Quote Originally Posted by Lucke View Post
If their language was being translated by the Echo, wouldn't the language be perfect Eorzean/Common without the use of accents?
Not to knock Japanese, but if you take the Japanese phrase "risu wo tabeta", this sentence literally only has the words "squirrel" and "ate", with the syllable "wo" tying it all together into "ate squirrel". This direct translation sounds very simplistic because it doesn't have context to give it extra meaning. Who ate the squirrel? How many squirrels? Is it "squirrel" as in the meat, or "a squirrel" as in a whole animal? I imagine the Amalj'aa and Ixal have a sentence structure that we can't always interpret smoothly into the common language, resulting in the game presenting our interpretations in accents.

We have to remember that our characters don't go out of their way to translate other languages in their heads if they understand them inherently. The translation is done by the game (or rather the writers) to help us understand what our characters hear.