evoke Romanian, since Barovia is meant to evoke Transylvania. But it can be spoken in Borca despite Borca's Italian flavor, and in Invidia despite its Mediterranean flavor (Spanish/Italian mishmash, IMHO).

Does it mean Invidia comes from the same world as Barovia and Borigia? Maybe, maybe not. Kartakass, Valachan, Hazlan, and Nova Vaasa all speak Vaasi with no such connection.

If you like, say that the DPs meddled with Invidia as they copied/created/moved it for Bahkolis, and changed the language without anyone noticing so it would match its neighbors.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Does it mean Invidia comes from the same world as Barovia and Borigia? Maybe, maybe not. Kartakass, Valachan, Hazlan, and Nova Vaasa all speak Vaasi with no such connection.

Actually, the do have such a connection: all the DL's came from Faerun, supposedly.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Actually, the do have such a connection: all the DL's came from Faerun, supposedly.

Wow, am I getting rusty. I totally forgot Harkon and Urik came from Faerun. *** (Though I think Tristen was always a bit iffy, since the actual Vaasa in FR bears little to no resemblance to NV, IIRC.)

Anyway, point retracted... but the gist of my post stands..


***spending too much time with my 3e books and not enough with the 2e...

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Perhaps it's called Nova Vaasa because some of the landscape looks a bit like parts of FR's Vaasa region, rather than because its residents came from Vaasa. Many IRL regions with "New so-and-so" names got those names because some explorer thought (rightly or otherwise) that they resembled another place, not necessarily the place that the namers came from.

Yes, FR's Vaasa is a lot colder and more desolate than Nova Vaasa, but for all we know, the domain was named for how it looks in the winter.

[Nathan of the FoS]

I don't know anything about Vaasa, but if its inhabitants would make passable Viking types then Nova Vaasa could be explained as an immigration of "Norsemen" into a more temperate climate...say, like the Scandinavian Rus' who immigrated into what is now the Ukraine.

I kinda like that idea because Vaasi has been defined as a Scandinavian language and most Vaasi speakers (well, OK, Kartakans, Mulani (blond if they let their hair grow!) and Nova Vaasans, at least) are Scandinavian in looks.

On the subject of places looking like their namesakes...I give you Zeeland and New Zealand. Sometimes these things are just historical accidents.

[The Giamarga]

Vaasa is an untamed wasteland of frozen moors and tundra located in the Cold Lands of northeast Faerûn. It is a relatively empty land with sporadic farms and the occasional wandering monster. As much of the land is unclaimed, there are many prospectors who come to Vaasa looking for natural treasure, of which it has many. The lands are rich in precious metals and gems, particularly bloodstone..(from here)

Check out this forum for more info and a few pics.

Together with its neighbour Damara it is also called the Bloodstone Lands , and this is where the Bloodstone modules of old take place. More recently the novel Promise of the Witch-King led Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle to the Bloodstone Lands.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Come to think of it, who says that "Nova Vaasa" is what the residents of that domain call their own nation? "Nova" is Latin, not Scandinavian. Perhaps "Nova Vaasa" is a name that Darkonians applied to the place, based on vague, umpteenth-hand accounts of some outland realm called "Vaasa" that they only knew was big and flat. The Mordentish-speaking nations first heard about Nova Vaasa's emergence from the Darkonians, so also adopted that name.

In their own tongue, Nova Vaasans could have an entirely different name for their homeland. If Germany is "Deutschland" in German, who knows what the Vaasi for "Nova Vaasa" might be?

[Garudos Celestar]

Well, Balok could be Bakholis' second language. Since Invidia, like many other domains (Dementlieu, etc.), was built from scratch rather than snagged/copied from somewhere else, the general population can speak whatever language the DPs want (and they can always grant the ability to speak a particular language to a newly risen darklord as one of his "powers" if necessary).

[Ryan Naylor]

While I personally think you're all over thinking this (who said that the fantasy world has to work like the real one, even if it's a pastiche of real world elements?), I would like to point out three things.

First, the names and languages aren't consistently applied anywhere before 3e, and not always then, because the game designers were more concerned with whether things sounded cool than were accurate. Even when they were trying for accuracy, they usually weren't fluent in the languages they were trying to replicate.

On the subject of Nova Vaasa, there is the concept of false friends, when 2 words look or sound the same but have different meaning in different languages, like "gift" or "land" in English and German, "attendre" in French and "attend" in English, or "push" in English and "pushim" in Tok Pisin. In game, "Nova" may mean "home" in Vaasi, but "new" in Darkonese.

Finally, what defines a language is its grammar, not its vocabulary. That's why Jabberwocky is understandable, despite having most of the words made up: because the sentence construction is English. Even if the *words* of Invidian Balok are based on Italian rather than Romanian or Slavic, if it has the same sentence construction of Barovian Balok, they'd be mutually intelligible once you'd worked out what the differences were.

[DocBeard]

Mister Naylor makes several good points.

And man how the heck did the Mulani get to be blond? They're descended from Thayvians who're descended from the very Egyptian Mulhorandi.