40427


This anime is still fairly new so I may be jumping the gun a bit, but in the
episodes so far the people living in the world that the protagonist Toyohisa
was transported to don't appear to speak Japanese.

Now my assumption may be off as I am not a fluent speaker, but as a third
semester Japanese minor I usually can pick up on some words, phrases and
contexts without looking at the subtitles.

When the elves speak there is a clear change in tone, pitch and pronunciation
of words.

Are they speaking a different language entirely? Or just some sort of
abbreviated form?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-24T03:11:11.200
37004
2017-11-01T03:38:44.147
2016-12-02T13:41:48.010
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question
drifters
Language of the elf-like people?


**The language is officially called "Orte"**, based on "Orte Empire".

In the original manga, it appears only in written form with Japanese
translation ( _no transliteration/spoken form_ ). The character looks like a
random scribble (and even like
[this...](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hd4hsl.png)), but later was thought to be
a modified Japanese hiragana & katakana.

> ![Orte text](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j60jD.png)
>
> **Transliteration:**
>
> **げきぶ**  
>  どりふたあず  
>  がくにを  
>  もしわれ  
>  さんどうする  
>  のならゆみ  
>  をとりやを  
>  つがえ
>
> From [佐とさん's Twitter](https://twitter.com/i/web/status/801428517435023360)

When _Drifters_ got animated, Kouta Hirano (the author) didn't think about it
at all. He mentioned it on the
[Twitter](https://twitter.com/hiranokohta/status/784396607605182464),

> The incoherent character that I wrote randomly on the spot, known as Orte
> language, was adjusted to be a fictional Latin-based language by the anime
> staffs. I can only say sorry while _dogeza_ -ing with my head thrusting the
> ground.

Seiichi Shirato, a setting researcher for _Drifters_ , also mentioned about
the difficulty in dialog speech due to Orte language. From [his
interview](http://kai-you.net/article/33481),

> **What's the most memorable impression when doing researches for
> _Drifters_?**
>
> The problematic one is about the dialog speech. Regarding the Orte language
> that is spoken by the elfs, there's a conversation to just reverse the
> Japanese text/dialog. When we tried it, apparently it's still similar to
> Japanese, thus we created a language based in Europe. There's an idea to
> modify Latin little by little, but since Scipio (a character in _Drifters_ )
> speaks Latin, he would find out!

_Surprisingly_ , Orte language seems to have its own language structure. [A
Japanese blogger](http://102037.hatenablog.com/) tried to analyze the
language, though it ended only until episode 3.

Examples:

>   * seda- : stop (verb)
>   * neruc- : kill (verb)
>   * quinacos: what (intransitive)
>   * quinacom: what (transitive)
>   * tu: you (2nd-person pronoun)
>   * hi/hii: he (3rd-person pronoun)
>


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2017-05-18T14:42:13.357
40427
2017-05-18T14:42:13.357
2020-06-17T09:17:53.303
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answer