Anybody here good with languages?

Nightwing

New Recruit
If so, could someone please explain to me when Leia was disguised as Boushh and uttered "Yoto, yoto", that Threepio translates that as "Fifty thousand, no less."

Wha? Am I missing something? The same word spoken twice can mean a whole sentence?!

Help me...PLEASE!
 

Zepp

Interstellar Buccaneer
It could be reduplication of the number 50,000 'yo' meaning 5 and 'to' being a counter for 10,000, and the use reduplication would imply exactly. Or, it could be a tonal language where the rising or falling intonation within the word can change the meaning of the word. In Thai there the word kao can mean white, rice, enter or the pronouns he, she or they (not seperated in Thai) depending on rising, falling, high, low or middle pronunciations, some languages even use a sixth rising+falling intonation... It might also be a difference in consonants or vowels that you can't determine, like yo v. eeo or toe v tou un Japanese there are three different O's, standard oh, oh+oo (like you) and oh+oh, or a long oh...

So basically it is either a grammatical feature that is different from English, or it is two words that you can't distinguish the difference between due to your ears nor being tuned for the difference...

or it could just be that they mixed the soundbytes without considering how it was supposed to translate...
 

AmShak

Senior Moderator
Staff member
actually this question was answered in the last insider ...

Q: The bounty hunter Boushh utters only a few syllables that, when translated, actually mean much more than only a few syllables would dictate. How is one to know what each of only a small number of syllables means?

A: To our untrained human ears, we don’t hear much variance in Boushh’s phrases. But the Ubese tongue, as filtered through metallic breath masks, spans a greater range of frequencies than human language. There are subfrequency phrases beyond our range of hearing that color and embellish what we can hear, offering much more information than a few simple syllables. C-3PO, built for translation, can of course hear these subaudible frequencies.
 

Darth Boru

Celtic Sith
Superb explanation, that guy should take up politics!

I reckon that perhaps he had become somewhat intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity (thats pilling on the smelly stuff with a huge shovel to you and me!).
 

Zepp

Interstellar Buccaneer
Basically he's saying it's a 'super' tonal language...

I like my explanation better. Especially since if a human ear can't hear it, how could a human learn to voice it?
 

Darth Boru

Celtic Sith
Maybe it was just a 'scriptwriters day off' kinda thing - or a word quota where the same one had to be re-used one a lot? ;)
 

Stevetrooper

Galactic Groundpounder
Or maybe Leia was just faking it and threepio was in on it and just "translating" it the way it was rehersed with her.
 
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