Famm sad! My name is Dr Gahato and I'm pleased to share this reference guide. In the past we used to require students of Al Bhed to travel around Spira and become acquainted with 26 individual primers, but once the Eternal Calm came there was some investment into updating our pedagogical methods, so I was commissioned by the cross-community strand of the Spiran Research Council to produce this new condensed primer, published by Bikanel University Press.
You can skip ahead to the actual method for converting between Al Bhed and your language (someone told me it's called English, although I haven't been able to work out how that term is connected to Yevonite superstition) if you like, but it might be useful or interesting – or hopefully both – to learn a bit about phonotactics, which is a term for the rules that tell us which sounds can be put together in a particular language. A lot of these rules are shared across languages: for example, you can't just have a long string of consonants without any vowels in the middle, because it would often be impossible to pronounce. But more specific versions of the rules are found in individual language varieties. In English, we can usually start words with a plosive + liquid sequence. Plosives are the sounds that tend to be represented by the letters p, t, c/k, b, d, and g, and liquids are represented by l and r. So we have words like plan, trap, close, broad, dread, and glean. After the t and d sounds, there's a slight restriction in that we can only use the r liquid and not the l one: there are no words starting with tl or dl in English, although they do exist in some languages. We can also add an s before some of these combinations to get words like splat, spring, strange, sclerosis, scratch. But if we try putting those sounds in a different order, we won't be able to produce any valid English words: there aren't any words that start with trs, or lsg, or rsp, for example.
Why am I telling you this? Well, Al Bhed also needs phonotactic rules; if it didn't have them, it would also be impossible to pronounce. The phonotactic rules of Al Bhed are based on the rules of English. This means that a lot of the letter conversions between the two are based on swaps that we can consider quite logical. For example, English vowels correspond to Al Bhed vowels. This means that sequences of consonants are broken up by vowels in the same mostly logical way, so Al Bhed words are generally pronounceable according to the overall phonotactic rules that all languages need to follow.
It's not always that straightforward, though. In a place called England (not sure which part of Spira this is in and my editors at Bikanel UP weren't able to find out, sorry), children who had received one year of formal education produced a 67% error rate when reading a passage,1 far higher than children tested in other European countries (not sure what a European country is either, apologies!). This could suggest that educational methods in England are inferior to those used in other parts of Europe, but it also reflects the fact that the spelling of English is often pretty opaque and not really a good guide to pronunciation. For example, the sequence ough is famously pronounced in various different ways according to the specific word it's used in. As a result, certain words in Al Bhed where the equivalent spelling in English correlates less straightforwardly with the sound sequence it represents can seem difficult to pronounce. Words like yvdanhuuh and pmulg don't look as if they follow phonotactic rules and you may not intuitively be able to pronounce them in the way you can pronounce other Al Bhed words such as dusunnuf or palusa. In fact, if you were to listen to the recorded examples of Al Bhed heard in the popular video game (some kind of machina, I believe) Final Fantasy X, you'd hear such inconsistent pronunciations for these more complex words that you'd be forgiven for thinking there are no rules governing Al Bhed pronunciation at all! In reality, we do have rules, but they're beyond the scope of this guide. I can only assume that Yevonites were hired to play the Al Bhed characters in that particular game. Sadly, there's still a lot of discrimination against Al Bhed in the media and it seems the industry would rather have Yevonite actors doing a poor impression of Al Bhed characters than hire actual Al Bhed actors.
1. Sprenger-Charolles, L., Abeillé, A. and Cerquiglini, B. (2024). Rationaliser l'orthographe du français pour mieux l'enseigner : synthèse de la recherche et recommandations. Conseil scientifique de l'Éducation nationale.
The conditions of my funding prevent me from making overtly political statements, so I'll swiftly move on to the meat of this primer. The main principle of conversion between Al Bhed and English is that letters come into two categories: pairs and chains.
Above, I mentioned plosives. These are sounds produced by making a complete blockage somewhere in the vocal tract (the space where we produce sounds, involving the whole cavity between the throat and the lips) and then releasing it, allowing air to be built up and then expelled in a quick blast that produces a short sound. Depending on where we make that blockage, the sound is different. The plosives we use in English are normally represented by the letters I listed above: p, t, c/k, b, d, and g.
