Dunan said:
LANGUAGE BROFIST! ^_^;
Linguistics grad student here too!
Are you interested in writing systems? That's my field, and I try to decipher every video game alphabet I find. Nier's was quite fun. ^^;
Aw, I did linguistics in my undergrad (along with neurosci), and pretty much took nearly every single available linguistics course (I even took Optimality Theory, phonetic analysis (Phonetics II), French syntax/morphology/etc, speech perception, and a ton of language pedagogy courses when I didn't even need them). I have a huge interest in historical linguistics, though--language change, English etymology and writing systems were my favourite courses out of all the linguistics courses I took. I really want a language tree poster, but itd probably be humongous. XD
I applied to speech-language pathology programs, though. And if that doesn't work out (ie: if I don't get in), I'll have to resort to engineering instead. It'll be a real shame, since I like linguistics a lot.
The speech of the Facadians (particularly the King) was made from Japanese, with a bunch of weird substitution rules thrown in to make it sound different. Now I want to go back and listen to the Facade dungeon music and see if it also follows these rules!
It'd be incredibly smart if all the songs were similar according to region. Temple of Drifting Sands doesnt sound like Facade speech to me right now, however (but I dont have access to headphones at the moment so I could be wrong). I thought it was interesting that Song of the Ancients consisted of gibberish, howeverin a pre-Tower of Babel-like language. Interesting, considering the geographical position of the Village towards the middle of the "world" (though given that it comes from Devola and Popola, it could have a different meaning entirely).
This would have been perfect for Grimoire Nier, but the only music-related info in there is the lyrics to "Ashes of Dreams". I wish she'd put the lyrics online or something; I'm sure the transcriptions by us amateurs are fraught with errors!
I still wonder if the lyrics she made up are internally consistent (like the languages Tolkien invented), or if they're just strings of sounds.
From reading the interview, it sounds like she randomly stringed them together based on sound and phonemes of that language. Similar to a babys babbling in terms of playing with the sounds and how they feel in the vocal tract. But I have a little hope that they have some sort of sense (but realistically, this is likely not the case). But given that the songs sound like a certain language, at least it seems like they follow some sort of phonotactical order. At first, I thought the lyrics were supposed to be similar to Proto-Indo-European and Proto- Japanese-Ryukyuan/Proto-Japonic.
What also interests me are the Words. Though they seem to be written in a Shin Megami Tensei-like manner with identical roots and minor morphological differences (conjugation/declension), Id like to know whether or not these words roots have some sort of connection with modern languages (or if this was an invention of the developers or localization crew themselves).
One heartbreaking thing in that interview was seeing that Emi Evans is interested in endangered languages, and that she wrote some of the music while on Ishigaki island in Okinawa. Now there's an idea... get Emi Evans to do a song in an Okinawan language! They're all related to Japanese, so Japanese speakers could take a stab at what it means, but it's different enough that it's still a foreign language. They're further apart than Latin and Spanish; maybe more like Latin and French. Fascinating stuff.
That was another one of my thoughtsthat she had picked some moribund languages in order to compose lyrics. But that would be incredibly time-consuming: finding speakers (and finding people to take you to those speakers), taking the time to learn the language or its sounds (which could be a lengthy process), possibly living amongst the people for a time to learn the lifestyle and why these sounds have the meanings they do (but that might be too much of a linguistic field study rather than simply sampling the language). But I suppose it makes far more sense to use current iterations of languages since it takes place in the future of our present, if that makes sensethough if she picked some langue doc and langue d'oïl stuff, I wouldnt mind). I suppose that if Nier were a slightly bigger world, they could include derivative languages similar to the parent language (though in the theoretical games case, Okinawan languages would be derivative of pseudo-Japanese). Id really love to hear Evanss take on these languages as well.
But if any sort of media attention helps to revive the moribund languages a bit, Id certainly be all for it.
