Inkling: The Language of Splatoon

[PiyozR]

Are you guys sure that the english speaking people from nintendo are actually a credible resource on figuring out if the language is actually gibberish? Because whenever you look into the credits of any nintendo game it is always all japanese names. Also, considering the actual part of nintendo that creates the game is stationed in japan, these two facts ive just stated may mean that this Lindsay woman who emailed one of the people on this forum could just be making stuff up. The people who send emails to us and are part of nintendo customer service do in fact NOT create any of the games because they are stationed in America. Not where the games are actually created. I dont think people who arent part of the game creation division of the company are informed of the actual creation of the game before launch nor after. This woman is probably just doing her job by emailing you back and is just stating her opinion and claiming it as factual. I'd really like a response from you guys on this.In my opinion i would think that the actual creation of the game would be kept classified and secret from the people who didnt create the games such as nintendo customer service which emailed one of us

Of course the American Nintendo people don't have a clue. That's why we're not taking it seriously. Not until someone from Nintendo says something.

it is true that the games are made in japan, however the american workers are responsible for the localization of the game, translating the words and changing details to fit the area its in. Due to this, its likely they would have knowledge of if the text and speech is translatable or not. On the other hand, the person you are speaking to is most likely only a helpdesk employee, so might not have that info.

I sincerely doubt that the foreign localization teams would know anything about this.

Hi everyone,

I'm kind of a language fanatic and I just wanted to say that I'm super amazed at all the work you've done so far!! I know you've been working really hard on this language Piyoz, but I was wondering a few things. Grammar wise, I noticed that your list of prepositions and the word order shown in your sentence seems to be a directly from English. Is Inkling going to be grammatically based off of Western European languages? Will there be aspects from other languages too such as noun cases, varying word order, particles, etc? Just a few thoughts. I really love your organization of the glyphs, and I'm really looking forward to the development of this language!!

Thanks for the feedback! For now, things like prepositions, conjunctions, nouns, verbs, and adjectives will be given roles similar to Western languages (save for conjugation because I really don't want to put myself through that unnecessary trouble). When I start stringing sentences together, creating phrases and clauses it's not going to be really based on any Western language in that way. But nothing's set in stone yet.

My idea at the moment is a more rigidly-structured kind of Chinese (Time + Subject + Verb + Adjective + Object). I'm going to start with something like that and just go in a direction that sounds and reads fluidly. Again, it won't be incredibly complex grammar like many Latin-based languages with conjugation, modes and tenses. And I certainly won't be created thousands of words of a dictionary. If people want to make their own words after me, I think we've established a good cornerstone for that.

If any other linguists out there have any input on, I'm all ears.

 

[OctagonalKahn]

This is a seriously interesting subject. I am now somewhat interested in learning stuff about new languages. Oh, and can we all agree that the Inkling language spoken by the characters in the game is gibberish!

 

[MissingNumbers]

Oh, and can we all agree that the Inkling language spoken by the characters in the game is gibberish!

I feel like this is repeated at least once every page.

 

[PiyozR]

I feel like this is repeated at least once every page.

ikr

After two days of irl business including the new Jurassic Park movie, I finally have some more Inkling words. First is another page of Inkling nouns for your perusal.

Second is a list of conjunctions that will be indispensable later on.

Third we have a big list of adjectives and a few adverbs. Now you can actually describe some of the nouns you've seen. You can talk about the size of a person, or maybe the color of their clothing. You think that Inkopolis is beautiful? Now you have the first building blocks for putting words together with some manner of semantics! Everyone is welcome to add their own words to this list. Just make sure to check to see that that combination of letters isn't already used.

Last up tonight is a small image introducing some introductory phrases for normal conversation. Hello, good-bye, yes, no, please, and thank you. With these, you can begin to speak some very, very Inkling 101 sentences! Have at it! Expect some more of these starter phrases and some more grammar-related stuff soon.

 

[Nukichuu]

whua cool people actually found out some stuff about the language o_O

 

[MissingNumbers]

whua cool people actually found out some stuff about the language o_O

It's less finding things out and more adding things on, really.

 

[TheMH]

This thread amazes me every time I look into it. Keep up the great work, even if a lot of it is made up, as long as no one provides better sources, everything can be possible.

I agree with DarkGalahad's statement. If we want a 100% failsave answer, we probably had to ask a member of the actual japanese dev team or Miyamoto himself.

