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"Adiemus" analysis

Linguistic analysis of the popular song "Adiemus" from a conlanging perspective

"Adiemus" is a song written by Karl Jenkins as part of his album "Songs of Sanctuary". It was originally commissioned by Delta Airlines for a TV commercial that appeared in 1994, but has gained widespread popularity since then. What makes "Adiemus" special is the use of specially-crafted lyrics that serve to convey a sense of freedom associated with flying in the sky. This article attempts to analyze the linguistic patterns used to achieve this effect.

Contents

  1. Original lyrics
  2. Simplified lyrics
  3. Frequency analysis
  4. Phonetic inventory
  5. Sonority analysis
  6. Diphthong analysis
  7. Syllable structure
  8. Morphological analysis
  9. Syntax analysis
  10. Lexicon
  11. Conclusion

Original lyrics

For comparison, these are the lyrics as they were originally written by Jenkins. However, in the next step I will make some changes in the transcription to allow for an easier analysis.

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
Aria natus late adua

Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate latea

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
Aria natus late adua

Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate latea

Anamana coole rawe
Anamana coole ra
Anamana coole rawe akala
Anamana coole rawe akala
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Anamana coole rawe akala
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Aya doo aye
Aya doo aye

Anamana coole rawe
Anamana coole ra
Anamana coole rawe akala
Anamana coole rawe akala
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Anamana coole rawe akala
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Aya doo aye
Aya doo aye

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
Aria natus late adua

Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate latea

Anamana coole rawe
Anamana coole ra
Anamana coole rawe akala
Anamana coole rawe akala
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Anamana coole rawe akala
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Aya doo aye
Aya doo aye

Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)
Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)
Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)
Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)
Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)
Yakama yamayakaya mema
(Ayacoo-ah-eh)

Simplified lyrics

To simplify the analysis, I transformed the lyrics using the following steps:

  1. Replace "oo" with "u", because they represent the same sound and single letters will be easier to analyze.
  2. Replace "c" with "k", because they represent the same sound and "k" is less ambiguous.
  3. Replace "y" with "j", to make clear that it refers to the consonant, not the vowel.
  4. Replace "w" with "v", because there seems to be no actual distinction in the pronunciation of "v" (voiced labiodental fricative) and "w" (voiced labial-velar approximant) in most performances.
  5. Remove "h", because this seems to be just a pronunciation hint and is not actually pronounced.

The result looks as follows:

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
Aria natus late adua

Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate latea

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
Aria natus late adua

Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate latea

Anamana kule rave
Anamana kule ra
Anamana kule rave akala
Anamana kule rave akala
(Ajaku-a-e)

Anamana kule rave akala
(Ajaku-a-e)

Aja du aje
Aja du aje

Anamana kule rave
Anamana kule ra
Anamana kule rave akala
Anamana kule rave akala
(Ajaku-a-e)

Anamana kule rave akala
(Ajaku-a-e)

Aja du aje
Aja du aje

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
Aria natus late adua

Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate
Aravare tue vate latea

Anamana kule rave
Anamana kule ra
Anamana kule rave akala
Anamana kule rave akala
(Ajaku-a-e)

Anamana kule rave akala
(Ajaku-a-e)

Aja du aje
Aja du aje

Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)
Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)
Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)
Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)
Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)

Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)
Jakama jamajakaja mema
(Ajaku-a-e)

Frequency analysis

Since each letter now corresponds to a single sound, the simplified lyrics now allow for an easy analysis with the freqy tool, which outputs the frequency of each letter as follows:

Rank Letter Count Percentage
1A, a30637.64%
2e8910.95%
3u556.77%
4J, j536.52%
5k516.27%
6m496.03%
7r425.17%
8l334.06%
9n334.06%
10t303.69%
11v303.69%
12d182.21%
13i151.85%
14s91.11%
total813100.00%

As can be seen from the table, the vowel "a" occurs extremely frequently in the lyrics. It makes up for more than thirty-five percent of all sounds. The most frequent consonant is "j", which is also considered a semivowel equivalent of the vowel "i".

Counting "a", "e", "u", and "i", they make up 56.47% percent of the sounds used. The heavy use of vowels make the lyrics of "Adiemus" sound very open and wide. The most frequent full consonant is "k", followed by "m".

Most of the less frequent sounds are consonants, with "s" being the least common sound. Also, the semivowel "v" is not used that much in comparison, and the actual vowel "i" is the second rarest sound.

