Thunder Rolls and the meaning of 'Ona Ramuhda'...

Hey Feeerrrrrrrnnnnnnnneeeeeee~? <3 From one con-lang nerd to another... can we have a more literal, word for word translation of the Old High Sylphic part of the song?

Ula menida tula oh (Hoary Arbor, Lord of Light)
Tela omnida tula ei (Thine advent quelleth creeping night)
Ona ramuhda deme os (The wicked burn, their pyres bright)
Nola tulama tela ei (Smote by Levin's blinding might)

The grammar seems like it might be really interesting to me - it looks vaaaaguely like Swahili in structure? Although that may be completely off-base - but I'm pretty sure this is a /really/ flowery adaptation of the Old High Sylphic, to fit with the tone of the rest of the lyrics. The reason I'm actually interested, though - aside from being a conlang nerd - is...

...what does 'Ona Ramuhda' mean? It's the name of the SMN book that the Lord of Levin grants us upon defeat, so somewhere in that stanza is a concept in Old High Sylphic that'd be applicable to the name of a Primal Weapon. Maybe "Levin's Might"?

Which then sent my mind down a really interesting garden path, especially when I read another stanza of Thunder Rolls...

"Soul without a name", eh? Does Ramuh have a name for himself, or is he simply called Ramuh because... that's the archaic Sylphic word for lightning? Did all the Primals acquire their names simply from their associated beast tribe's name for whatever physical phenomena they embodied? This is a bit of a spitball - we know a fair bit about the linguistics behind the beastman tongues, and the other Primal names don't really seem at a first glance like they could have come from the archaic versions of their beast race's tongues, but languages shift like CRAZY over time...

...all of which is potentially null and void if the Sylphic lyrics just refer to Ramuh as Ramuh because, you silly cat, that's his name, and it's just translated as Lord of Light or Levin or something to fit the tone of the rest of the lyrics / Ramuh's archaic speaking style. (Which - well done! I'm a stickler for usage of archaisms and even when hearing Ramuh's lines spoken, his conversation flowed really naturally despite being in a very formal and archaic register. That's not easy to do, and I'll doff my new Amon's Hat to you as soon as I pry it out of his cold dead hands...)

Edit: I'm a complete idiot and misread the lyrics in my excitement; 'soul without a name' refers to /the Warrior of Light/, which is... just as interesting, but in a wildly different way...

(...also, off topic, just between the two of us, I think we all know who the real Lord of Light analogue here is, lurking up in the northwestern mountains... I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, MR. FERNEHALWES... :3)

Forgive my ignorance, but do any of the other weapons, the scholar tome in particular, have sylvan names?

Nope - the Scholar tome is called the Law of Levin, I believe. (And I wants it, I wants it so very much!) The other weapons are Thunder-somethingorother, if memory serves. Ona Ramuhda stuck out like a sore thumb!

Yeah, the translation given in parentheses seem to take a rather large amount of artistic license in order to be sing-able in the same cadence as the Sylphic words and also preserve rhyming scheme, rather than be a literal translation. Thus, it's basically impossible to discern what Sylphic words refer to what in English.

Okay. I used to be a huge conlang fan, and I majored in linguistics but haven't done anything with it since I graduated 4 years ago. So I'm very out of practice, but I thought I'd give this my best shot anyway.

Things I am fairly certain about:
1. Ona Ramuhda translates to "Ramuh's might"
2. This language is agglutinative
3. The suffix -la refers to an animate noun, translating to "one" in the game (as in "walking one")

Taking those things into account, I reached the following conclusions (which I am less certain about):
1. The word order is object-subject-verb
2. There are no articles or marked plurals and verbs are not conjugated

So here is my best attempt at translation, which is probably completely wrong but it was fun anyway:

Original lyrics and translation:
Ula menida tula oh (Hoary Arbor, Lord of Light)
Tela omnida tula ei (Thine advent quelleth creeping night)
Ona ramuhda deme os (The wicked burn, their pyres bright)
Nola tulama tela ei (Smote by Levin's blinding might)

