Quote Originally Posted by Eloah View Post
Another thing to remember is what their skills actually mean, many meanings get lost in other languages. To start with, almost everything they do is related to poisons, heals and attacks, as that is something done in the real world, injecting toxins into our bodies to either heal ourselves or cause injury to others. As an example Art of War in Japanese is Poisoning Art, Leeches was an old method of "purifying" the body, and Physick is an old term for a laxative. As for some other skills, Adloquium is Encouragement Plan(which is what Adlo means in Latin) Succor is morale lifting plan, the Galvanize effect is encouragement in Japanese, and Galvanize itself means both to shield and encourage. As well as the rest of their non-fairy based skills which deal with tactical measures, often being a translation of the original Japanese in an easier to understand/cool sounding formate; why say Far Seeing Plan when you can say Excogitation. Also, here is something I wrote a while back about the Broil line of spells.
A few further points:
  • I'd have to find the Yoshida/Koji interview that discussed it, but Yoshida himself mentioned that when a particular job draws at all from European motifs or historical reference, the English names are generally devised first. This definitely doesn't seem to be the case with Broil, but I'd hazard the references are intentional for Leeches and Galvanize, while Physick is just the obvious "academicification" of your typical "heal" spell. Note also that while the French words may follow more obvious thematic connections between their abilities ("Law", "Dogma", "Strategy", and "Treaty"), they and the German words are mostly direct translations from the English words, not the Japanese.

  • Leeches were primarily a way of sucking blood from the body to cure "excess of blood", one of the four types of humors (from the greek χυμός, meaning "sap") of the body, similar to the four elements, which needed to be each be within an acceptable range and balanced against each other in an acceptable range. Excess blood was usually associated with hyperactivity, giddiness, manic swings, and the like. More effectively, it was also used on actual skin problems, hemorrhoids, or the like. However, since the treatment -- via leeches -- of the "blood" humor was so much easier than of black bile or yellow bile (the last being phlegm), leech treatment tended to be horrifically overused.
  • Physic is literally an old word for "cure". Because it later came to mean a "natural cure", which then in turn became "natural medicine", and then the most common natural medicine (separate from "herbs" alone) became those of teas or laxatives, and people didn't necessarily want to sip laxatives for a calming drink... physick finally more often referred to laxatives. We can safely assume here though that it still literally means "to cure" or "to heal", as it did previously. Contrary to frequent opinion on these forums, we aren't actually trying to make tanks **** themselves.
  • Galvanize has a bit of a complex history. Even now its literal meaning is to induce a muscle contraction via electricity, which gives you a much closer idea of its origin: Luigi Galvani, who experimented on muscle-electricity interaction and whose works later became the basis for theories of (re)animation and, more famously, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Now, of course, the term more often takes after its metaphorical relationship to electricity -- to "shock" something into action. I also wouldn't doubt that its use in, say, "galvanized steel" (electrically coupling a coating of tin to iron or steel to protect the underlying metal from rust) is also an intended reference.
  • It's not as if the non-Japanese translations of Scholar abilities lack their own humor (modern meaning); Adloquium, for instance, is literally just reassuring words, or a speech (-loquium) of purpose for some action or against some negative circumstance (ad-).