The Language of Hyrule (Tears of the Kingdom)
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- Опубліковано 21 лип 2023
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Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Special thanks to @TheStellarJay and his Japanese friend
Music composed by Mitsuhiko Takano and performed by me. - Ігри
although the idea that the Gerudo 'v' is just an inside joke for Japanese players, when I first played BOTW, I actually came to a different conclusion. The newest sound added to the IPA is ⱱ, and I actually assumed that 'biting the lower lip' genuinely implies the bottom lip is behind the upper row of teeth, as is usually implied with 'biting' one's lip. This sound also much more closely resembles the 'b' noise and would explain why Link has difficulty with 'voe' but not Vah Ruta, etc. Perhaps the consensus is right, and it is just an insider Japanese joke, but I still like to believe there was just a linguistics nerd in Nintendo offices that day.
I had to read your comment three times because I didn't notice that the IPA v you used wasn't a normal v
@@supremechaosbeing2696 I can't edit it now that it's pinned so it's gonna stay confusing ad infinitum haha
The problem with that is that the new sound is a tap. In addition to being pronounced like a v, it also has the bottom lip going forward and briefly tapping the top lip. It's a complicated, yet distinct sound, hence why it is only a recent addition
Yeah, when I first read that line, I didn't interpret it as "Hyrulean doesn't have a v sound", I interpreted it as "v's in Gerudo sound more similar to a b than a v in Hyrulean does"
I interpreted as v and b being as in Spanish.
gerudo is treated like a separate language, but in both botw and totk you can eavesdrop on a conversation had between multiple gerudo and understand it perfectly, which indicates that they were speaking in hyrulean among themselves
ah shit yes... or MAYBE, Link does speak Gerudo, albeit with a bad accent?
Maybe Gerudo is a dying language, and the true language the Gerudo speaks is actually a related language to Hylian with some words and phonemes from original Gerudo language, just like the way Mozarabic was related to Spanish.
@@kklein Link is more or less implied to have *special* ears, across all his incarnations, and to have the audio version of all-speech, including with beings and creatures that a normal hyrulean wouldn't know.
It's apparently a trait of _Hylians_ (which are a distinct race from "hyrulean", which just means living in Hyrule).
Canonically he's only ever seemed to have dialogue issues with Subrosians as his Oracles incarnation, and animals as his Twilight Princess incarnation out of wolf form-- in Ocarina and Majora's Mask he can even understand cows, dogs, beavers, and seahorses.
The Hylians' hearing involves being able to hear the "secrets of nature" and the "secrets of the gods", and it's a spin on the "jigokumimi" saying (in english it'd be "having big ears" -- having a knack for eavesdropping on and learning secrets).
So yeah Hylians like Link and Zelda are confirmed to be able to listen to something someone else wouldn't be able to hear and understand.
@@neoqwerty the minish in MC too, but aside from that yeah, magic ears I suppose
Czech and Slovakian are different and separate languages but mostly intelligible regardless.
5:24 I think part of the /b/-/v/ joke is that a lot of modern Japanese speakers can more or less pronounce /v/, and that it can be indicated in writing for loanwords, so that sort of exchange can happen in the real world between Japanese people.
So, if possible, this guy can reconstruct the Swedish Empire.
(they're not a guy, they're non binary)
What tells you they haven't done it already
@@Elisadoesstuff hreal
0:59 To me, as a native Japanese, the ancient Hyrulean text in Japanese edition rather seemed like sort of a mixture of ancient Japanese from Heian-Period plus kanbun (漢文) , which is the way commonly used in Japan to decipher ancient Chinese texts word by word. When I played the game, I naturally convinced myself that the tablets had some kind of Chinese-ish text using ancient Hyrulean characters, and Wortsworth is deciphering it into modern Hyrulean but with many katakanas in the subtitles (using katakanas instead of hiraganas is a common way to decipher kanbuns). Also, it doesn't necessarily follow the historical kana usage, but it does use some ancient vocabularies in elegant ways.