Phonetic inventory

"Adiemus" uses only four vowels:

FrontBack
Closei · · u
Open-mide ·
Opena ·

(When vowels in the table are shown in pairs separated by a dot, the left one is unrounded and the right one is rounded.)

These are the open front unrounded vowel "a", the open-mid front unrounded vowel "e", the close front unrounded vowel "i", and the close back rounded vowel "u". Aside from "u", back and rounded vowels, such as the otherwise typical close-mid back rounded vowel "o", are being avoided.

Using mostly the unrounded front vowels "a", "e", "i" also helps making "Adiemus" sound open and wide, while the back rounded vowel "u" is used for contrast. It is often sung by the choir as a sort of echo in the line "Ajaku-a-e" ("Ayacoo-ah-eh"). In the main lyrics, it often appears in the ending "-us" and in the diphthong "ue".

"Adiemus" uses ten consonants, which, like the vowel inventory, also is a relatively small set:

BilabialLabio-dentalAlveolarPalatalVelar
Plosivet · dk ·
Nasalmn
Trillr
Fricativevs ·
Approximantj
Lateral approx.l

(When consonants in the table are shown in pairs separated by a dot, the left one is unvoiced and the right one is voiced.)

Classifying the consonants, it is noticeable that there is an emphasis on alveolar sounds. On the other hand, looking at the plosives row, the voiced/unvoiced pair "p" and "b" is omitted altogether, and the voiced counterpart of "k", "g", is omitted as well. Perhaps this was done to avoid sounds that seem to harsh and guttural.

Sonority analysis

In general, the consonant inventory consists mostly of sonorants that do not obstruct the airflow and can be heard more clearly when singing. Obstruent sounds, that block the airflow, on the other hand, are avoided for the most part. The following scatter plot shows the number of occurrences of each sound in relation to their position on the sonority scale:

scatter plot

The y-axis, depicting how often a sound occurs, is logarithmic to make the chart easier to read, since the sound "a" with the highest position on the sonority scale (10) is extremely frequent. The sonority scale is depicted on the x-axis using numbers from 1 to 10 to depict each category. (For details about the sonority hierarchy, see for example the Wikipedia article on Sonority hierarchy.)

The scatter plot shows clearly that most sounds occur more frequently when they are higher up in the sonority hierarchy. Notable exceptions are the plosive consonants "k" and "t" which occur relatively often even though they are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The sounds "s" and "i", which are the overall least frequent sounds in "Adiemus", are unexpectedly rare.

Diphthong analysis

"Adiemus" contains a total of five diphthongs:

  1. ea
  2. ia
  3. ua
  4. uae (!)
  5. ue

It is striking that all of the diphthongs end in a position where the mouth is more open than in the beginning, which also contributes to the fact that "Adiemus" sounds so open and wide.

Interestingly, "Adiemus" includes the triphthong "uae" consisting of three vowels in a row. This combination that is rather difficult to produce does not seem to appear in well-known natural languages. It must be said, however, that these sounds are spread over multiple notes when singing "Adiemus", which makes them easier to produce. If "Adiemus" was supposed to be spoken, this combination might not have been chosen.

On the other hand, consonant clusters do not occur at all in "Adiemus".

Syllable structure

Splitting up all known words from the (simplified) lyrics into individual syllables, we can discover the following twenty-five distinct syllables that appear in "Adiemus":

a, da, dia, du, dua, ja, je, ka, ku, kuae, la, le, ma, me, mus, na, ra, re, ria, te, tea, tue, tus, va, ve

We can therefore conclude that the following patterns are permissible:

  1. V: a single vowel (only occurs with "a")
  2. CV: a consonant followed by a vowel
  3. CVV(V): a consonant followed by a diphthong (or even triphthong)
  4. CVC: a consonant, vowel, and consonant (only "s" occurs as the coda)

The following table shows how often syllables from each of the four types occur:

Type Syllables Count Percentage
CV da, du, ja, je, ka, ku, la, le, ma, me, na, ra, re, te, va, ve 287 70.17%
V a 70 17.11%
CVV(V) dia, dua, kuae, ria, tea, tue 43 10.51%
CVC mus, tus 9 2.20%
total 409 100.00%

As the percentages show, CV syllables are the by far most common type. The single vowel (V) syllable "a" appears relatively often, which corresponds to the overall frequency of the sound "a", closely followed by CVV(V) syllables. Syllables ending in a consonant are very rare. As mentioned before, consonant clusters (CC) do not occur at all.

There are two special cases:

  1. The rare vowel "i" occurs only in the diphthong "ia", which means that it can only appear in syllables of CVV(V) type, not in the common CV syllables.
  2. The also rare consonant "s" never appears as the onset of a syllable, but only as the coda of CVC syllables.

