https://wiki.evageeks.org/A_Cruel_Angel%27s_Thesis

Alright, I think I've finally figured out what the lyrics in that instrumental section of the full version of Cruel Angel's Thesis are. "Faria. Sepa messo. Faria. Tu se." gives the Portuguese translation of "Would make. Know yourself. Would make. You are." - more properly translated as "Faria. Conheça a si mesmo. Faria. Tu es." (Perhaps that's what's being sung?)

I know for a fact that Portuguese, not English, has historically been the most widely studied foreign language in Japan for several reasons, although I'm not sure what that status is at present. So sneaking Portuguese lyrics into Cruel Angel's thesis would make sense, especially for a Japanese songwriter like Oikawa Neko who wrote the whole thing.

Or perhaps I'm just adding more fuel to a fire that has long since snuffed itself out...

Very interesting!
I didn't even realize that that part of the lyrics wasn't known.

Interesting! Portuguese was studied a lot in Japan in the days outsider influence was very restricted in Japan and only a few traders from select nations had access to it. The Japanese world for cigarette is still testament to this. That being said, while historically influential, nowadays English is by far the number one language taught in Japan.
Either way, I always was under the impression, those lines were sung in Latin (which Portuguese is derived from, if I'm correct?) or just lines that mean nothing, lol.

robersora wrote:Interesting! Portuguese was studied a lot in Japan in the days outsider influence was very restricted in Japan and only a few traders from select nations had access to it.

Would that have been a part of the Silk Road? Because historically speaking, then yes that would make sense with regard to Portugal/Spain's connection to the Far East.

I always assumed, too, that the words were in Latin and one of us Evageeks knew what it said...But, Portuguese would be pretty close as well in figuring out...

Native brazilian-portuguese speaker here! Never heard most of these words, and even the existing ones are used in a form that doesn't make sense at all... I'll try to listen to the song to figure out what's going on - never occurred to me that those lines might be in portuguese, but thinking of it now, the beat used in this part is a common samba beat, which always seemed odd to me. Gonna investigate and post the results here soon

Ok, I've been listening to it on repeat for a few hours and it doesn't sound like anything in portuguese, at all

The proposed phrasing "Faria. Sepa messo. Faria. Tu se." is not entirely in portuguese either:
- "Faria" is the 1st and 3rd person subjective conjugation for the verb "fazer" ("to do" or "to make"). "Faria" would mean something like "[I ] would do" or "[He] would make", but can also work as a question with the subject omitted, "faria?". It would mean "would [I, you, she] do/make?";
- "Sepa messo" is not portuguese. Neither word exists in the language. The closest I can hear (and even then it doesn't really sound like it) is "será mesmo?", an expression meaning something like "could it be?" or even "is that so?";
- "Tu se" as a expression is incorrect too. "Tu" is an archaic form of the 2nd person, like the nominative "thou". "Se" has a lot of different meanings, the closest in this context would be "sê", the imperative form of the verb "ser" ("to be") applied to the 2nd person "tu", but even then the phrasing would have to be "sê tu", not "tu sê". In the correct form, it would mean an archaic form on the imperative, something in the line of "be thou".

Regarding the (somewhat adapted) proposed phrasing "Faria? Será mesmo? Faria? Tu sê! [sic]", it could mean something like "Would you do it? Could it be? Would you do it? Be thou!".

But as I said, I don't have the slightest idea of what they're singing in this part: it really doesn't sound portuguese at all, even accounting for a possible accent.

Non-Japanese languages are not Gainax's/Khara's forte. Asuka's German is pigeon speech the whole time, and half of the time the English is so technical and rigid that it lacks any personality or character. So even if those lyrics are in Portuguese (which, it probably isn't?) I wouldn't expect it to make any sense.

What about:

Fadia seda mês o
Fadia: tu sêi!

It should mean:

Beech silk month
Beech: be thou!

Errata corrige: fadia in Brazilian Portuguese sounds fajee-uh. Faria was actually a better guess. On the other hand, seda and sera virtually share the same pronunciation, so I'll stick to my first interpretation. That said,

Faria seda mês, ou
Faria tu sê?

should translate into something like

Would you make the month of silk, or
Would you make Thou be?

