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) and because I haven't gone far into the game itself. Though I must mention that Catherine Le Caroff herself has said that pronunciation has been simplified(
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Btw, I'm kind of working on it too, y'know(working ha-ha
I don't know for sure how much letters and words Catherine had to remove from translations to Eschaton('cause on average Eschaton's letters are twice longer than English ones), so my best bet is that it's better to create a new pronunciation technique for Eschaton based on in-game one.
Don't get offended, that's just my opinion.
So, my coworkers told me you guys were raising hell trying to understand Eschatonian and I thought I'd give you all an answer on what is what! So, first, let me say that you guys are pretty cool for showing so much interest in my work! I really didn't think people would try to learn the language and I must admit that I feel a bit bad for not having straight answers. But alas, I'm the only writer on the games and so I can't allow myself to delve too deep into creating a complete language. Which means that there's no real answer when it comes to the pronunciation of the language. I was extremely lucky to have someone like Olivier Barette to work with, since he had an expansive knowledge of languages and also spoke German (which is kind of the language I based the pronunciation the most on). He tweaked certain words that were simply too hard to pronounce and tried to make the best of it, basically. What I can give you guys though is this:
So here's the complete alphabet (by the way, you guys rule for finding out so much of it!)
A= Ae
B= V
C= K
D= Ct'
E= Eh
F= Fh
G= Gl
H= Ht'
I= Y
J= Cg
K= C
L= Lw'
M= Mg'
N= Ng'
O= Li
P= Ph'
Q= Q
R= R'l
S= Sh
T= Tag'
U= Ui
V= W
W= Wg
X= Xa
Y= Yeh'
Z= Ts'
Working with that, let's say you want to translate this sentence:
This language is odd
it would go that way
Tag'ht'ysh lw'aeng'gluiaeglea ysh lict'ct
Now, as for the way to pronounce it, it really depends on the person who speaks it. To make sure Olivier wouldn't go crazy, I had to remove some of the letters to make the words shorter, at the same time ensuring that the length of the sentences matched the English ones. So this is the way I would say the sentence.
Written: (Tag'ht'ysh) (lw'aeng'gluiaeglea) (ysh) (lict'ct)
Spoken: (Tag-te-yesh) (la-eng-glu-ia-lea) (yish) (lickt)
Tag the way you pronounce "day" in German, te like "T" in German, then you need to pronounce the "Y" in "yesh" like Yott "J" in German, followd by "esh" (so kind of like "yesh"). Tag-Te-Yesh. And that's only for the first word.
Then you get weird words like Hello, which would translate to
Ht'Ehlwlwli
Now, you understand what I meant when I mentioned I had to simplify words. In the game, the word hello is pronounced "Helvi", which means that the letter T was removed, as well as one of the L (lw). The W turned into a V because that is how you pronounce it in German, so it all boils down to Helvi.
The effect I wanted to give the player upon seeing the titles of regions in the Eschaton's village was one of confusion, as well as a general sense of "what the hell is that", which I guess worked pretty well! But we all need to make sacrifices and so the pronunciation had to suffer a bit. With well over 15 pages of gibberish to record, we had to haha
I guess I would recommend you guys look up the way German letters are pronounced and try to work with that.
I really wish there was a clearer answer but hey, lovecraft stuff is never clear haha
Anyhow, I hope this somewhat helps! If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to provide answers.
Thanks guys!
C. Le Caroff
Here's the line I was talking about, since y'all were curious. The actual pre-production audio of this is in the article Caroff wrote on Eschaton, about halfway down.
In the game (a major boss battle) it's surprisingly unedited (as we don't get the usual chorus-y effect that's applied to TST's voice):
Taght'eh kr'lehaetaguir'leh yehliui sheheh vehfh'lir'leh mg'eh ysh mg'yeh tagr'luieh fh'r'llimg'! Yehliui wg'ylw'lw' r'lehgl'r'lehtag'... EHWEHR'LYEHTAG'HT'YNG'GL'L!
"The creature you see before me is my true form! You will regret... EVERYTHING!"
It's from the TST/Nyarlathotep showdown before the second part of the battle.
That being said, I really don't have any questions right now, which is surprising. :)
I've done a lot of analyzation of the lore, and it's obvious to me that the game is Lovecraftian. I really appreciate the flavor text/captions below major Skill Tree abilities and Perks (that's a good 25% of the lore) and I love the dialouge before and after bosses that actually gives you quite a bit of insight into The Shining Trapezohedron's behavior and motivations.
Anyone saying the game isn't Lovecraftian really hasn't had a thorough look at any of the lore, in my opinion.
I would write more, but I'm short on time right now, I'll be on Monday though.
I'll see about looking into German, and sorry about the hell raising haha!
There is no way to create the same phonetic system that Oliver used(as previously said they have been tinkering with words like a lot. Sometimes letters were travelling through words and added to make Trapezohedron's speak more emotional). Let's assume that we've somehow managed to do so. Will it be easy to listen to and speak in Eschatonian? Probably not.
That's leaves us with a question: What do we do?
We've created 3 stratigics:
1) Tinkering with alphabet, namely making some words gemanised.
2) Tinkering with words, i. e. germanising some of Eschaton letters, so it would sound close to Oliver's speeches.
