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Brief Hymmnos Reference

Hymmnos is a language invented for the Ar Tonelico series that focuses on conveying emotion.

Keep in mind that I'm working from a Japanese description of how the language works and Japanese descriptions of the terms. Translations of translations always tend to suffer somewhat in quality...

Hymmnos Origins and Types

(This section is directly translated from the corresponding page on the Hymmno Server. As such, terms found here may not match either those used in the official English translations or those used on fansites.)

The origins of Hymmnos and the Hymmnos script are ancient, and existed before the forefathers of acousticians discovered "Sound Magic" in the First Era. It was not yet called "Hymmnos" at that time, but the incantations that all sorts of shamans used, called "Tsuki Kanade" (Moon Performance) in those days, became the origins of Hymmnos. Hymmnos was later formalized as a language optimized for control of and communications with the tower, but its grammar and vocabulary sounds are based in the incantations of these shamans. The generic Hymmnos that spread throughout the world from there subtly changed format depending on the region and sect, and the vocabulary also steadily altered as history progressed. Therefore, archaisms, dialects, and so forth also exist in Hymmnos, just as they do in Japanese and other languages.

There are many such Hymmnos derivatives in the present Third Era, as the following.

• Pure Core Form (Common Language)
• Kult Ciel Form (Pre-1st Era Language)
• Cluster Form (Cluster Region Language)
• Alpha Form (Origin Spells)
• Old Metafalss Form (1st Era Sacred Language)
• Pastalie New Testament (Pastalia Dialect)

Pure Core Form

"Core" refers to the First Tower "Ar Tonelico", called the core of Song Magic in the First Era. In other words, the incantations optimized to control this tower are called Pure Core Form. However, this is not to say that only this Pure Core Form can control it, and in practice it is possible to control it using any form. That is to say, Pure Core Form is nothing more than the format that the tower administration in Sol Ciel's capital city "El Elemia" decided upon as a global standard (like the ISO standard on Earth).

As a result, everything standardized from each "form" becomes "Pure Core Form", so everything acknowledged in lookups and so forth is all written as Pure Core Form. Pure Core Form and other forms thus often exist mingled together.

Kult Ciel Form

This Kult Ciel Form is itself the spells of the shamans who once incanted "Tsuki Kanade", and is the origin of Hymmnos. It has largely been forgotten in modern times, and it can be said that this line of vocabulary scarcely remains.

Cluster Form

Passed down and established during the First Era in the Sol Cluster region, a region far removed from the Sol Ciel region (on the far side of the planet), is the "Cluster Form". From the standpoint of Pure Core Form, it is a "dialect" of sorts, but the practical effect is scarcely different. At present, there are said to be none in the vicinity of Ar Tonelico who can use this "Cluster Form", but somewhere in the world, a colony centered on Cluster Form might exist even in the present day.

Alpha Form

The "Reyvateil Origins", of which there are said to be only three in the world, can craft optimized Hymmnos terms in their own minds. Terms formed like this are called "Alpha Form". This Alpha Form is somewhat troublesome in that it is unable to produce maximal power if not used with the tower that the Origin manages. That is because, in contrast to the way the other "forms" craft terms that are within the current specifications of the tower (strictly speaking, Reyvateils just pick out terms that are already present), this Alpha Form alone expands the receiving tower's functionality and creates a Hymmnos term to deal with this. In other words, in her own tower exists the functionality to handle that term, but it is an invalid term on other towers lacking this, and is thus naturally not general-purpose.

Old Metafalss Form

A unique form invented in the early First Era by the holy land of "Metafalss" that dominated the world back in the time of the 2000s. The power that one term holds far exceeds the average value for Pure Core Form. The reason they produced such high-powered Hymmnos terms is said to be in their land. In this land, spiritual ideology thrived more than in other regions, and the study and development of song through Tsuki Kanade was extensive. For that reason, even as other regions were feeling the limits of song power, they overcame these little by little, training themselves to craft yet stronger songs, then refining and improving them.

For better or worse, the influence of their spiritual ideology meant that even as other regions began studying song scientifically, spiritual thinking through Tsuki Kanade lived on even then, and the civilization rapidly became relatively backwards after entering the 3000s. Through diplomatic relations with Sol Ciel, Metafalss Form came to be registered on Song Magic servers.

Pastalie New Testament

A new dialect crafted in the land of Metafalss around the year 3400. The land has "Infel Phira", a different Song Magic server from "Ar Tonelico", and it is only possible to use the language by means of an I.P.D.(Infel-Phira Dependency), a Reyvateil linked to that server. Thanks to its special characteristics, its compatibility with other languages is almost zero, from grammar to vocabulary. The execution commands are thus also revised into the unique declaration "METHOD_XXXX/." rather than "EXEC_XXXX/.". However, in practice, other forms are also generally available through emulation. They are translated into Pastalie New Testament within Infel Phira, but on the user level, it is possible to use "Pure Core Form", for example, without modification.