I don't know Portuguese so this is most tentative. Speaking about meaning, I kind of see a metamorphic theme emerging here, something along the lines of butterflies coming out of cocoons and becoming what one is. It would be coherent with the rest of the lyrics. But I may easily be creating meaning out of nothing. GuiBiancarelli, you're the authority here. What do you think of my attempts?

LPeyrani wrote:Errata corrige: fadia in Brazilian Portuguese sounds fajee-uh. Faria was actually a better guess. On the other hand, seda and sera virtually share the same pronunciation, so I'll stick to my first interpretation. That said,

Faria seda mês, ou
Faria tu sê?

should translate into something like

Would you make the month of silk, or
Would you make Thou be?

I don't know Portuguese so this is most tentative. Speaking about meaning, I kind of see a metamorphic theme emerging here, something along the lines of butterflies coming out of cocoons and becoming what one is. It would be coherent with the rest of the lyrics. But I may easily be creating meaning out of nothing. GuiBiancarelli, you're the authority here. What do you think of my attempts?

Sorry, it doesn't make sense
As I said, it really doesn't sound like anything in portuguese, so even if it really is, it's unrecognizable. But I honestly think it isn't for another reason: it would be the first and only occurrence of the language in the show. NGE uses a lot of languages and references to other countries, but AFAIK there's no mention to portuguese or any of the countries in which it's spoken. The words being in portuguese would be a doubly-unique thing: the only use of the language and the only instance of a language being used only once in the show.
I would say it makes more sense to investigate the languages well-established in NGE, since each of them is used more than once: AFAIK, NGE has multiple occurrences of:

- Japanese (derp );
- English;
- German;
- Greek;
- Hebrew;
- Latin;

I'm no native speaker of english, but I don't recognize many of its usual phonetics being used in the referenced phrases. My latin is very rusted, but I think that it might be the case - Gregorian singing sounds a lot like the instance.

PS.: @LPeyrani, really nice effort, mate! Portuguese is a tough language, I can't even count how many non-regular cases and conjugations exists in it... About your phrasing:
- The 2nd archaic and 2nd modern persons ("tu" and "você", thou and you) usually are not employed in the same sentence referring to a single subject, their conjugation are different (modern follows 3rd person rules), so the correct form would be "Faria tu?" (Would thou make?). It couldn't be followed by "sê" though, since it and "faria" are both verbs being applied to the subject and in different cases, imperative and subjective respectively. The only way to get a meaning out of it, would be changing "sê" to "ser", the infinitive conjugation, creating "Faria tu ser?" (would [I/it] make thou be?), but I don't really hear the "-r" phoneme in the last sung phrase;
- "Seda" and "mês" are both substantives, so a pronoun must be employed between them. To follow your interpretation, it should be "da" (of [referring to a feminine substantive]), being the correct phrasing "mês da seda" (month of the silk). The conjunction "ou" (or) is correctly employed!

Thank you for the very clear explanation!
I guess we'll have to try something else, maybe Latin. I liked the idea that the samba pattern was linked to the language, maybe chosen because of the link between issues of personal transformaion and the Carnival, but it seems there's no way to save this theory. Too bad.
Let's keep looking for the right answer, bye...

Fascinating discussion - thank you for setting me straight about this! I admit that I should have known better than to play with machine translators and expecting them to give proper results!

I've tried some online searches with the Latin language, but I can't seem to find anything. None of the usual machine translate possibilities are turning up.

Back to square one with the lyrics.

There's maybe still a chance with Portuguese: it's possible that they used some Portuguese words, but without the right syntax. I mean, they could be just words and not sentences. Not unlike a magical spell...

UrsusArctos wrote:Fascinating discussion - thank you for setting me straight about this! I admit that I should have known better than to play with machine translators and expecting them to give proper results!

I've tried some online searches with the Latin language, but I can't seem to find anything. None of the usual machine translate possibilities are turning up.

Back to square one with the lyrics.

Hey, so far it's the most structured hypothesis we have, kudos to your efforts
I'm having contact with archaic greek due to research I'm doing for an article, if something turns up that sounds useful to this discussion I'll post here

Gui - I found a version with far clearer singing in that section. The lyrics I posted earlier turned out to be off-base because of all the background singing overlays. The real lyrics seem to be more or less "Faria. Se ta mesmo. Faria. Oo-sei." So I tried to get this translated again online.

