Comment on What do other languages use for "magic" words; or names and titles in fantasy and sci-fi novels or cinema?

it_depends_man@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Anime and japanese (and chinese?) culture often uses German or French imagery or words in ways that either lack some context and sometimes it’s complete gibberish. The “Frieren” anime uses German words for names that would not be names in German. (Frieren is a verb means, “being cold”, but actually not the kind of emotionally cold that the character Frieren is either, it just means being physically cold).

The use of latin is actually deeper rooted in mysticism and religion. Nobody really used it as a spoken language after the fall of the roman empire, but the chatholic church still used it it’s ritualistic language until the bible was translated to German by Martin Luther. That’s not the only case of that happening either, if you look into the sumerian and related languages, they shared an alphabet, but the actual grammar and pronunciation and use shifted and it evolved in a way that the older language grew to be exclusive for religious rituals, while the more common language was a different one.

Another example that might have slipped your attention is mathematic’s use of Greek symbols. We don’t speak Greek. We don’t have those symbols readily available on keyboards or anything.

Programming languages of course. They’re basically exclusively in English. Some of the concepts in programming are actually cumbersome to translate and make the most sense if you have an understanding of English.

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