Constructed Languages.

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Mafty
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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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Seto Kaiba
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Re: Constructed Languages.

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.
Very little... usually because very little effort actually goes into it.

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.
Quite a few of them are simply badly-mangled English or Japanese and are making only the most trivial effort to hide the fact. If there's a written form on display, it's often just English with a different symbol set.

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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