3) Entirely preserving the alphabet and to tinker with long words by creating some rules.(That's the thing I myself will emphasise on)
I just wanted to elaborate on that method #2 that Insanelvan talked about! I came up with it, and it would be closest to the recording style, but also pretty intensive.
1. You'd have to get English phoneme text, disregarding instances of different vowel pronounications-- for example, there's like 4-5 ways to pronounce "a" in English, while Eschaton only has one.
2. You'd have to do an Eschaton conversion of these English phonemes.
ie, something like "baby (beh - bee)" to [vae vyeh] , except for most phoneme combinations found in English.
3. Then you would Germanify things as needed.
4. Memoriziation would be the hardest aspect of this, tbh.
As there are several English phoneme systems available that people have made-- including "lite/light" ones, translating parts of English to Eschaton would be the easier portion of this, probably.
For the Germanification you'd probably only need to know basic consonant sounds, and really only the ones Eschaton uses, most likely.
If multiple people were working on this method, we could probably get everything knocked out in about six months.
Some rules that I was able to create to shorten the words(now I can see why Catherine and Oliver were slicing words):
That's all I have on my mind right now
Tag'ht'aet'sh' aelw' Yeh' ht'ae'weh' ling' mg'yeh' mg'yng'ct' r'lyglh'tag' ng'liwg
P.S. Now I can already see that this scheme will soon be trashed for a solid reasons...
I’m going to get started on the vowel blends. We need to come up with a way to standardize vowel pronunciation.
Here’s what I have so far. Does this look ok?
ae= [ah eh] , as in [awe egg]
eh= [eh] as in [egg]
y= ?? maybe as in [ice] ex., since [sh’yng’keh] [sh y ng keh] (i think that the sound of y could very well change based on context as it does in English)
li= as in [leeway] , though if we change it to German i think it would start with a v.
ui= as in [you meek]
If you need clarification on the vowels, let me know! I’m going to make a spreadsheet of this.
Eschaton is your intellectual property: but is it ok to use in something like a publicly posted story or even a synthesized singing/talking voicebank (which was something I was planning on using the phonetics of either for a personal voicebank or a publicly distributed one)?
I would give you and Thunder Lotus Games credit in both cases, however, since Eschaton is your language I was wondering if this was something I could legally do, or if it was off-limits. If it’s not ok, that’s totally fine!
Thank you!
(ps., it it alright if I talk game lore with you? there are some aspects that are really interesting but also some things that are slight loose ends/things I’d like clarification on, as I’ve been doing a heavy look into the lore on my art site, and possibly may post a YT video on it, defending the lore)
Hi!
Some people have already asked me if they could use the language in their game and I said no, for the sole reason that they wanted to make it accessible to play for anyone and I thought it a bit weird to re use a language that has been created for a specific game.
Although, if you tell me it's for a fan project/that you won't make profit out of it, we can definitely come up to an agreement.
As long a you credit me, the company and Sundered!
Could you email me more specific details about your story? You can also ask your lore questions at the same time and I'll answer them :) You can reach me at catlecaroff@gmail.com
Thanks!
C. Le Caroff
Not all Eschatonian vowels have English equivalents, so I'll use IPA for my pronunciation suggestions ( Here's a page with all IPA letters [en.wikipedia.org]). My suggestions are based on Olivier's pronunciation in the game. So, here we go:
The "ae" diphthong is pronounced as /aɪ̯/ (like the "ae" in "Xea'sh'kaebt").
"eh" is a bit tricky. If you work with the Eschatonian alphabet, it would most likely be pronounced as /ɛx/. But why? Let's take a look at the word "yeh'liui" (=you). In the game it's pronounced as [ɥɛxliaʊ̯]. Actually, there's no /ɥ/ in German, but if I saw the alternate spelling of this word ->üexliau and didn't know anything about Eschatonian, I'd still know that in this case, "ü" must be a semi-vowel like the "y" in "young" (/ɥ/ sounds very similar to /y/-> the German "ü"). In Old English, the letter "h" is pronounced as /x/ when it's at the end of a syllable or comes after a vowel[en.wikipedia.org], so this is where the /x/ comes from. However, if the "h" is used to indicate that the "e" is a long vowel, it would be pronounced as /e:/.
"y" would be /y:/ or /ʏ/, depending on if it's a long or short vowel.
"li" I'd pronounce the same as you.
"ui" is another tricky diphthong. I'd say it's the same as the English word "we", but in spoken Eschatonian, it's often pronounced as /aʊ̯/, like in yeh'liui => üexliau or shuifhfhykeh=> schaufk [ʃaʊ̯fk] (=suffice). Also, if you take a closer look at Catherine's vocab sheets[thunderlotusgames.com], you might notice that the Eschatonian translation for "but" (=taks) used to be "wautaks". This seems to be based on the English vowel development[en.wikipedia.org] (it's in the fifth last row).
Whew, Eschatonian is a really interesting language! I hope there will be Eschatonian dialogues in the DLC as well because it adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game plus there might be new words to learn :D (would be great if Krurhal made an appearance in the DLC because it would be interesting to hear what he used to sound like before he ate a mega mushroom the ritual failed... I imagine him having a rather deep, raspy voice.)
PS: I got the info about Old English pronunciation from the internet, so if I wrote anything wrong, please correct me.