So sad we didn't get ancient French or ancient German in the game btw...
With 'goro' it's a trope that you see in Japanese media, where you have a word to indicate an accent or a way of speaking. A great example is Naruto with 'dattebayo' at the end of a sentence. Normally, the English translation will change it into something else but it's interesting that they left it for the English Yunobo
The Polish language translations in videogames;
Sony: fully dubs every single game they make into Polish starting by the end of the PS3 lifespan.
Nintendo: doesn't translate into Polish at all. The consoles aren't translated either. The Wii U was the first Nintendo console distributed in Poland.
Microsoft & others: depends sometimes subs, dubs or no translations at all.
When I say dubs I mean actual proper dubs not the Polish lektor which isn't used for videogames at all.
The Kiwi translations in videogames;
You get US english lol, enjoy your backwards dates, feet & pounds, and missing 'u' from words.
But hey, sometimes we get British english to choose from too, so that's a plus.
(Just FYI, I'm not saying they're the same. Obviously US english is still playable, unlike needing to use a non-native language for untranslated polish games)
@@Programmdude
Most Polish gamers know English so the vast majority just play games in English. If there's a translation they might play it with the translation if it's good.
I found the multitude of jokes about Hyruleans being unable to pronounce V strange, because its clearly a joke intended for the japanese audience that the localization team decided to keep for some reason. Dialogues like these usually get changed during localization.
There were a handful of questionable localization decisions in TotK. Secret stones being a prime example.
@benbookworm They should of used a word like "Mystic." You lose out on the alliteration but you keep the meaning without sounding like it was pitched by a 5 year old.
@@U.InfernoI would have chosen “sacred stones” to preserve the alliteration, but I really like the vibe that “mystic” gives. It also avoids overloading the term “sacred”. I could see that going either way-they might want to directly tie the stones to the various other forms of sacred power, or they might want to emphasize that the power of the stones is distinct from other sacred items (which I think might be part of the reason they used “secret” rather than “sacred”, which was *right there* all along).
@PaulFisher Well the translation from Japanese is explicitly not Sacred. While Sacred certainly rolls off the tongue it's not particularly the most faithful choice to the Japanese not to mention that Sacred Stones belongs to a different Nintendo franchise entirely. So Mystic falls more closely to the original script without feeling as clunky. Esoteric was another possibility but it felt as clunky as Secret
Hyrulian and its many dialects truly is one of the ficitional languages of all time.
i read this type of sentance so many time it doesn't even feel weird anymore
It weird that the Rito can supposedly speak Hyrulean considering they have beaks. How many consonants could you even pronounce with a beak?
parrots and crows and lyrebirds etc have beaks
Maybe the are hiding something in the back of the mouth that makes it possible
@@Envy_MayMaybe the Rito evolved kinda like human evolution in the real world, where their ability to mimic noises developed into a more complex system of communication? Maybe the period of them developing complex language happened to coincide with early hylian exploration in early Hebra so they learned how to mimic hylian phonemes? Could even maybe be possible that rito and hylians share a relatively recent common ancestor, though it's more an outside chance
@@sophiegrey9576 You don't even need that, parrots are capable of all the human morphemes entirely because their tongues are flexible enough to work like our tandem of lips and mouths, by shaping the air with said hypermobile tongue and using the beak as an aid.
(there's an interesting study on how the parrots don't even need their sirynx to make the sounds, just manipulating the tongue alone can shape the air and gets you human phonemes. And parrot tongues can move in *millimeter-precise* ways to produce a larger amount of phonemes than humans can with both their tongue and lips.)
So technically all the evolutionary pressure you need is a dextrous tongue that serves as a finger would, and then any language that isn't whatever would naturally arise for the rito, probably through co-existing, much like with crows.
I don't know why but the fact that Hyrulean doesn't have a "V" but has a "B" makes me unreasonably happy I have no idea why it just does.
