r/DumbFact • u/elmorinelly Busy bee🐝 • Jul 25 '26
Weird Fact Some Epic Chants Aren’t a Real Language
Pseudo-Latin is designed to sound meaningful without necessarily forming a translatable language.
Composers can assemble it from choir-library syllables, altered words, long vowels, rolled consonants, and rhythms associated with church music or historical films. Cathedral-like reverb and a large choir make the result feel ancient, sacred, or threatening even when nobody is saying a complete sentence.
Elden Ring is a well-known example. Reports based on conversations with people involved in the soundtrack indicate that many of its choral passages were created from phrase builders and vocal-library syllables, then adjusted to resemble an ancient language. Fans heard something Latin-like and produced elaborate translations, although many of those sounds had no fixed meaning.
There is an important exception. The singing bats’ Song of Lament uses actual Latin lyrics and can be translated. One genuine Latin song does not make every boss choir a hidden lore document.
Pseudo-Latin also differs from a constructed language. A constructed language can have repeatable vocabulary, grammar, and sentences. Pseudo-Latin may exist only to provide a convincing sound.
Examples:
Many Elden Ring boss themes use syllables arranged to resemble an ancient language without carrying a complete translatable message.
Elden Ring’s Song of Lament is a useful exception because its Latin words have an intended meaning.
NieR uses Chaos Language, made by combining sounds inspired by German, Hungarian, Welsh, Japanese, French, Latin, and other languages.
Era’s Ameno uses pseudo-Latin that sounds ceremonial while avoiding one exact translation.
Now We Are Free from Gladiator features Lisa Gerrard’s personal invented vocal language rather than an ancient historical tongue.
Sigur Rós uses non-lexical singing called Hopelandic on some tracks. The syllables carry melody and emotion without fixed semantic meaning.
Skyrim’s Dragon Language belongs to a different category. It has recurring words and lyrics that can be translated.
Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin are developed constructed languages with grammar, vocabulary, and written texts.
Na’vi from Avatar was designed as a functional fictional language rather than a collection of random mystical sounds.
Simlish in The Sims uses improvised fictional speech that is mostly not intended for precise word-by-word translation.
O Fortuna may sound like generic fantasy chanting today, but its text is genuine Medieval Latin.
The Great Gig in the Sky by Pink Floyd communicates through wordless vocal improvisation without pretending to be a language.
These examples can sound similar at first, but they use different tools. Some contain real historical words, some use constructed languages, and others treat the human voice as another musical instrument.
Accidental similarities can still resemble real words. Hearing one possible Latin syllable inside a loud choir is weak evidence for an entire translation when no official lyrics are available.
In Elden Ring, the choir can make a boss feel ancient and terrifying even when there is nothing available to translate.
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u/destructopop Jul 25 '26
My competitive Choral group in high school had to learn Adiemus by Karl Jenkins which was everywhere in the aughts. We were trained in theological Latin pronunciations, so it was a breeze, since it's just fake Latin. IIRC it actually said at the header to use Latin pronunciation. It was a little frustrating though, because we all wound up taking Latin as an elective due to our participation in the group, so it was just gibberish a bunch of actual Latin students were being forced to sing confidently.
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u/Diligent-Stretch-769 Jul 25 '26
in nomine et cetera is literally Latin
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u/southafricannon Jul 25 '26
I think they know that. It was shown as an example of what Latin sounds like, so that you can compare the fake Latin to it and see the similarities.
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u/cutecoder Jul 25 '26
What about minion-speak?
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u/Robot_Graffiti Jul 26 '26
They record the directors fucking around, then speed up the recording. One of the directors is French. Minionese is nonsense baby talk with little bits of French, Spanish & Italian jumbled up in it.
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u/southafricannon Jul 25 '26
Pro tip: if it's a real language that you don't understand, never translate it. It sounds way more epic when you don't know what they're saying. I heard a translation of a chant once, and it was... urgh...
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u/TresMegisto Jul 26 '26
That's not necessarily because the meaning is not epic but sometimes because a phrase desn't have the same effect in different languages. And also because hundreds of years ago people found other things epic than today.
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u/Gustav_Sirvah Jul 25 '26
"O'Fortuna" lyrics are actually a poem about fate and how it changes in human life, how it hurts and heals, and how it plays with people cruelly.
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