The Dictator and Manchu
Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie The Dictator, which I haven’t seen, apparently draws a bit from our neck of the woods. In a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cohen explains a desire to get away from looking too Arabic in the film. One aspect of this was to create a writing system for Wadiya, his fictional dictatorship.
Conlangs are hard, and good ones, even if just an alphabet, take time. Cohen says in the interview that the short-cut in this case was to borrow some shapes from Manchu. You can see the name of the country on the flag in the image above. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Manchu is referred to by Cohen as a dialect of Chinese. Ah well. Looks like the 方言 argument may have finally spilled over fully into English.
Sorry Randy.
edit:
Here’s a better example than the flag:
First of all, I find it awesome to see the word “conlang” being used outside of the actual conlanging hobbyist circles.
Scripts are a big design challenge, and there are a lot of terrible scripts out there. Most of the good conscripts I see ape the aesthetics of a natural language’s script. There just aren’t that many options if you stick with given implements and media and actually try to make a realistic script. I’m glad to see that Cohen’s script (at least the example on the flag there), isn’t some art department monstrosity.
Try as I might, I fail to see a similarity to Manchu. Maybe the letters in Wadiya don’t include the Manchu letterforms he is talking about?
I don’t think he was too successful in getting away from looking like Arabic. It looks just as Arabic to me as those calligraphic flourishes that adorn my favorite 烧麦 restaurants.
Yeah I kinda agree. Looks more like Syriac than Manchu to me. It kinda looks arabish to me, but not Arabic. I can see the tall vertical in the middle as the ā that would be there if it were Arabic, but that’s about it.
I’m adding an image to the post that shows more Manchu-esque writing.
Yes, particularly the smaller writing in that image looks like Manchu turned on its side.
OK, yes, now that looks more like Manchu.