Direct translation:
ruling-one light-ness-of old-one is
wicked-one dark-ness-of old-one burn
strong-thing Ramuh-of very-light smite
fiery-one old-one-by wicked-one burn

(Hopefully) more accurate but less poetic translation:
The old one is the ruler of light
The old one burns the wicked night/darkness
The might of Ramuh smites very brightly
The wicked ones are burned by the old one's fire

Word list:
me - 'light'
no - 'fiery'
o - 'strong'
om - 'dark'
te - 'wicked'
tu - 'old'
u - 'ruling'
ei - 'to burn'
oh - 'to be'
os - 'to smite'
de- - intensifier
-da - possessor
-la - noun, animate
-na - noun, inanimate
-ni - noun, abstract
-ma - agent

Linguistics is fascinating... English is Subject-Verb-Object and Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb, so this is quite a different animal as compares what I've had the pleasure of dealing with in the past... I still wish the Floating One would give us a vocab lesson...

Well, in this case, I figured it was worth looking at the Japanese. I know the song was written in English originally, but here me out for this bit, the Sylphic language was probably designed on the Japanese side of things, and you'll notice some repeated uses of words here.

ウラ・メニダ　トゥラ・オ （森の古老　光の主）
テラ・オムニダ　トゥラ・エイ （降りたまえ　光の神）
オナ・ラムウダ　デメ・オス （雷神ラムウよ　守護と調停を）
ノラ・トゥラマ　テラ・エイ （厳正なる裁き降す　大いなる神）

For example, you'll notice トゥラ (tula) appears on both lines with 光 (light), meaning tula probably means "light" in Old Sylphic.

Also notice on the second and fourth lines, with エイ (ei), how 神 (god) appears on both lines too, meaning ei almost certainly means "god" in Old Sylphic, the exception being the third line with 雷神 (thunder god, or as it's translated in official English, Lord of Levin), which goes with オナ (ona), meaning ona is "Lord of Levin" in Old Sylphic, the title for Ramuh specifically.

As it is, here's my basic translation for the Old Sylphic translation from the Japanese dev blog:

Patriarch of the forest, Lord of Light
We beseech thee, descend, God of Light (the Japanese used -tamae, which is an old way to say please, replaced by -kudasai now)
Ramuh, Lord of Levin, protector and arbitrator,
Pass strict judgement, Great God

(oh, and just to counter the "how can it mean Ramuh, Lord of Levin if it's a book name", the japanese name of Ona Ramuhda is ラムウ・サンダーインデックス, or Ramuh Thunder Index. Law of Levin is ラムウ・サンダーコーデックス, Ramuh Thunder Codex)

Without a larger corpus it will be nearly impossible to confirm whether any of Junoh's conclusions are true (Great work though!), but to add to unorigino's process, here's the French. Perhaps a third translation could be of service:

Ulamenidatula oh (Voute cendrée, Seigneur de Lumière) - Ashen vault (?), Lord of Light
Telaomnidatulaei (Ton avènement apaise la nuit sombre) - Your coming calms the dark night
Onaramuhda deme os (Que les hérétiques brûlent sur un bûcher rougeoyant) - May the heretics burn on a glowing pyre
Nola tulamatelaei (Foudroyés par la puissance aveuglante du Levin) - Struck down by the blinding power of Levin

I haven't taken much time to analyze the lyrics so I can't draw any of my own conclusions about it. I also haven't done any of the Slyph beast tribe quests so I'm sure there's a lot of cultural context that I'd miss.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by unorigino

]...the Sylphic language was probably designed on the Japanese side of things, and you'll notice some repeated uses of words here.

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I don't know how many languages (real or constructed) that Ferne speaks, but I think it's safe to say that Japanese had an influence on Old High Sylphic.

I LOVE YOU GUYS. <3

And I want more Old High Sylphic. :D (I really like the idea of the Sylphic-language explanation for the Sylphs' odd speech patterns, by the way~.)