The last point about Hyrulean not having a /v/ sound is interesting because /v/ appears in the divine beasts' names in Breath of the Wild like Vah Ruta, Vah Rudania, etc. We know that Vah is likely pronounced with a /v/ because the Japanese transcription is always purposely written as ヴァ, denoting the /v/ sound that doesn't exist in Japanese, rather than バ.
To me the "voi" vs "boi" conversation is more likely a product of a Japanese cultural phenomenon of the /v/ sound being difficult to pronounce that has been directly translated into English, similar to the direct translation of "goro" which loses its original meaning/intent outside of the Japanese context.
well the "vai" vs "bai" conversation of course is exactly what you say, which is kind of the point i'm making. i'm just trying to analyse it in-universe to bring it to its conclusion.
you're right about the Vah of the divine beasts though...
@@kklein it's possible that the naming of the shrines/divine beasts are an ancient dialect of the Sheikah which includes /v/.
Maybe Link being unable to parse /v/ indicates he isn't very educated, like a modern Japanese person mixing up b-v or l-r in English
@@kkleinThe Divine Beasts might be named in Sheikah. They do have their own language symbols, after all.
It is sort of kind of hinted that the Shiekah have their own dialect so it could be that too since they made those right?
I actually wrote my first college linguistics paper on fleshing out the gerudo language from BOTW - love to see more Zelda linguistics! ✨
link to fulltext plsss
@@tentathesane8032nooooooo it was so rough 😂 I didn’t even know the ipa yet, but it would be worth reworking after a whole linguistics education!
I'm Irish and sentences enders like "Like" and "Bai" are quite common so "goro" always came across as just that
It's weird to see that there is a difference in the Gerudo language between the English and Italian localizations. "Voe" is spelled "voy" and "vai" is spelled "vay". That same joke about Link pronouncing "voe" wrong still exists, with him asking the guard if she meant to say "boy". Robbie, will also use random English vocab, so I guess English exists in this world somehow.
for robbie, it's the same case in chinese (i don't know about other languages i just watched my dad play totk, i play in english), he will throw in random english words into his speech, but only the more basic ones that a chinese speaking person would probably know like "you" and "me", that makes it feel kinda weird as, assuming this is supposed to imply robbie's native language is "english" or whatever it would be called canonically, he would be struggling with the harder words not simple words like 「你」 and 「我」. though as a game development thing the reason this is done is obvious, you wanna make sure that a typical chinese player could understand the english words that are thrown in so the simplest ones are used
also sad that they didn't keep this thing about robbie in english, though there really isn't a foreign language that you could expect most english speaking people to understand the basic words of (unlike other languages which have english because english is the international default language for reasons)
Interesting conclusion. I hadn't thought that was a thing because, just because I mostly play it in my native Latin American Spanish, and b and v are allophones (they both make the /b/ sound and had to learn the difference when learning English), I assumed that it was just a reference to that and hadn't realized it was in all languages.
And I say this as Spanish translations from Nintendo games can be all over the place. In Pokémon Klara, or Sófora as she's known in Spain, reacting to the three tasks to do has become a meme for how off that translation really is...or a lot of the things that get translated into European Spanish as weird.
If we assume the ballad of the goddess is sung in hyrulian, which I feel is a safe assumption, it has something approximating /ʋ/, perhaps even /v/ (the first line is something like /(j)en daʃe ʋu/). This is a very old hyrulian by the time of BotW though, I suppose they've lost it since.
Riveting stuff, I have always wanted to know how hyruleans pronounce the letter v. Truly it has kept me up at night! Now i may rest soundly all thanks to you Captain ❤
I'm a conlanger working on a Classical Hylian (Hyrulean?) language based on that of OoT. Given how little we really have to work with, what I've come up with has gotten pretty good reviews in the community. If anyone is interested I've made some comments and a post or two about it over at r/conlangs.
I had so been hoping you would make this video
omg this is amazing im so excited to watch this🤩
I’ve played the game in Japanese. In Japanese the Gerudo word for man ”voe” was ヴォーイ(pronounced voy).
