which star wars languages are real languages?

I know the following:

Basic=English
Er'Kit=Spanish
Nelvaanese=Hungarian
Sullustese=Haya
Sith=Latin

any others?

High Galactic in Jedi names (ie, Qui-Gon Jinn) sounds sorta "Oriental" to me, but I may be wrong

I'm pretty sure Honoghran and Rodese are real languages, but dont know which; Ive also heard the cantina is full of real tongues; feel free to expand this list!

 

^^ before anybody wonders about Sith = Latin

source is Visual Dictionary sith holocron inscriptions

aurek besh letters upside down, read from right to left read: in umbris potestas est

latin for: in the shadows there is power

so latin = sith

 

IIRC hutese is based on pourtagese.

 

I've heard, but never tried to look for myself, that Vader's chestplate has Hebrew lettering.

 

There's definitely Chinese based on
Qui-Gon Jinn
Klin-Fa Gi (There was another Gi in the Clone Wars, cannot remember her name)
Also Jang Li-Li (Definitely Chinese name)
YES!

Edit: Of course, who could forget the great Exar Kun

 

Here's Saxton's page on the Hebrew on Vader's chestplate.

How about Greek? We see squadrons and ships named after Greek letters all the time. And didn't Allston use a Hebrew letter (aleph or something like that?) for the name of a squadron in Wraith Squadron?

 

Ewok is Tagalog, the Filipino language; bizarrely, Jeremy Bulloch taught English to native Tagalog-speakers in the 1970s...

Note that Threepio's storytelling is actually in Yuzzum, while the "Yub nub!" song is in a made-up Ben Burtt language

Chiss has some Hungarian words (Csilla = "Star"; "Csaplar" = Hungarian surname), and French words are occasionally borrowed in Core Basic ("sans the parenthood metaphor") and Gungan creole ("J'ai bongo do deepu sea")...

Raising the question: is this meta-translation? Or is it an indication that the narrative POV of "A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away..." is in Star Wars' future, not our own present-day?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Isn't aleph a Phoenician word?

 

Sith is Latin?..... wow, that's poor

 

I guess aleph is in a number of languages.

 

I'm all for meta-translation. If we're gonna go after "Lucas' intent," then there's the whole fairy tale thing, plus the "Alien Exodus" thing that got cancelled...

Anyway, none of the languages are purely "Latin" or "Spanish" or "Portuguese" because, unless they're "foreign" enough, it's too easily picked out. Then again, Mando'a is the only one seemingly sprung entirely from an author's head.

 

Well the Sith/Latin thing makes sense, since so many Sith names sound like the Sith want to be Roman (Sidious, Plagueis, Tyranus)

 

I think its the Tagalog dialect not the Filipino Language just because I couldnt understand what the heck they were talking about but the tones and pronounciation is familiar.

 

Vader is dutch for Father

 

It's probably just based on Tagalog, not exactly Tagalog.

 

I know that Greedo speaks some African language in ANH. I don't remember what it is called though.

 

Pretty much, since ben burtt never mentions it in the DVD commentary. He only describes an African woman's song that one of the Ewok sings, so it may not be even based on tagalog.

 

I believe what you are looking for is the Quechua Language, the language of the Incan Empire of South America. It is what Huttese is based off of and what Greedo speaks.

 

I thought that the guy (Ory Mantell I think)was speaking Huttese? Jabba says "Boska" (come on) in ANH also.

 

I saw a little kids' magazine for Episode III, which says that English, reversed, is really the Utai's Language.

 

I know a bit of Tagalog and I didn't hear anything I could recognise, so I think it was just based on it.

 

the Nelvaan language utilizes a lot of Hungarian and translates fairly closely.

i wouldn't say that Qui-Gon and other "chinese-sounding" names are indicative of actual chinese... but merely some non-chinese speaker trying to make names that sound chinese. unless you can point out what the names actually translate to in that language, you're just looking at pseudobabble.

IIRC, Ben Burtt used a language of Kenya for the dialogue that Nien Nunb speaks in ROTJ. unfortunately i don't think it is a direct translation of anything that the Falcon's co-pilot should be saying.

Ben Burtt's intergalactic travel book lists the real-world inspirations for most of the major bits of the alien languages that we hear in the OT. i thought Ewokese was based off of a Mongolian dialect for the sounds, IIRC.

we should probably break out language comparisons this way:
1. alien language A is simply human language X, in form and in translation.
2. alien language B sounds like human language Y, but isn't a translation of Y.

 

Well, I'm not really sure if it's what the authors had in mind when they wrote the names, and one should know that even in Chinese, there are many different names that can be translated from the same into Roman letters. But theoretically, I could come up with these

I'm not sure if the board will be able to let you see the Chinese letters, but here they are anyway (typed in from Windows 2k)

Qui-Gon Jinn could theoretically be translated into ½ð¿ì¸Õ
One option for Jang Li-Li is ½­ÀöÀö
For Klin-Fa Gi one possible translation is ¼§Áé·¢
Exar Kun's name written in Chinese could possibly be À¥É±

So I will plead my case that Chinese is definitely present in the Star Wars Universe.

 

Just because you can write it doesn't mean anything. I mean, heck...I can write Qui-Gon Jinn in English, that doesn't mean the name is English. Do those translations mean anything?

 

Yeah, somehow they found an old Mongolian woman who didn't speak any English. She asked for vodka and told a whole bunch of stories in her dialect (her son doing the translating to let her know what they were asking for), which was used as a guide for Ewokese.