The grammar differs entirely from the other Hymmnos formed in the First Era.

Standard Hymmnos

As previously noted, Hymmnos focuses on conveying feelings, not on happenings as most languages do. That by itself poses a significant barrier to understanding and especially translating it cleanly.

To use (and translate the explanation for) the example sentence from the Hymmno Server:

"Was yea ra" is as explained below under the "emotisound" heading. Rough translations of the remaining words are wael = joy, herr = he (subject case), hyma = hear (words), ar = the, wart = words. The explanation given translates to: Says "He was glad to hear the words" while expressing that I am as glad of it as if it were myself. Also noted is that "Was yea ra" expresses the entire part outside of the quotes.

Emotisound (想音)

All grammatical sentences in Hymmnos begin with a three-word phrase we'll call an "emotisound" (想音, literally feeling-sound). An emotisound is composed of three parts, in this order: A degree or extent (how strongly the speaker feels), a specific emotion (what the speaker feels), and whether one wishes to escape that emotion or remain that way (what the speaker want to do with the situation). The subject of the emotisound is always "I".

One particularly common emotisound is "Was yea ra"—'Was' means the feeling is very intense, 'yea' means the emotion is gladness, and 'ra' means the speaker wants to stay like this. Put simply, "Was yea ra", with no other context to work with, means "I'm very happy and I like it this way".

Though it is possible to have a Hymmnos sentence without an emotisound, this is uncommon and will not function as Song Magic, which is the primary purpose of Hymmnos in the context of the game.

It's also possible to establish a single emotisound as the default for a block of sentences, by using the syntax "[emotisound] 0x vvi." to begin the block and "1x AAs ixi." to end it. A sentence within such a block may still have its own emotisound, which then overrides the default one for that sentence, comparable to the way an accidental in music notation makes a single note sharp, flat, or natural instead or what it would otherwise be.

The cataloged terms used in emotisounds are as follows. All are Pure Core Form unless otherwise indicated.

As suggested by the table, automated messages and such that use proper Hymmnos but lack any real emotion typically begin with the emotisound, "Ma num ra." Furthermore, "ra" is so overwhelmingly common that it might as well mean nothing in most cases, and can usually be safely ignored.

Sentence structure

Since Hymmnos is focused on conveying feeling and is most often used to invoke Song Magic, sentences are first person by default. Second- and third-person subjects are not a strong point of the language. A typical sentence has no explicit subject, using an implicit first-person subject instead.

Syntax for a normal first-person sentence is emotisound-verb-object-clause.

Syntax for a normal second- or third- person sentence is emotisound-verb-"rre"-subject-secondary_verb-object-clause. The "rre" indicates that the following word is the subject of the sentence. Arguably, these are still first-person sentences, since the emotisound still expresses the speaker's feelings, and the first verb still has a first-person subject, giving the speaker's actual or desired action. Just to confuse things even more, there are special subject pronouns for the singular and plural variants of second-person, third-person masculine, and third-person feminine that are understood to be subjects and do not require "rre" (though it may still be included for emphasis). Furthermore, this syntax is a relatively recent development in Hymmnos (by the game timeline), and does not exist in older forms of Hymmnos. As already noted, Hymmnos is much better suited to first-person sentences, but for reference, here are the pronouns used:

For comparison purposes, English is nearly always subject-verb-object-other, as "I read a book in the park." Japanese, on the other hand, is most often subject-other-object-verb, other-subject-object-verb, or just other-object-verb, as "公園で本を読んだ," though the language is more flexible about word order than either English or Hymmnos, as long at the particles are placed properly.

Pastalie New Testament

Ar Tonelico 2 introduces an alternate song magic server known as Infel Phira (pronounced "infel pira" and, unfortunately, also spelled that way in the English release) that primarily uses a vastly different form of Hymmnos, with different vocabulary and a completely different method of infusing sentences with emotion. It's so much different from ordinary Hymmnos that non-I.P.D. Reyvateils can't make sense of it, despite having an instinctive understanding of Hymmnos in general.

Aside from the differences in vocabulary and grammar explained under the following headings, Pastalie New Testament also differs from other dialects in punctuation and other notation. Hymns run on Infel Phira begin with the identifier "METHOD" rather than the usual "EXEC" used for Hymns run on Ar Tonelico or Sol Marta. Statements in Pastalie New Testament normally end in "/." (forward slash plus a period), though this is mostly to prevent confusion with the bank periods explained below, and ordinary question marks and exclamation points are also valid. Quotations begin with ":/" (a colon followed by a forward slash) and end with "/:" (a forward slash followed by a colon), instead of the quotation marks used in standard Hymmnos.