This actually comes from the English word “boy”.
But I guess the English speaking players won’t find that exotic enough, so it was changed.
Been wondering when my langtubers would touch on Zelda again, thank you.
great vid as always :] !!
Always fun with some language analysis :) thank you
K KLEIN IN IT FOR THE MONEY ?!?!?!?
Frotz
69420
@@pettylein that is indeed me
Is this one of the commandments in the Holy Frible?
omg no way i had no idea :o
This is the piece of information we were waiting for ! Vank you very vuch.
I've been waiting for this video
I’ve been thinking about making a conlang for Gerudo using evidence from placenames, names, and phrases, I thought I was the only one thinking about Hyrulean language
in Breath of the Wild there were also some Gorons who had trouble pronouncing Gerudo words because of the v
I like to imagine Hyrulian being a fusion of Japanese and Sindarin (or Kēlen for cultured folk/jan Misali fans)
Tbh one of my conlangs I’ve been making is rather Japanese inspired (tho it’s relatives are rather inspired by Korean) if I ever get myself to tackle doing a writing system for Sanai (one of my langz) I imagine it being featural like Hangeul but Syllable based like with Hiragana/Katakana
we will construct the phonemic inventory, one phoneme at a time if need be
K Klein gaming
They really should develope or hire someone to develope an official Hyrulean conlang
they should hire me 😌😌
also the gerudo language isn't exactly the same depending on the language of the game
for instance if you play in french then voe is voï
This reminded me of something i randomly learnt in video like a year or two ago, i think in the original Japanese for a link between worlds the zora said like “zora” or something at the end of there sentences just like the gorons
in fact, this is why I interpreted the second person pronouns of my Classical Hylian to be goro, zora, and jora. Which one is used is a register-based thing.
The video we all waited for. Bery marbelous!
The hyruleans get really damn old, so maybe since it took longer to change out the population, the language also changed slower
The Gerudo like to insert "Gerudoisms" when speaking another language, I presume for flavour. Could also be part of a dialect continuum like what happens here in scotland. We will often use words such as "Wee", "bairn/wean", "braw/guid" when speaking Standard Scottish English, because the EN equivs require more stress and feel a bit unnatural to say sometimes
Where nerdy nieche interests takes you! Never expected to be watching a video about Zelda, but here I am Linguistics has brought me here
I dont think that they dont have the V sound but that its just one that is hard for them to hear sometimes, or a sound slowly being forgotten. The hylian wrighting system has a specific letter for V [that is similar to the letter for X], a detale I find odd sense it uses tge sae charicter for O and Z or E and W ect. But the letter for V does only come up once in game on koltins shop so its possible that, like English, they have redundent letters that are only there because of "history" or something but has now lost its meaning.
On the gloom weapons, you can see old Hylian wrighting, the same wrighting from ocorina* of time [or wind waker, I cant tell].
The modern Hylian wrighting system seems to be based off of ancient Hyrulian from Skyward sword and is exactly the same as the one from a link between with, maybe they had an ancient Hylian renisons*.
[Edit]- old Hylian from oot and ww translates to Japanese wile modern Hylian translates to English and so does ancient Hylian.
Finally k posted again it felt like ages XD
I just found out this channel and I am already liking it
Also yes Finally someone pointed out the language barrier that be formed between Zelda and the people of the past, no matter how much you are a nerd you will have a hard time speaking to guy in a language spoken 20000 years ago but Nintendo didn't put much effort explaining all that. Also now you mention it Zelda and Mineru had all the the chance the document the events of the past and the info regarding the Zonai tech into the Purah Pad for people to use in the future but they didn't, Remember how excited Zelda was when she saw the Zonai ruins and then she ignores it when she's given a chance to explore a long dead civilisation when it was still thriving.
OH GOD THIS IS COOL, longtime fan
Hiii, I actually wrote my thesis about Problems and strategies in video game translation: An Analysis of TloZ: TotK.
