The World Language

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First introduced in .hack//G.U., the language of The World is the common language employed within the game world for all living creatures to communicate with each other, the only exception being monsters. This language is visible in the engravings of some weapons, in some of the game textures, and is also present in the majority of the vocal songs made for the .hack series.

Writing and Pronunciation

The writing system for The World's language is composed by a total of 29 characters: 26 characters equivalent to the ones from the Roman alphabet, and three special characters used to denote whether the word they are part of is used to refer to oneself, to another person or to the world at large.

Glyphs

The glyphs made for the alphabet with the pronunciation they each have can be seen in the following table:

Letter A B C D E
Glyph

A


B


C


D


E

IPA Pronunciation béɾə sís dəːɾ éi
Katakana Pronunciation aa bera shisu daa ei
Letter F G H I J
Glyph

F


G


H


I


J

IPA Pronunciation fúː dʒíːéi həːɾː zéɾə
Katakana Pronunciation fuu gei haa ii zera
Letter K L M N O
Glyph

K


L


M


N


O

IPA Pronunciation kuf míːə nǽn ou
Katakana Pronunciation kufu ri mia nan ou
Letter P Q R S T
Glyph

P


Q


R


S


T

IPA Pronunciation pəːɾ kúː lúː θ túː
Katakana Pronunciation pea kuu ruu sui tu
Letter U V W X Y
Glyph

U


V


W


X


Y

IPA Pronunciation væɕ wæɕ téks jaː
Katakana Pronunciation uu vas was tekusu yaa
Letter Z Self Another Person World
Glyph

Z


:


;


=

IPA Pronunciation zɐd
Katakana Pronunciation zotto

Writing Rules

The language is written from left to right and from up to down, and it has two possible ways in which it can be written:

  • The Simple form, in which the glyphs are written as indicated above with no change to their forms.
  • The Fancy form, in which the glyphs are stacked upon each other within a square block, reducing themselves in size to do so and combining their sounds together. The reading sequence in this case would be from up to down and from left to right, starting with the uppermost glyph.
An example of the Fancy form in which the glyphs for "m", "self" and "y" are combined to form "miajaa", or "my".

Structure

Strictly speaking, the The World language is a cipher for English, with the peculiarity that when the language is spoken, it does not say the words as a whole, but instead it spells them out using the phonetics outlined for each letter in the table indicated above. Therefore, it can be concluded that it shares the same grammar and vocabulary as English, but it does not share its phonology. Even so, there are sometimes when the spelling order is changed for the sake of pronunciation, such as when "exposed" is instead spelled as "xeposed" or "without" is instead spelled as "iwthout".

References