"Se ta mesmo" appears to be a genuine Portuguese figure of speech, something like "if it is really..." and the last part might be "Eu sei" which seems to translate to "I know" in Portuguese. Again, I'm not clear how accurate this is.

"Would I/he/she do it?" "If it is really <...>" "Would I/he/she do it?" "I know."

Since this part seems to be deliberately synced in the official music video to all the black-and-white imagery of Lilith and Eva-01's birth, Seele, Yui's contact experiment and Gendo, I wonder if this was actually meant to represent Yui's thoughts as she went into the contact experiment instead of being as nonspecific as the rest of Cruel Angel's Thesis usually is. Something like "Would I (Yui) do it/make it?" "If it really is..." (Assuming that it is "se ta mesmo" and not maybe "ce" or "sei" - are these pronounced the same in Portuguese?) followed by "Would he (Gendo) do it/make it?" "I know." This is all a stretch, but having potentially revealing information accompany the most important montage in that entire sequence might be a plausible reason to have it translated (poorly) from Japanese to Portuguese.

From what I've gathered, Newtype magazine, the source for the misheard lyrics - speculates that it's meant to represent words from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls and is therefore just gibberish. I'm personally not a fan of this idea, because Anno and his crew were really pretty good with the Angel names and characteristics and generally tried their best with English and German (even if it didn't always work out). For them to ask the songwriters to throw in nonsense during the instrumental section seems hopelessly out of character for them, but I can imagine them asking the songwriters to sneak in something in a foreign language.

UrsusArctos wrote:Gui - I found a version with far clearer singing in that section. The lyrics I posted earlier turned out to be off-base because of all the background singing overlays. The real lyrics seem to be more or less "Faria. Se ta mesmo. Faria. Oo-sei." So I tried to get this translated again online.

"Se ta mesmo" appears to be a genuine Portuguese figure of speech, something like "if it is really..." and the last part might be "Eu sei" which seems to translate to "I know" in Portuguese. Again, I'm not clear how accurate this is.

"Would I/he/she do it?" "If it is really <...>" "Would I/he/she do it?" "I know."

Since this part seems to be deliberately synced in the official music video to all the black-and-white imagery of Lilith and Eva-01's birth, Seele, Yui's contact experiment and Gendo, I wonder if this was actually meant to represent Yui's thoughts as she went into the contact experiment instead of being as nonspecific as the rest of Cruel Angel's Thesis usually is. Something like "Would I (Yui) do it/make it?" "If it really is..." (Assuming that it is "se ta mesmo" and not maybe "ce" or "sei" - are these pronounced the same in Portuguese?) followed by "Would he (Gendo) do it/make it?" "I know." This is all a stretch, but having potentially revealing information accompany the most important montage in that entire sequence might be a plausible reason to have it translated (poorly) from Japanese to Portuguese.

From what I've gathered, Newtype magazine, the source for the misheard lyrics - speculates that it's meant to represent words from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls and is therefore just gibberish. I'm personally not a fan of this idea, because Anno and his crew were really pretty good with the Angel names and characteristics and generally tried their best with English and German (even if it didn't always work out). For them to ask the songwriters to throw in nonsense during the instrumental section seems hopelessly out of character for them, but I can imagine them asking the songwriters to sneak in something in a foreign language.

Let's dive into it!
- "Se ta mesmo" might point to some different directions: "ta" could be the informal spoken version of "está" (is, but in a non-permanent state, like "he is here"). But this form, informally written "tá", is only used on conversational context, as a slang;
- As I said before, "se" can mean a lot of things... Two of them that can fit in the proposed context are "se" (if) or "cê" as a slang for "você" (you). In the first case, the phrasing would be "Se [está] mesmo", meaning something like "if [he/she/it] really is". In the second case we have a very conversational sentence, full of slangs. It is used on day-to-day speech, but rarely seem in written form (besides whatsapp chatting :P), "cê tá mesmo". Removing the slangs it would be "você está mesmo", (are you really), usually indicating a rhetoric question and inside a larger sentence denoting the context, like "você está mesmo fazendo isso?" (are you really doing that?). That would fit the relationship with the imagery shown, but again, it would be a VERY informal phrasing, almost a literal transcription of a real informal talk between two people familiar with each other;
- "Eu sei" is "I know", but the problem with that being the last sung sentence is that "eu" is spoken emphasizing the first vowel, in this case a long "e-", pronounced as in "Gendo". The sung phrase sounds like it's emphasizing the last vowel, a long "-u", which in portuguese usually indicates that the previous letter is an consonant ("-u" following another vowel turns into a semivowel, assuming a short sound, like in the english word "soul". In conversational tone, it's even omitted - "Eu sou" (I am) usually sounds more like "eusô", with the last "-o" being pronounced long and being the tonal);