The Zoras also has a dialect in Japanese and would end each sentence with "zora" (ゾラ) which differs from the name of the race in Japanese which is Zoora. There's no evidence of this fantasy dialect in the English translation, however, in the German translation they always pronounce the syllable "so" as "zo" which sounds like an interesting sea creature kind of lisp. They'd say Zorgen instead of Sorgen (worries) or Zoldat instead of Soldat (soldier). In Spanish, the fantasy dialect of the Gorons was maintained as well and they mix it as some sort of prefix into their verbs, for example "no es nada recomendable que un hyliano viaje sin gorocompañía" it's not recommendable for a Hylian to travel without gorocompany.
I alternate between languages a lot when playing BotW and TotK. Haven’t done a whole lot of Japanese with TotK yet, but I distinctly remember a lot of the children Rito adding a lot more chirpy sounds to their dialogue in Japanese. I don’t think it really continued much more into their ‘later’ years, but they had more use of “ch”. I’m pretty sure a lot of Zora also made use of “zo” a lot more as well. Goro was more common in Japanese but also fits more easily than does in English.
Love the little quirks like that.
Nice to see the some spoiler warnings, even though i probably won't play it anyways but still
Interesting topic anyways as i may or may not have noticed or cared as much.
Maybe the spoken hyrulian didn't change but the written language did
Within 10 days!
I wish this video was longer… but then again im not sure how much more information you can get about the languages in hyrule, maybe the alphabet’s?
Dude how did you think this game was just okay?
This is literally one of the best games I've ever played and it thoroughly impressed me with a scope and innovation it brought to not only the series but gaming in general.
I played literally every Zelda game including breath of the wild and this game just isn't comparable.
It's absolutely insane The amount of creativity and passion that was put into this game as well as the things you can do.
The fact that this game didn't blow your mind is genuinely unthinkable to me I'm sorry.
Rarely does a game hook me onto it for a month or two on end.
Literally a sky world AND and underworld.
Nintendo is used to doing dark and light worlds but never three at the same time.
At most it's a sky sanctuary or a sky dungeon but NEVER 3 at the same time on THIS scale.
How can a game/Zelda game that has caves, an extremely flexible and powerful building system, the most insane traversal and exploration options as well as the crazy amount of quality content not blow your mind?!?
Not to mention the story and enemy variety.
It put botw to shame and I thought that game couldn't get any better but they pulled it off somehow!
Maybe we can get more phonems looking at names: Link, Zelda, Hyrule, there's at least an L sound separated from some sort of R, Goro, Kokiri, Deku, etc... It's kind of interesting, I never really thought about it
0:36 I like how Japan became the japanese language
Ah yes the famous language spoken in Japan... _Japan_
that is true that was dumb i edited those in two iterations lol
I think there is, or was, also a Zoran language and a Goron language, and other languages throughout the series.
The developers just didn't put much effort into it, aside from some symbols and alphabets that just said things in English or Japanese...
Woohoo! A phoneme!
i think that the linguistics of zelda is definitely an under-discussed subject. thanks!
Nice video goro
Here's a fun question if you need more video ideas. Why do all spoken languages only use sound made by the mouth? So for example, why are there no languages where a hand clap or a finger snap are consonants like any other?
I’d say, short answer: inconvenience.
But I know that some speakers of English use snapping paralinguistically as a filler to indicate that they are having a “tip of the tongue” moment
Probably because we already use hand gestures to reinforce what we're saying.
EDIT: Also if finger snapping was used in any language people like me would be unable to speak it as I (For some reason) physically can't snap my fingers loudly.
With my single phoneme, I can master this new language! Wait, my phoneme is the Danish soft D??
I am SO dissapointed you didn't just completely reconstruct the language based on in-game signs and writing
in fairness the in-game signs etc just use alphabets, rather than having an entire constructed conlang, like the hyrulean text is all just english to the point you can even read it pretty easily if you speak english and know what to look for
@@Envy_Mayyeah the stable just says stable. I could tell that and I haven’t even looked at a single key
k klein stellarjay crossover :o
YES, OMG YES, I FINALLY FOUND SOMEONE WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT THE LINGUISTICS OF BOTW
Is Gerudo the same regardless of localization?
