Constructed Languages.
Constructed Languages.
So a lot of anime Sci-Fi (and Sci-Fi in general) uses a made up language for alien characters. Space Battleship Yamato has the Garmillas Language; Macross has the Zentradi language and Macross II has the Mardook Language, DBZ has Namekian amongst others etc,). Often it varies from source to source; but is there any information on how these languages were created? Like background material or interviews? It seems like it would be a lot of effort to create new words and symbols.
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Re: Constructed Languages.
For the NIER game on PS3/360 the singer/songwriter Emi Evans put together constructed languages for all the major musical pieces. She used existing languages and 'aged' them so to speak so they have a similar lyrical tilt as you'd expect of say a classical french tune but with different words giving you both a familiar and mysterious feeling at the same time. She goes into depth on the process in this interview here: https://www.originalsoundversion.com/de ... emi-evans/
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Re: Constructed Languages.
Very little... usually because very little effort actually goes into it.Mafty wrote: ↑Fri Jan 14, 2022 4:10 pm So a lot of anime Sci-Fi (and Sci-Fi in general) uses a made up language for alien characters. Space Battleship Yamato has the Garmillas Language; Macross has the Zentradi language and Macross II has the Mardook Language, DBZ has Namekian amongst others etc,). Often it varies from source to source; but is there any information on how these languages were created? Like background material or interviews? It seems like it would be a lot of effort to create new words and symbols.
Examples of fictional languages that are actually constructed languages are pretty rare. The Yamato Garmilla language was constructed by a linguist hired by the production team, for instance. Star Trek's Klingon was the product of James Doohan's interest in creating a language Tolkien-style.
Most fictional languages are a lot less effort intensive.
Most are simply gibberish, without any rules of grammar or syntax. Japanese authors seem to be fairly fond of three simple methods:
- Speaking a real language backwards.
- Cyphertext dialog made by composing a sentence normally in a real language then exchanging letters/characters within the sentence in a predetermined pattern.
- Speaking in anagrams by composing a sentence normally then simply scrambling the characters in it until it looks like gibberish.
Zentradi, for instance, is mostly anagrammatic Japanese and its written form is a 1:1 symbol substitution for all the letters of the basic Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals used in written english. Zolan's written language is simply a new symbol set mapped to completely modern hiragana. The Mardook language seems to be primarily gibberish. Namekian is garbled Japanese, and its written form is a symbol substitution on hiragana and katakana.
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