I totally agree with you, to just add some glossolalia doesn't seem to fit Anno's style
And to blow some more flame in this discussion, I ended up making a detour from my research and went looking in the book of Genesis written in rabbinic hebrew... And found a really interesting phrase: Na'aseh adam betsalmenu ([let us] make man in our image and likeness), on the myth of the creation of Adam, the first man... One not familiar with hebrew language could try to sing it with incorrect intonation on particular words: linking the first two words, removing the emphasis on the last syllable of "adam" and end up sounding like "nAHceAd'm" (capitalizing the most pronounced sounds). This and the similarities between the phonemes on the sung phrases and the ones in hebrew, plus the context, makes me think that the mysterious phrases might be some lines of the book of Genesis, in hebrew language!
What you guys think?

@UrsusArctos, could you post the link to the version of the music you used? Thank you so much

UrsusArctos wrote: I found a version with far clearer singing in that section. The lyrics I posted earlier turned out to be off-base because of all the background singing overlays. The real lyrics seem to be more or less "Faria. Se ta mesmo. Faria. Oo-sei."

Actually it is because of the overlaying chorus that what is sung as "meso" sounds "mesmo". At least, this is what I hear (with earplugs the illusion is easier to detect because of the panning of the delayed vocals). But I did not listen to this other version. Where did it come from?

Gui, thanks again for such a thorough explanation. The idea that it could be butchered Hebrew sounds fascinating!

Gui and LPeyrani, these are Yoko Takahashi's live performances of Cruel Angel's Thesis, from 2017(I think) and 2006/7(? didn't look up the exact dates)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjF6AkrXods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1-fnTzB70k

The newer video with the ridiculous costume and the background dancers gives a straight view of Yoko's mouth right when she's lip-synching to the sequence in question - you can clearly see her mouth "se ta" because her lips do not make contact. Whether it's "messo" or "mesmo" is more ambiguous because the lip movements for both are nearly identical.

The older video has Yoko actually sing the part without overlays, and it pretty clearly sounds like "mesmo".

Do take a listen and tell me what you think you hear!

@UrsusArctos, what a coincidence! I also went searching for versions of CAT from other NGE albums, and found two that may give us some answers:

- One sung by Megumi Ogata (Shinji's original voice-actress) with a male back-vocal which clearly sings "setameso" in a Gregorian style right at the beginning of the song! I'm not sure about the lines sung on the interlude, but the "setameso" sung at the start is clear as day. However, I don't know if we can assume that the singer was fully aware of the lyrics.
Follows the version: https://youtu.be/mJjHJi0z8tk

- One live version, recorded in 1995, sung by Yoko Takahashi (the original opening singer). I think if one in this world should know what the hell is sung is her! In this version, she herself sings the lines and begins with a loud and clear "faria"! The next line I couldn't discern so easily, but sounded like "será mesmo" to me.
Follows the version: https://youtu.be/Ru4RLdaUYKQ

Any thoughts?

According to the January '96 issue of Newtype magazine, that part can be transcribed as「ファリィア。セタ(orセパ）メッソ。ファリィア。トゥスェ」 "Fariya. Seta (or sepa) messo. Fariya. Tuse."

Source: Reddit

"In some versions of this song, there is singing in this part. Unfortunately, I can't tell what they're singing (there's too much overlap). I think the last thing they sing could be "ai ga fusei," which can be roughly translated into "Love is a sin (wrongdoing)." If you have any idea what they're singing, please e-mail me. Arigatou! "

Source: Geocities