Apparently not according to some people. Seems reasonable that the spelling would change to reflect the language read in. Y for English/Spanish, J for German/Dutch.
i think zonai characters are chinese seal or bronze scripts.
maybe in english, "goro" is meant to be like a goron word for "brother", since that's something they call people a lot ?
I think it's the equivalent of 'you'. Similarly the Zora and their habit of ending sentences with 'zora'.
Æ
"Promo sm" 😁
[Edited]
huh? that's exactly what was said in the video. they're using "bite the lower lip" as a description for the gerudo sound /v/, because link pronounces it as a /b/ instead, implying hyrulian doesn't have /v/ but does have /b/..
@@suranumitu7734 My error! I got the characters confused the wrong way round
@@suranumitu7734 I know this wasn't what they meant but I love the idea that Gerudo has a voiced sublabial alveolar fricative.
Fucking nerd (I love the content) (I’m a nerd too) (great quality) (trying to help get more people into linguistics) (trying to boost engagement) ❤❤
Delightfully ridiculous! :)
...and now explain why you've disabled the dislike function. (something that UA-cam shouldn't allow, nor should they have made the number of dislikes, invisible [I use an extension, that makes them visible, mind you])
dislikes are always disabled, there's no way for me to enable them. i would if i could but i can't so i won't
@@kklein That is a lie. It specifically says "Disables *_by Owner"_* (emphasis mine)
...and no other video I've seen (before or since), has dislikes disabled. You can dislike every video. _The amount of dislikes a video has,_ isn't visible to anyone *except the owner* (though there are ways around this, such as certain browser extensions, like the one I use, that make you able to see it, just as before), but *_you can dislike the video._*
@@ZarlanTheGreen Maybe your extension glitched?
@@kakahass8845 Nope.
It is easily confirmed, without the extension.
I tried two different browsers (both without the extension) and the only difference is that there is *_no clear indication,_* that it is disabled, but...
The video has, rather suspiciously, NO likes or dislikes.
Clearly, it's not just likes that are disables, but rather rating the video, either way, is disabled.
It used to be the case, that it would be fully visible, that ratings are disables.
Now the fact is hidden.
...much like how plenty of comments get, effectively, deleted nowadays. They are still visible to the person who posted them, but not to anyone else. Without any indication, that this has happened. (a fact one can confirm, by opening the video in a "private mode" window, and being unable to find the comment. Whenever I make a comment, I open check it in private mode, to see if it was posted or not)
This is UA-cam being extremely unjustifiably sneaky, dishonest, and unfair.
The previous K Klein video (about the "genders" [which aren't grammatical genders, in any way shape or form] in Swahili) has (at the moment) 3.7K likes and 43 dislikes.
This video has no likes or dislikes.
Not a single one.
At all.
How would that be possible, unless they have been disabled?
okay i made a mistake with this one specific video (that should be fixed now btw) thanks for bringing it to my attention but like bro calm down it's not a conspiracy to hide my like ratios it's just a box i forgot to tick when uploading the video - yeah, that's right, from the creator interface, you don't disable likes, you enable them. go figure
Not having /v/ is very helpful to the Bengalis as well. In fact, anytime I notice that a language doesn't have the /s/, /v/, or /ə/ sounds, my first thought is that it must have been invented by a Bengali and/or inspired by Bengali.
i interpreted it as that gerudo v is a labiodental stop that they have distinctly from the bilabial one, i dont think any natlangs have that but it fits the context. cuz if it was rlly a matter of him saying a plosive instead of a fricative i feel like she would have focused on something abt the manner rather than biting your lip
:D
B and v are easy to miss hear and confuse
Did you mean to put [b] instead of the bilabial trill
@@Denneth_D. No he just capitalized "B" because it was at the start of a sentence he was using the letters not the sound.
9,780th viewer of this video!