Morphological analysis

Looking at the lyrics at word level, several points can be observed:

Patterns of sounds in syllables:

  1. "a" is a very common beginning of a word. Almost half of the words in the lexicon (41%) start with "a". In fact, the single vowel syllable "a" never occurs mid-word or alone, and no other single vowel occurs at the beginning of a word.
  2. The syllable ending "-us" appears only at the very end of words. Since "-us" is a very common ending of Latin words (masculine nominative), the lyrics of "Adiemus" remind us a little bit of the Latin language.
  3. Diphthongs (and triphthongs) occur only at the end of words, never at the beginning. This is not always the case, however. Words can also end in one of the common CV syllables. The only exception to this is the diphthong "ia" which occurs in the middle word the word "ariadiamus" (see below).

Word length:

  1. The shortest words are two sounds/letters long. They consist of one of the CV syllables. The shortest words are "da", "du", and "ra".
  2. The longest words are "ariadiamus" and "jamajakaja", both ten sounds/letters long. The word "ariadiamus" could be analyzed as a compound word consisting of the single words "aria" (which is also part of the lyrics) and "diamus" (which is not part of the lyrics). The word "ariadiamus" is unusual, because it is the only word where a diphthong appears mid-word.

Grammatical considerations:

  1. The two pairs of words "aja" and "aje" as well as "late" and "latea" could potentially be considered inflections of the same root word, because there is only a slight difference between them.
  2. The word "ajakuae" could be analyzed as either a compound word that consists of the parts "aja" and "kuae" or as some other form of derivation of the word "aja".

Syntax analysis

Obviously, the "Adiemus" lyrics are not a complete language. But even if they were, it would be hard to speculate on how the syntax of the language works, considering that "Adiemus" is a song, and songs, like other poetic texts, often come with freer word order than prosaic texts.

From the lyrics, about ten distinct sentences can be extracted:

  1. Ajakuae
  2. Aja du aje
  3. Anamana kule ra
  4. Anamana kule rave
  5. Anamana kule rave akala
  6. Aravare tue vate
  7. Aravare tue vate latea
  8. Aria natus late adua
  9. Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
  10. Jakama jamajakaja mema

Considering the repetition of the word "ariadiamus" in the ninth sentence, this may be two separate sentences, which would then result in eleven sentences in total. However, sentences that repeat the same noun twice can occur in natural speech, such as for example in the English sentence "The tree is a big tree". Since it is given as a single sentence in the original lyrics, I decided to keep it together.

Lexicon

Here is a list of all words that occur in the lyrics of "Adiemus", for reference. In total, the lyrics contain twenty-two distinct words. Of course, the words do not have actual meaning assigned to them. It can only be speculated what these words would mean if they were part of an actual language.

  1. adua
  2. aja
  3. ajakuae
  4. aje
  5. akala
  6. anamana
  7. aravare
  8. aria
  9. ariadiamus
  10. da
  11. du
  12. jakama
  13. jamajakaja
  14. kule
  15. late
  16. latea
  17. mema
  18. natus
  19. ra
  20. rave
  21. tue
  22. vate

Surprisingly, the very title of the song "Adiemus", does not show up in the lyrics. It is never sung, and since this article focuses on the analysis of "Adiemus" as a song as opposed to spoken text, I omitted this word in the lexicon and the rest of the analysis.

Conclusion

The song "Adiemus" is an excellent example how conlanging can be used to craft the lyrics for a song in such a way that is reflects the emotions that it is supposed to convey.

Several linguistic patterns, such as the heavy use of vowels and sonorant consonants, specifically chosen diphthongs, few words that end in consonants, and the absence of consonant clusters, give "Adiemus" its unique sound that perfectly fits the feeling of freedom and harmony that is also depicted using the visual language of the original Delta Airlines TV commercial.

A few words ending in "-us" remind us of Latin, where this is a common word ending. This makes "Adiemus" also sound somehow sacral.

From a conlanging perspective, it is especially interesting that the "language" of "Adiemus" seems to be especially designed for singing, considering that the triphthong "uae" would probably not have been selected for spoken text that is supposed to be easy to pronounce.

The very frequent use of the vowel "a" may sound repetitive if "Adiemus" was a spoken text. It is also questionable if a language with such a high frequency of a specific vowel would allow for the creation of enough meaningful words without increasing word length too much.


Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Heller [ˈtoːmas ˈhɛlɐ]