Emotion in Pastalie New Testament

Emotional content in Infel Phira's dialect of Hymmnos is more compact than, yet capable of more complexity than, standard Hymmnos, though it looks quite odd at first. All verbs in this dialect contain two to four periods, such as "c.z." and "t.n.m.n". These are called "bank periods" and stand for "banks" that may be filled with "emotivowels" (想母音). Banks within a word are numbered 1, 2, etc. from the left, and the lower the number is (the closer to the beginning of the word), the greater the effect and the higher the priority of the contained emotion.

The possible emotive fillers are as the following table indicates. Place the letter from the row side in the blank from the column. Note that the levels are merely notation and do not imply any sort of ranking or relative strength.

The resulting compound term consisting of a "base term" with "emotivowels" filling in the bank periods is called a "emotisound verb" (想音動詞) and may be a complete sentence all by itself, depending on the context and the verb. The base term is always in lower-case and the emotive vowels always in upper-case. Any, all, or none of the bank periods in the base word may be replaced with these emotivowels when used. If some but not all periods are replaced, the unused ones are omitted from the final word. For example, the word "c.z." may thus become "cEzE" or "cYOz" or "czLYU", or remain as "c.z.", but will never become "cYOz." or "c.zLYU" (the "c.z." case functions as a noun, see below).

If we take "c.z.", which is equivalent to "chs" in standard Hymmnos and means "become," then we can add some joy to it and get "cEzE," which is roughly equivalent to the familiar "Was yea ra chs" and roughly means "I (gladly) become." However, the emotivowels used can also affect the object of the verb. If we change "cEzE" above to "cYEzYE," now it is not I who become, but you (and I mean for you to be happy by it). Similarly, cYLEzYLE would now target the situation as a whole. Of course, changing the emotion works similarly, so cLYNzLYN would indicate the situation becoming in a way that I intend to be calming. One practical example from METHOD_REPLEKIA/. is "hLYUmLYUmOrO." The dictionary indicates that "h.m.m.r." means "sing," so there's the literal meaning. "LYU" is unease directed at all, and "O" is rage, so essentially "hLYUmLYUmOrO" means to sing to with the intent to instill terror in all and with feelings of rage. While this system looks odd at first and is largely alien to standard Hymmnos, the way all emotional indicators can be expressed in a simple table actually makes it simpler once learned, since there is no additional vocabulary needed to express emotion.

If the object is clear from the emotivowels, and no other information is needed, the emotisound verb is a complete sentence by itself. Otherwise, the object may follow the emotisound verb to clarify. The examples given on the Hymmo Server are "fEwErYEn/." (フェウェリェン) and "fEwErYEn Luca/." The first simply combines the base verb "f.w.r.n" (meaning roughly "embrace") with two "E"s and a "YE" to get something along the lines of, "I embrace you with love." The second has an explicit object and becomes, "I embrace you, Luca, with love."

Pronunciation isn't that complicated either, even though it looks ugly. The simple vowels are simply vowels and append to the (usually) consonant sounds in the base verb, but keep in mind these are based on the Japanese pronunciations of vowels, not the English ones (quick reference... A: Similar to short a as in "father"; I: Similar to long 'e' as in "feel" or short 'i' as in "ribbon"; U: Similar to 'oo' in "boot", but not in "foot"; E: Similar to long 'a' as in "cane" or short 'e' as in "lend"; O: Similar to English long o, as in "open"; N: Basically an 'n', make it a grunt if it helps). The Y+ compounds should be simple enough too, and the LY+ are the same but may be more tricky to pronounce since compounds like "tLYO" are rather unnatural, and I'm honestly not sure what to do with ones like "lLYE" with a double 'l'. On the plus side, the (usually) consonants in the base words tend to behave themselves (for base words that contain vowels, such as "a.u.k.", pronouncing each vowel individually is most likely the way to go). If there aren't any vowels in the final word, just fake it as well as possible and toss in minimal vowel-ish noises as needed. "f.w.r.n" might come out sounding something like "fwern" for instance. The 'g' always seems to be hard, and the 'x' pronounced like a 'z', but be careful of 'c'. It's soft (pronounced like an 's') in "c.z.", but seems to be hard (pronounced like a 'k') elsewhere.

You may have noticed that there's no equivalent to the third word of a standard Hymmnos emotisound. This is no great loss, however, as the third word rarely conveys any real meaning in the first place. While other words do occassionally appear, "ra" is so overwhelmingly common that the term becomes essentially meaningless, and most sentences would be unaffected by having the emotisound be only two words long, if grammar allowed that.

