#there's a tldr at the bottom of this ridic text wall :'D

[serenegaldr]

ancient language hcs

((I’ve been thinking of doing this ever since it was mentioned in a thread, and I realized I’ve never really thought that much about what the Ancient Language (abbreviated AL) was supposed to be like, spoken. The soundtrack for the Galdr of Rebirth renders it as backwards Japanese, and I will take that into account, but I also have some thoughts of my own! My thoughts are also ridiculously long so have a read more cut:

First, according to the FE Wiki:

The ancient language was first devised by the beorc of Tellius, and for a time saw wide use among all of the land's people. However, its complexity proved to be a significant obstacle for it to be learned by laguz, and so the modern "Tellius language" was created and soon supplanted it as the continent's dominant tongue.

So the Ancient Language is supposedly ‘complex’. However, it is also the language the Galdrar are sung in, which means bird anatomy alone is capable of making the full range of these sounds. Thus, I propose that the AL has these following qualities, when compared to the Modern Tongue:

Phonetics: The production of sound (phones) in AL is, as stated above, extremely simple, allowing for its production by the tongues of multiple different types of animals. ‘Backwards Japanese’ is actually quite simple to pronounce, since like forwards Japanese, a lot of their words end on vowels, but I did wonder if the glides or fricatives wouldn’t be too much for them, so I looked up a bird utterances paper online, to which I found that the sounds available to them in song are probably slightly different from the sounds available to them in speech. There are probably some replacements when they sing, but at the same time they are Magical Birbs (TM) so their range of available sounds could well be much larger than your garden-variety bird. Do keep in mind that other species also use AL, and I did not go and look up a ‘wolf utterances paper’, so my hc does not take into account the other Laguz :’D Also related, I do firmly believe that speaking MT is not feasible to them in their Laguz form; for stuff like battle cutscenes, regardless of what the graphics render, I think they talk first, and then transform to fight.

Phonology: Tonal changes, differing stress and syllable onset all play a large part in differentiating the subtle intent behind words, at least in the spoken language! In song, that’s often replaced by vowel shifts, some of which do not naturally occur in speech, so it’s a music-only feature of the language, which might have something to do with seid magic. If you disregard all the subtle phonology changes, you’ll get the general gist of what they’re saying, but miss a whole load of nuances behind it, similar to, say, the way sarcasm is used in MT.

Morphology: The absolute bulk of AL’s ‘complexity’ stem from morphology! Every single word is tagged with all the information, including but not limited to: tense, aspect, mood, gender, case, number, and even things like ‘relative degree’, ‘relative status between speaker and listener’, or ‘special emphasis’ and the like. Perhaps there used to be more variance, or maybe there still is for other ‘dialects’ of AL (will the Herons and the Wolves really speak the exact same language after being separated for centuries? Unlikely), but at least the Herons’ version of AL is extremely ordered (get it?), and there is basically no irregularity in the application of morphemes. Learn all the intricate rules exactly once, and you’re all set for life, but there are a lot of rules. It’s interesting that the wiki mentioned it was more complex for Laguz - later on I think it’s said that, however, eventually the Laguz’ long lifespans allowed them to master the language better.

Syntax: Think Latin, but even freer than that, since there is no such thing as emphasis through position and everything is indicated in tones and by the morphology. Any word can go anywhere in the sentence and it’ll make perfect sense and mean exactly what you want it to mean, which is great for these birb singers! Very few headaches about how to fit lyrics to make sense :’D This, however, is the main reason Leanne pauses so much when speaking MT! She knows her grammatical options are severely more limited there than in AL, so she needs to think about how the sentence is supposed to be structured before she says it. And while I am biased towards making her replies actually make sense to the other person, she probably does make weird grammatical mistakes every so often.

Vocabulary/Semantics: This is probably the part I’ve mentioned the most in posts already, but AL has a relatively small pool of vocabulary, with differences in nuance indicated mainly by morphology and tone. For instance, ‘walk’ and ‘run’ would be two different words, but ‘jog’, ‘run’ and ‘sprint’ would be the same word with a slightly different indicator for ‘relative speed’. I actually have not consciously taken to doing this (yet), but in practice, Leanne, as an unexperienced speaker who still thinks mostly in terms of AL, would tend to prefer using simple words with additional adjectives/adverbs (e.g. ‘run fast’ or ‘run slow’ instead of ‘sprint’ or ‘jog’) when speaking MT.

Pragmatics: If you have a good grasp of the phonology and morphology and what they entail, you’ll generally understand what the person is trying to say, but if not, then a lot of their conversations will appear to not follow any known rules of conversation at all. As AL is a very old language, I figure a lot of the pragmatics side has strong ties to basic instincts and body language, which animals are often better at reading than humans are, so a lot of that plays into AL conversation as well!

Ok, but then why can Leanne understand everything but not speak well? As I mentioned before in the hcs channel on discord, I hc that Bird Laguz are born in their bird form, before going through Laguz Puberty at a later age, whereby they gain and are then locked into their humanoid forms as their default form. This, for Leanne, probably happened during her time asleep in the forest, so she was a baby bird for her entire time alive before the Serenes Massacre, which happened when she was about 2.5 years old in equivalent Beorc age, since Reyson calls her an ‘infant’ during that time. Now, 2.5-year-olds don’t normally understand everything you tell them! However, and this actually is a gripe I have with a lot of long-lived characters with a long infancy period, this is really not the same as a human situation. I briefly looked this up, and a baby who is considered ‘spoken to a lot’ might hear about 15,000 words a day. For Leanne, who had 6 siblings and 2 parents and a whole forest of other playmates, I might even think she’ll have heard more, but some of that was AL so probably about 15,000 words of MT a day sounds about right. But unlike a 2.5-year-old human baby, she’s been getting that for a whole entire 47 years. That means, before she even has the capability to speak a single word of MT, she’s already heard way more words spoken at her than the average adult Beorc, certainly more than one of her mental age of 18. Thus, while she’s still struggling to learn to produce the language, listening is usually no problem to her, unless the interlocutor in question speaks very quickly, or uses unfamiliar figures of speech / very difficult vocabulary! Like, Leanne probably won’t get anywhere talking with Awakening’s Miriel, but she can probably understand any average speaker just fine.

TL;DR because this is really long: the ‘complexity’ of AL is mainly in its vastly intricate phonology and morphology, which also results in a rich and confusing-to-outsiders system of pragmatics, while phonetics and vocabulary are very simple, and syntax is basically nonexistent. Certainly a very different kind of language from MT, which is why Leanne struggles when speaking, despite being receptively fluent!))