 

[Tezz]

Yo, this dude on Miiverse posted this.
I only recognize a couple characters. Legit or no?

 

[Jason Tremble]

Yo, this dude on Miiverse posted this.
I only recognize a couple characters. Legit or no?

It doesn't look like it's based on PiyozR's alphabet, considering most of the glyphs in this Miiverse post don't exist within that alphabet. Though, he could be using his own variation of Inkling, considering he made another post using some of the same glyphs as from that miiverse post. https://miiverse.nintendo.net/posts/AYMHAAACAAADVHkMfFdIIA

 

[eli]

font on its way this week

 

[OctagonalKahn]

Yo, this dude on Miiverse posted this.
I only recognize a couple characters. Legit or no?

I bet he found signs, such as the "Hello my name is" And the "On Air" sign and made sentences from them/tried to make an alphabet from them.

 

[aggravatedTranscription]

@PiyozR Sorry if this seems unnecessary, but I wanted to know if you had figured out how we should write "stay fresh" in Inkling, or at least the word "fresh". I was just curious because, as we all know, Inkling society is pretty much centered on the concept of staying fresh.

 

[Jason Tremble]

@PiyozR Sorry if this seems unnecessary, but I wanted to know if you had figured out how we should write "stay fresh" in Inkling, or at least the word "fresh". I was just curious because, as we all know, Inkling society is pretty much centered on the concept of staying fresh.

"Stay fresh" is written like this when translated:

, and is pronounced like "gooyo oei". Hope this helps.

 

[eli]

Would you guys prefer "ligatures" (I put that in quotes for a reason, I'll come back to this later) or accented letters/diacritics?

For example, we see 4 versions of this same character:

In the Squid Sisters' song and many other materials featuring the language, we see many characters as rotated versions of other glyphs. Even though in some cases I've only observed two/three rotations, it's safe to assume there are 4. Therefore, we need four versions of many letters.

In the example above, these can be represented by, for example, 'u', 'U', 'ú', and 'ù'. That is, lowercase u, capital u, u with acute accent, and u with grave accent. (We could potentially have 'ü', 'û', and the capitalized versions of all of these, too).

However, not all letters are able to be accented, e.g. 'b'. While we can have the lowercase and uppercase variants of this letter – accounting for two of the rotations – how do we do the other two?

Here's a solution I propose, if you guys are okay with it: "hack-y" ligatures of sorts. You would type 'b' for rotation 1, 'B' for rotation 2, 'bb' for rotation 3, and 'BB' for rotation 4. I'd add in some sort of delimiter character (perhaps comma) if you want to type two in a row – so, like, if you want to make rotation 1 appear twice as it's repeated, you'd type "b,b" rather than just "bb". Does this sound like an okay solution? Accents can still be used for variations, e.g. o with bar at left represented by 'o', with bar at right represented by 'O', and with no bar represented by 'ó'.

Not all letters need rotations (e.g. 'i' which just looks like a line, and a version with serifs/bars) – in this case, typing 'ii' or 'II' would simply repeat it twice.

Please let me know, along with any other suggestions/ideas you have!


____

EDIT: Also, if someone could post the numbers, that'd be great! I know we see them in Walleye Warehouse plus on some other maps. I think I have a couple screenshots including some too…

 

[aggravatedTranscription]

"Stay fresh" is written like this when translated:

, and is pronounced like "gooyo oei". Hope this helps.

Do you have any sources of evidence, or did you just make it up yourself? Just wondering.

 

[Jason Tremble]

Do you have any sources of evidence, or did you just make it up yourself? Just wondering.

"Stay" is in the bottom right of PiyozR's first inkling verb list, found here: "Fresh" is also in the bottom right of PiyozR's inkling adjective list, found here: So, no. I didn't make them up myself.

 

[zmop]

font on its way this week

I'll be looking forward to this!

 

[eli]

I didn't make them up myself.

But still made up nonetheless. :P

I'll be looking forward to this!

Thank you!

 

[OctagonalKahn]

"Stay" is in the bottom right of PiyozR's first inkling verb list, found here: "Fresh" is also in the bottom right of PiyozR's inkling adjective list, found here: So, no. I didn't make them up myself.

Wouldn't Stay Fresh be pronounced: oyo oei

 

[Jason Tremble]

Wouldn't Stay Fresh be pronounced: oyo oei

Whoops. Going to edit that.
EDIT: Edited the edit I made, the correct pronunciation is "gooyo oei".