Here are a few more example emotisound verbs, translated from the Hymmno Server because it's less trouble and more authoritative than writing my own:

hYAmmrA (hya m m ra) = "I sing thinking of you and do so with all my might"

hYImOmOrO (hyi mo mo ro) = "I sing feeling, 'I shall surely curse you unto death!' and brimming with anger"

hEmEmArA (he me ma ra) = "I am happy and sing with all my might"

hLYImLYImOrO (hlyi mlyi mo ro) = "I sing with feelings of cursing this world to ruin, filled with anger"

Sentence Structure

As noted above, an entire sentence may be expressed in a single word in some cases. Longer sentences behave more like standard Hymmnos, with objects and clauses following the emotisound verb as needed.

Syntax for a normal first-person sentence is [emotisound verb]-[object]-[clause], much like in standard Hymmnos.

Syntax for a normal second- or third- person sentence is [x.]-[rre]-[subject]-[secondary emotisound verb]-[object]-[clause], mirroring standard Hymmnos except for the substitution of a emotisound verb for a standard verb, and of course the "x." at the beginning. This "x." is simply a place to indicate the singer's emotion about the whole thing, and replaces the emotisound found here in standard Hymmnos. Fill in the bank period as usual. The same special pronouns as in standard Hymmnos also apply in Pastalie New Testament, and as in standard Hymmnos, the subject versions are already known to be subjects and therefore are normally used without "rre". However, using "rre" along with one of these words is grammatically valid and results in emphasizing the subject.

Sample third-person sentences translated from the Hymmno Server follow:

xE rre chroche cEzE hymmnos/. = Cloche (with joy) becomes song (and I'm wishing for good fortune by this)

xI harr cEzE hymmnos/. = She (with joy) becomes song (and I'm envious of this)

Though not explicitly stated on the Hymmo Server, it seems that the orientation of the emotivowels shifts to match the subject when using second- or third- person. For instance, when the subject is Cloche, Level 1 emotivowels now mean "Cloche feels" rather than "I feel", and so on. The initial "x." always remains first-person, and so always functions from the singer's perspective.

Miscellaneous Grammar

Nouns

Infel Phira has emulation capabilities that makes nouns from other dialects of Hymmnos available.

Nouns specific to Pastalie New Testament may have possession indicated by adding specific upper-case letters to the beginning of the noun. Add "A" to mean "my", "YA" for "your" (this may be either the singular or the plural "you"), and "LYA" for things that belong to the place, the situation, or the public in general. To indicate other ownership, add "A" to the beginning of the noun, then follow it with the owner and connect the two words with an underscore. To use the Hymmno Server's examples, "Agasar" is "my plushie", "YAgasar" is "your plushie", "LYAgasar" is "everyone's plushie", and "Agasar_chroche" is "Cloche's plushie" (the spelling mismatch due to an arguably unnecessary name change in the English release). If the noun begins with an 'a' (leading to an "Aa" in the compound word), just extend the 'a' sound when pronouncing it.

Because this construct is based on the [noun]の[noun] construct in Japanese grammar, it can more generally mean that the second noun modifies or otherwise describes the first. For instance, "Ahiew_ayulsa" (from METHOD_IMPLANTA/.) more accurately means that "ayulsa" (eternity) describes "hiew" (sadness) than possesses it. In other words, "Ahiew_ayulsa" more cleanly translates as "eternal sadness" than as "eternity's sadness".

Passive Voice

Attach "eh" to the end of a emotisound verb to create the passive form. The following examples are from the Hymmno Server:

fEwErYEn = I embrace you with love (active voice)

fEwErYEneh = I am embraced by you and feel loved (passive voice)

Passive Voice

Attach "aye" to the end of a emotisound verb to create the "want to do" form. No examples currently available.

Negation

Place "zz" before a emotisound verb or a noun to negate it. The following examples are from the Hymmno Server:

zz rUfImeh/. = "I can't see it yet." (literally, "It isn't seen by me yet.")

zz Agasar = "not my plushie"

Nominalizing Emotisound Verbs

Leave all the periods in a emotisound verb as periods to use it as a gerund (noun). The following example is from the Hymmno Server:

aIuUkA zess pop v.a en d.z./. = "Birth and death are like a bubble." (a metaphor for the transcience of life)

Functions

Pastalie New Testament has a macroing capability that allows an entire sentence to be represented in a single newly defined term called a "function". A function is only valid within the song in which it is defined, but has the same effect in one word as using the entire sentence. The definition syntax is "[new term] -> [sentence]", in which the "->" is pronounced "pass". As an example, using the line "foobar -> xE rre chroche cEzE hymmnos/." would allow "foobar" to stand for "xE rre chroche cEzE hymmnos/." for the remainder of the song.

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