We'll leave out c for now as this letter is more ambiguous than the others (think of the different ways it's pronounced in the phrase Pacific Ocean – I haven't been able to locate which part of Spira this is in either – I ought to put in for a research grant that pays travel expenses one of these days). As for the others, we can organise them into three pairs:
Why? Think of the way we pronounce the sounds that these letters usually denote. If you say a p sound a few times and then try a b sound, you may notice that the blockage to the vocal tract you make for these two sounds is in exactly the same place: the lips. In fact, the only difference between these sounds is what we call their voicing: whether or not our vocal folds vibrate when we pronounce them. Put your hand on your throat as you pronounce these sounds, and you'll feel the vibration when you produce the b sound, but not for the p sound. The b sound is voiced, and the p sound is voiceless. (It may help to pronounce the sounds as the start of a full word, like bit and pit – you should notice that the vibration doesn't start until you're saying the vowel sound in pit, while in bit it starts earlier.)
The same applies for the other two pairs above: d is the voiced equivalent of t, and g is the voiced equivalent of k. And in fact, when we convert between English and Al Bhed, we simply swap these letters within their pairs. So p becomes b, b becomes p, and so on. We can see this in a few simple examples:
There's one more pair that can't really be explained in terms of phonetics like the first three can, but I just like to think of it as involving the two strangest letters of the alphabet: q and x.
With these pairs, you've already covered eight letters of the alphabet! The rest fit into chains instead, which are slightly more complex, but there are only four of them to remember and they can be memorised with the help of some simple words and phrases.
The first chain we'll cover is the vowel chain, as we can combine this with the consonants we've already seen to assemble a good number of words. The vowel chain is as follows:
To convert English vowels to their Al Bhed equivalents, just move along to the next vowel in the chain. So o becomes u, e becomes a, and so on. To convert from Al Bhed to English instead, of course we follow the chain in the other direction. You'll notice that the chain includes y, and you may not believe that this is a vowel, but I assure you it is: consider its use in words like happy. (In fact, it's more complicated than this because of English's lack of orthographic transparency that I mentioned above: the letter y sometimes corresponds to a vowel and sometimes, often at the start of a word, to a particular kind of consonant that we call a glide or semivowel, but it's found more frequently at the end of words so its use as a vowel is actually more common.)
This chain is a bit harder to remember than the pairs because it lacks the phonetic link most of them have. You may know that the word you in English becomes oui in Al Bhed thanks to Hupiu Iasydci's song Oui Are Al Bhed, which I believe gained some popularity on the mainland. So that's three out of six vowels covered already. To remember the entire chain, you might like to use the common greeting hela du saad oui, meaning nice to meet you. That covers five of the six vowels, and for the sixth you can just work out that as there is no a in the English version of the phrase and no y in the Al Bhed, English a must become Al Bhed y.
You can look back at the examples above to see some of the letter conversions using the vowel chain.
Our next chain involves just three letters:
So English h becomes Al Bhed r, Al Bhed n becomes English r, and so on. You can remember this using the word horn. I heard some Ronso once bullied one of their clansmen by calling him "hornless". But they say that particular Ronso became the leader of the tribe in the end, so I suppose he had the last laugh.
Here are some word pairs incorporating the pairs and chains we've seen so far:
Our next chain involves four letters:
You can remember this one using the word muscle. I hear a certain twice-legendary guardian was renowned for his strength with the sword. My editors seem quite insistent that I include this information, although I'm not sure why they're so obsessed with him.
We've now covered most of the letters in the alphabet and those remaining tend to be less commonly used, so we can build some quite complex phrases now! Oui lyh dno talebranehk y brnyca mega drec uha, du yld yc yh aqysbma.
The final chain involves five letters and is a bit harder to remember. Here it is:
I normally remember this one using a mnemonic phrase such as Jecht's Zanarkand will feel vulnerable – which is, from a past standpoint, what will happen once Tidus discovers he's a dream of the fayth. Or so I'm told. You may be able to think of a more effective phrase.
That's all twenty-six letters covered! With practice, you'll find that reading and writing Al Bhed is easy enough without referring to a guide. The more you read, the more you'll find that certain sequences of letters become familiar.
As noted, we don't translate Yevonite terms into Al Bhed, and the same goes for a number of other words relating to Spiran society and culture. These include fiend, Guado, guardian, Home (and other place names), machina, Sin, and summoner. We also tend to use English for expressions of time, e.g. one minute, one thousand years.
Normally, we don't use apostrophes like in English, but instead spell out the full word in the case of contractions, or use a phrase containing of to indicate possession: I wouldn't've said that'd mean you're nobody's fool, ma'am would become E fuimt hud ryja cyet dryd fuimt sayh oui yna dra vuum uv huputo, sytys. There can be exceptions to this, however.
Huf oui yna vmiahd eh Al Bhed! Luhknydimydeuhc! Please consider writing to the SRC in support of my application for follow-on funding.
