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Haryuu no hanekata: FF7's misheard lyric

Posted in Games on

Myth: One-Winged Angel, Sephiroth’s theme in Final Fantasy VII, contains the lyric “haryuu no hanekata”, meaning “winged one of the lower reaches”.

Fact: The correct lyrics to this misheard line are “gloriosa, generosa”. This is true in all versions of the song, including the Japanese game, with the exception of the rendition in Advent Children which changed the song’s lyrics entirely.

  1. Evidence
    1. 1. It’s not correct Japanese
    2. 2. It’s not supported by any Japanese sources
    3. 3. It’s not pronounced correctly
    4. 4. Why would it be Japanese?
    5. 5. You can hear the audio sample
  2. How the wrong lyric came about
  3. One-Winged Angel trivia
    1. Lyrical origins
    2. Japanese misheard lyrics

Evidence

1. It’s not correct Japanese

Neither the words “haryuu” nor “hanekata” are real Japanese words.

2. It’s not supported by any Japanese sources

Various Japanese sources concur with the lyric “gloriosa, generosa”. This includes a Japanese fansite, a Pixiv page, and a Youtube video.

Conversely, the only verbatim Google hit for “haryuu no hanekata” as written in hiragana is the English-language talk page for the Wikipedia entry on One-Winged Angel.

This appears to disprove the unlikely hypothesis that the line only appeared in the Japanese version and was changed to Latin for the English version.

3. It’s not pronounced correctly

In Japanese, “ryu” is a single syllable, pronounced to rhyme with “view”. In Japanese, “haryuu” would be pronounced “ha-ryu-u”, and not, as misheard, “ha-ri-yuu”.

The “ri” you hear is correct, as it’s the second syllable in “glo-ri-o-sa”. There’s no “ri” in “haryuu”, and only a non-Japanese speaker could make that mistake.

4. Why would it be Japanese?

The rest of the song is in Latin. There’s no logical reason to insert one line in Japanese. It’s even less logical to swap it out for Latin for the English release, as one unlikely hypothesis suggests.

5. You can hear the audio sample

In the mid-90s, computing limitations meant that game soundtracks were generally tracked audio, meaning that each instrument and vocal would be stored separately.

A website called The Northern Crater has the lyrics to One Winged Angel, and settles the argument by supplying the audio sample ripped directly from the PC version. The sample clearly says “gloriosa, generosa”.

How the wrong lyric came about

It’s difficult to find who originated this misheard lyric; perhaps some USENET poster in the late 90s to early 2000s, and even if they could be tracked down they may well have forgotten. Nevertheless, we can speculate.

The Japanese title of One-Winged Angel is 「片翼の天使」, or Katayoku no Tenshi. It’s entirely possible that someone wildly misread the kanji on this title, and assumed it was the mysterious missing lyric - the hardest to hear, and the hardest to find in Carmina Burana.

Suppose they misunderstood that Japanese is read right-to-left, and thus read the title as 「使天の翼片」. The middle hiragana “no” and the last kanji “kata” are the easiest to correctly read. The fourth character, “yoku”, meaning wing, is incorrectly back-translated to “hane”, which also means wing.

The second character means “heaven”, and is easy to read correctly. The first could have been misread as 悪, as in “warui” meaning “evil”, but they misused the rule that “wa” is written “ha”. They misinterpret this as “evil heaven”, or rather “hell”, and as was popular in AD&D 2nd edition (late 90s) they avoid saying “hell” by calling it “the lower planes” – but “plane” is a D&D specific term, so they say “lower reaches”.

Turning back to the audio to pick out the second character, since it can’t literally be “ten”, they mishear “ryuu”, a familiar sound used in the name of a Street Fighter character. They assume it’s just an unfamiliar reading of “ten” and call it complete.

Our mystery author thus hears “haryuu no hanekata”, and mistranslates it as “winged one(?) of the lower reaches”. They assume, not entirely unreasonably, that the song’s title makes sense to appear in the lyrics somewhere. Most RPG fans don’t speak Latin, and the lyrics (most easily recognised from Carmina Burana) are accurate apart from this one line, so the misheard lyric spreads.

This hypothesis is plausible when you consider how few resources Internet users had in the late 1990s. There was no Google Translate, Wikipedia or Youtube, and accurate information about foreign-language material was hard to find.

One-Winged Angel trivia

Lyrical origins

The lyrics to One-Winged Angel are taken from Carmina Burana, a musical performance composed by Carl Orff and based on Latin poetry dating back to the 11th century.

Japanese misheard lyrics

A Pixiv page on One-Winged Angel in Japanese features its own set of misheard lyrics: