Cityspeak from Blade Runner (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Cityspeak from Blade Runner (2002)

brmovie.com

167 pointskeiferski64 comments

According to Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon, the actual words of Cityspeak were put together by Edward James Olmos, the actor who plays Gaff:

> [Second credited Blade Runner screenplay author David] Peoples did not, however, come up with the mishmash of languages that Olmos speaks in the film. "That was pretty much all Eddie's doing," Peoples recalls. "All I'd done was indicate that Gaff was speaking some funny language in the script and then translated that into English."

> According to Olmos, "Cityspeak was already a word being tossed around when I came onto the picture. I'm not sure who came up with the actual word -- I think it was David Peoples. But I guess I'm the guy who literalized it.

> "My first idea was to put a mixture of genuine Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian, and Japanese into Cityspeak. Then I went to the Berlitz School of Languages in Los Angeles, translated all these different bits and pieces of Gaff's original dialogue into fragments of foreign tongues, and learned to properly pronounce them. I also added some translated dialogue I'd made up myself. All that was a bitch and a half, but it really added to Gaff's character."

As the linked PDF just contains a small amount of text, here it is in full:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CITYSPEAK (from Bladerunner)

Sushi Master: Nani ni shimasho ka. [Japanese: "What would you like to have?"]

Deckard: {Points} Give me four.

Sushi Master: Futatsu de jubun desu yo. [Japanese: "Two is enough!"]

Deckard: No. Four. Two, two, four.

Sushi Master: Futatsu de jubun desu yo. [Japanese: "Two is enough!"]

Deckard: {Resignedly} And noodles.

Sushi Master: Wakatte kudasai yo. [Japanese: "Please understand!" (Actually implying sarcastically, "Can't you understand?")

Policeman: Hey, idi-wa. [Korean: "Hey, come here."]

Gaff: Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte. [French-Hungarian-German: "Sir, follow me immediately please!" "azonnal" - means immediately; "kövessen" means follow imperative; "engem" - means me. And of course "Monsieur" is French for Sir and "bitte" is German for please.)]

Sushi Master: He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard.

Deckard: You got the wrong guy, pal.

Gaff: Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade ... Blade Runner. [Hungarian: "Horsedick, no way! You are the Blade ... Blade Runner."

Sushi Master: He say you 'Brade Runner'.

Deckard: Tell him I'm eating.

Gaff: Captain Bryant toka. Me ni omae yo. [Japanese: "Captain Bryant wants to see your mug in front of his immediately!" (This is a loose translation. "Me ni omae yo" is a sort of pun. "Me ni mae" means to meet someone. "omae" is the very informal use of "you" - in Japanese, this is significant. "yo")

Deckard (V/O): The charmer's name was Gaff, I'd seen him around. Bryant must have upped him to the Blade Runner unit. That gibberish he talked was city speak, gutter talk. A mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn't really need a translator, I knew the lingo, every good cop did. But I wasn't going to make it easier for him.

The submitted pdf was http://www.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/temp/cityspeak.pdf.

We switched to the link wool_gather mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21536491.

The accusative of horsedick, to be precise.

Now it makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. :-)

I just re-watched this section with closed captions turned on. The cityspeak is just identified as “FOREIGN LANGUAGE”, but isn’t actually translated.

Ironically enough, the same is true for “Maclunkey” in the scene where Han shoots Greedo. All the other things Greedo says are translated, but not that one.

Darn.

I’ve always wondered why the food vendor wanted to sell him less food and make less money.

Quotas and incentives. There may be incentives to serve many meals instead of serving a lot of food.

Is the Bladerunner universe not capitalist?

You can get that effect in any system if the bean conuters count the wrong thing. Source: have worked in a Ford factory.

When you belong to a franchise, capitalism becomes indentured servitude and any rule goes.

I've always supposed he had some affective care for Deckard and didn't want him to eat too much junk food.

Very fun, it kinda reminds me of Belter creole from the expanse books/show.

https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole

https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_dialogue

Some of my favourite works of fiction include made up languages, maybe because only people obsessed with world building (which is the stuff I like most about fantasy/scifi) would ever consider constructing a language just to flesh out their world.

After a few seasons of Expanse, I couldn't stop mixing Belter Creole. It's so fantastically interwoven into their culture. I absolutely love how it's much more relatable and easier to pick up than something like Dothraki or Valyrian, which may as well have been Parseltongue for me.

My only wish is that fictional worlds use more Urdu/Hindi phrases, but I'm sure bilingual person whishes their favorite world used both their languages. Although Belter Creole does use some familiar Urdu words, they're often paired with completely unfamiliar words. For example, setara mali or little star (literally "star little") uses the Urdu word sitara for star, but pairs it with—what I think is—the Polish word for small.

Setar äre bara star...

Or, in the case of Tolkien, construct a world just to flesh out their language

Peek at Mad Max: Fury Road if you haven't. The anthropological work they put into the wasteland tribes was surprising and cool. :D

As long as it's not just building a world to use their language with…

Although both Cityspeak and the Creole seem more in line with Burgess' Nadsat than Tolkien's Quenya/Sindarin/Khuzdul. More cant than conlang.

I rewatched this the other night. Cityspeak was great as a concept and the way it was portrayed in the film, but the poorly done Chinese graffiti that appeared on walls and buildings at various points harmed the cinematic vision of this future city (well, for me at least). It was clearly drawn by someone, probably not a native speaker or writer, copying simple phrases or making up sentences from a dictionary (中國人好，美國人不好, "Chinese good, Americans bad").

Chinese has a long history of slogans, 4-character idioms, and graffiti. How hard could it have been to find someone -- an artist, calligrapher, or even a non-artist who grew up in Asia (almost everyone learns calligraphy basics using brushes in secondary school) -- to do it better?

Or is the idea cityspeakers are clumsily writing random Chinese stuff on the walls?

I think one can overestimate how much care goes into background details like this. I recall there's a scene where an airship flies by, plastered in Japanese advertisements, and a fan figured out that the Japanese text was simply random headlines snipped from a women's magazine.

Fake edit: it was a 1981 issue of "Josei Jishin" magazine. Here's the link (JP):

https://ameblo.jp/allbr/entry-10038560072.html

Sometimes it's on purpose: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/oct/15/homelan...

That was interesting, thanks for the link. Within, street artists from Berlin were asked to add realism to the background of scenes in a Middle East refugee camp by painting Arabic graffiti. The artists painted criticisms of the show and no producers checked what was painted before it aired.

Its for an English speaking audience, who largely aren’t going to notice.

But now I am, because of you. This is one thing I hate about the internet: if you browse for long enough, someone will ruin something that you cared about.

Oh, come on. I hope you're just kidding. Surely you don't relish living in ignorance as you get older? The fun part about life for me is that the curtain keeps getting pulled back. Nothing is what it initially seems to be.

Yeah, I like knowing how some things really work, but not movies.

When I was younger, I would always watch these "behind the scenes" type shows and was interested how it was all made. Eventually I realized that it was just ruining movies for me. The director and crew work very hard to create a vision, create "magic". Why would you want to destroy that by learning how its all done?

Its like a magic trick, most would agree that the interest, the mystique, is in not knowing.

Some of the best magic tricks are the ones where you learn how it's done, and you discover it's actually done the hard way.

I can't find the quote right now, but I believe there's a quote from Penn or Teller where they talk about how some of their tricks could be done more easily, but they intentionally do them the hard way because it strengthens the illusion when a cynical audience member imagines the hard way, discounts it as "too hard; there must be some trick," and discovers that, no, it's just done the hard way.

I wish I could track down that quote right now.

Even when a trick is done the easy way, for me it is still fascinating that this person has managed to pull it off with a straight face and it fooled me!

Knowing how the trick is done often strengthens the illusion.

The famous trick they do which I know that they've talked about is "Shadows" -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJH9iFOji_A

In the interview I saw, they don't talk about how they actually do it, but they've talked about the ways they could do it, or have done it in the past, but don't anymore -- and why.

Good luck finding that interview. I found it extremely interesting, but can't dig it up at the moment.

He was being a little facetious.

Having re-watched it last week I was reminded again of some bad choices for corporate logos. Coca-cola we still have. Pan Am and Atari, not so much. Related:

https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/

Those were juggernaut companies which seemed unstoppable at the time; that they would vanish was unthinkable.

Keep that in mind when considering Facebook, Google, and others we can’t imagine will ever disappear.

Probably since it's such a mishmash of languages around, nobody bothers much with proper grammar in a given language. At least that's my guess

I'm not a linguist, but it's been explained to me that grammar is important to understanding. Even mishmash languages (think Creole) develop their own grammatical conventions over time.

>How hard could it have been

For me, it's those movies with ancient Egyptian sets with obvious crap glyphs. They can't be bothered even to copy from reference.

The neon signs in Japanese are also mostly gibberish. (You can even get a T-shirt with the nonsensical neon signs from this Japanese site: https://www.ttrinity.jp/product/2353750)

It depends . You see “amateurish” or anti-balanced typography for Chinese characters. Some people want to write beautifully but some people write it in a very mechanical (non flowing manner). Usually you see it in the less visible parts of a city.

I recently watched the "extras" that came along with the "Final Cut" version of Blade Runner. The guy in the art department who created all those images talked about his process, and I found it very interesting.

Almost as interesting as hearing about EJO's work in creating the spoken version of Cityspeak for his character.

I'm going to assume the Chinese graffiti was written by someone in-universe who didn't know Chinese (or at least Chinese writing) very well.

Like when someone in our world gets a tattoo of gibberish because they think it looks cool, maybe someone in the world of Blade Runner wanted to graffiti some cool Chinese characters they looked up in a dictionary.

Not even the Hungarian part is proper, no one says 'azonnal kövessen engem' in real but more like 'azonnal jöjjön velem' or 'gyere velem faszfej', it appears so that the whole thing is made up! ;)

Not sure which is the original, but there's a much fuller essay that contains the text from this PDF here: http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_Language.htm It includes a bunch of background information.

It also has the "cityspeak" (I think it's solely German) from a later scene, where a gang attacks a police car outside JF Sebastian's apartment.

"Warte bist die bollen weg sind!! Warte bist die bollen weg sind!!"

-means "wait till the cops are gone!"

That movie was incredible.

Bullen. https://www.dict.cc/german-english/die+Bullen.html

Boll = round or spherical.

We've changed the URL to that from http://www.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/temp/cityspeak.pdf. Thanks!

I've always found the mismash of languages used at the beginning of Blade Runner to be fascinating. Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, French, German, and of course English.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwOApqmJMQ

You might be interested in Belter Creole [0] or Lang Belta from The Expanse. It's spoken by people living in/on the asteroid belt, roughly a century after it being colonized by people from all over Earth.

[0] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole

EJ Olmos, in his role as Adama in Battlestar Galactica, refers to the Cylons as "skin jobs".

There's good historical prior art for 'cityspeak': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

Why does Gaff use cityspeak when talking to Deckard in the beginning? The original narration shows that Deckard understands, but pretends not to, to not "make it easier for him".

Gaff speaks English, why didn't he just switch to English?

In at least one of the various scripts (or treatments) I've seen, Gaff resents Deckard, believing that he should be given this particular replicant slaying job himself. Predisposed to dislike Deckard as he is, he criticises Deckard for not being able to understand and chooses not to make it easy for Deckard, and further insults him directly in Cityspeak.

Maybe to challenge Deckard. Deckard refuses to play by Gaff's rules (street rules) then, but by the end of the film Gaff does speak English with him ("Too bad she won't live!").

In Blade Runner 2049, I don't recall cityspeak being used at all, and the scene with Gaff being interviewed by the new Blade Runner is entirely in English.

If the lack of cityspeak in 2049 is intentional, that by itself is interesting. Language phenomena do evaporate overnight from time to time.

On at least one occasion, the CC says a person is speaking in city speak, but the language is a Semitic language, probably Amhara.

I think they're both fucking with each other, and they both know it. It's the equivalent of a black guy pointedly using street slang with a white guy he doesn't like.

The sushi chef is the only one who doesn't realize exactly what's going on. Or maybe he does and he's playing along to have some fun at both their expenses.

(Come to think, the chef is doing the same thing, isn't he? He can make himself understood in English when he wants to--"He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard"--but he does business in Japanese, even when the customer is speaking English.)

You're exactly right. Gaf and Deckard are fucking with each other, the chef is doing his thing and mediating as those in the service industry often do.

Gaff: Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade ... Blade Runner. [Hungarian: "Horsedick, no way! You are the Blade ... Blade Runner."

Horsedick, is that a call/ref to VALIS? I.e. Horselover?

My guess is yes. In Valis quite a bit is made of the play on words with Phillip meaning horse-lover. So Phillip K Dick = Horsedick (though that's not the sense it's used in Valis).

Do you mean VALIS? PKD? I don't believe it is. Lofasz is just your all weather Hungarian swear word.

Yes, have corrected! Yeah, I just thought PKD liked that Horselover imagery so much, that Greek version of the name. (Philippos, lit. "horse-loving" or "fond of horses"). Just thought this might have been a bit of a nod towards that! Guess it's a bit of a stretch.

Used in the manner "bullshit" is English.

From just last week, LAist did a retrospective interview with some of the creators. https://laist.com/2019/11/05/blade-runner-november-2019-los-...

> {Rainy, busy street scene. Deckard reading newspaper while waiting for a spot to open up at the White Dragon Noodle Bar.}

I've visited the White Dragon Noodle Bar about two dozen times at burns; never realized where it came from!

Firefly used a mishmash of English and Mandarin (?).

Warte bis die Bullen weg sind!

404's

Reply on news.ycombinator.com