Eclectic Mental Necrosis

Oh, the cutscenes, my beloved...where do I even start?

Skyward Sword's plot is a love letter to everything Zelda. When I criticize games, plot is usually the first thing I go for; Breath of the Wild, for example—it had so much potential, which we luckily got compensated for in Age of Calamity, but the main/canon story just leaves you kind of...empty feeling. Link is just a vessel to watch through the eyes of, and while he is heroic, he’s also...just...there.

Skyward Sword, though? It brought me to tears. It was perfect. Every motion Link made, every expression; he no longer felt like Nintendo's favorite blank slate with a permanent expression on it, a la Pokemon Sun and Moon's protagonist.

We got his smiles.

His determination.

His panic.

His shame.

His fear.

We see him comfort a friend,

We see him cry,

We see him rage.

So much thought and care was put into every single cutscene, from beginning to end.

And the sacred flames are a point to that.

With Farore's sacred flame, he cowers. The power in front of him is new and terrifying, and he doesn't know what to expect of it.

When he raises his sword as Fi instructs, his hand actually trembles.

And when he first tests out the Goddess Longsword, his expression is blank and uncertain; he only gives it two swings and a twirl before sheathing it, which is the typical Master Sword twirl we get in Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess.

Yeah, for us it can get really confusing, and it makes it hard to decode stuff sometimes. But I'd guess the in-universe reason for the repeating letters and stuff is just that the sounds those letters make either just don’t exist in that Hylian or the repeating letters actually have a double pronunciation

Like, in SkSw for example, we have this "translation" guide of written Hylian to English:

D and W, E and K, G and Q, P and T, O and Z, X and I. Those pairs share hylian symbols. 

So, retaking what I said above, this could mean those symbols have two ways to be pronounced, which isn’t totally unheard of? In many languages, like Spanish and English, the letter “C” can have both a “S” and a “K” sound, despite being completely different letters. In Spanish, “G” can have both an English-esque “H” sound and a normal “G” one. 

The opposite theory would be that, in the case of the letter shared by D and W, one of those sounds doesn’t exist in Hylian - which, if we listen to the ballad of the goddess sang by Zelda and Fi, could be W’s case, since that noise could easily be replaced by a u sound, that has a unique letter in the alphabet.

But there’s also a third possibility here... As much as Hylian’s written in English throughout SkSw, we know for a fact it’s not pronounced the same. Let’s take “Link” for example

We know Link is written this way in Hylian, both because Nintendo confirmed the above translation of the alphabet, and because, in-game, we see Zelda wrote his name that way in the letter she sends to him at the very beginning:

but we KNOW his name isn’t actually said “Link” in Hylian! - It’s actually “Madas”/”Matdas”. Fi says it all the time, along with the Hylian for Master: “Mari” (Mari Madas = Master Link). You can hear Fi saying his name in the very first cutscene with Link in it, the one the above screenshot is from

So, going from the written “LINK” and the spoken “MADAS”, the corresponding sounds for each letter could be something like this in Spoken Hylian: