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Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

polygon.com

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Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#11

Post by ryanschneider »

proper_black wrote: post #10
Galanwe wrote: post #6

Interestingly, we have a word in French to call these gibberish languages that sound like real ones but have no meaning. It's called speaking "yogurt". It was originally used because young French people wanted to sing the English songs that they heard, but didn't know the language, so they would make up sounds that looked like English.

This exact thing is called "washawasheo" or "washawashear" in (Mexican) Spanish. It would be cool to know what languages have this, as I'm pretty sure not all of them do (Russian doesn't, for example).

Reminds me of the (supposed?) etymology of “barbarian”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian

> The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness. According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;"

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#12

Post by Waterluvian »

vimy wrote: post #8

Reminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&feature=emb_titl...

It's also a pretty catchy song. But yeah it messes with my brain that is working hard to parse English. It's interesting. If a language is clearly not English I don't have the same issue.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#13

Post by Razengan »

Instead of the constant focus on graphics graphics graphics, why don’t companies improve other tech like speech synthesis for a while?

That would bring about a new boom (pun) of creativity by allowing indie devs to write complex stories with spoken dialogue without having to worry about hiring actors and immutable recording sessions.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#14

Post by ta1234567890 »

proper_black wrote: post #10
Galanwe wrote: post #6

Interestingly, we have a word in French to call these gibberish languages that sound like real ones but have no meaning. It's called speaking "yogurt". It was originally used because young French people wanted to sing the English songs that they heard, but didn't know the language, so they would make up sounds that looked like English.

This exact thing is called "washawasheo" or "washawashear" in (Mexican) Spanish. It would be cool to know what languages have this, as I'm pretty sure not all of them do (Russian doesn't, for example).

And a band made a hit song in Spanish about it in the early 2000s, Asereje: https://youtu.be/V0PisGe66mY

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#15

Post by cbhl »

Razengan wrote: post #13

Instead of the constant focus on graphics graphics graphics, why don’t companies improve other tech like speech synthesis for a while? That would bring about a new boom (pun) of creativity by allowing indie devs to write complex stories with spoken dialogue without having to worry about hiring actors and immutable recording sessions.

There aren't super technical burdens to speech synthesis in games; for example, Jackbox Party Pack 7 runs just fine on the Switch and contains a speech synthesis engine for "Blather Round".

I imagine it's mostly a licensing/cost thing (since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor and doing a recording session).

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#16

Post by oooooooooooow »

vimy wrote: post #8

Reminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&feature=emb_titl...

Adriano Celentano is a singer songwriter, actor, director, screenwriter, composer, film editor and TV author[1]. He definitely has humor and used irony throughout his career, but wouldn't call him a comedian by any stretch.

[1] Taken from wikipedia

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#18

Post by Razengan »

cbhl wrote: post #15
Razengan wrote: post #13

Instead of the constant focus on graphics graphics graphics, why don’t companies improve other tech like speech synthesis for a while? That would bring about a new boom (pun) of creativity by allowing indie devs to write complex stories with spoken dialogue without having to worry about hiring actors and immutable recording sessions.

There aren't super technical burdens to speech synthesis in games; for example, Jackbox Party Pack 7 runs just fine on the Switch and contains a speech synthesis engine for "Blather Round". I imagine it's mostly a licensing/cost thing (since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor and doing a recording session).

> since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor

That's what I'm talking about. Surely we can do away with that if we try, just as we don't need real people to build 3D models -from- if we don't want them.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#19

Post by komali2 »

bschwindHN wrote: post #17

I play it in Japanese, I thought it was always just a high-pitched, sped up version of the sounds the language is composed of.

When I was a kid the only way I could play video games was in 1 week bursts in the form of hollywood video rentals. When we picked up animal crossing for GameCube and I heard animalese, I thought my disc was messed up and went back to swap it out. I was too young to really know how to google something like that.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#20

Post by BoorishBears »

juancn wrote: post #2

Animalese is a simple phonetic translation of the text. It’s super noticeable in Spanish which is fairly straightforward. In English it’s a simplistic translation to phonemes as far as I can tell.

You can notice it at the screen where you enter your name at the start of the game

As you move the cursor over each letter, the character speaks out a phonetic sound similar to the letter you're on

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