Imagine Aliens coming down in a space ship, landing in a crop field in Idaho or something… These Aliens are have strange colored skin, disproportionate in size, and a manner of dress you have never seen before.
And when they speak in their native language, it just sounds like they have a thick, Louisiana accent.
I mean… basically, yeah. That’s how it worked. The only possibly remote justification I could give is both languages have roots in Titan… but Orcs are not like Azerothian Titan-derivative races where large amounts of language existed and they came from constructs which spoke it… Orcs are literally, an accident… and there were no Titan facilities on Draenor.
If the book is supposedly written in Orcish, then that just makes it worse. Why go to Lor’themar to learn Orcish when he has all those Orcs nearby? Don’t sit there and tell me not one single Orc couldn’t teach him.
If Zekhan went to Lor’themar to learn Thalassaian or even Common that’s one thing, but Orcish!?
Honestly that’s a matter of expediency; there are a handful of situations in-game that maintain the presumption that races can’t all just arbitrarily understand one another, such as the old questgiver in Theramore who could translate an orcish missive only because he’d learned their language, or the Horde quests in Storm Peaks that have players and their allies unable to understand a recording of Brann until they find a means of translating what he’s saying.
It’s not particularly realistic, but for the sake of convenience major protagonist characters in WarCraft can generally understand one another by default to move the story forward, while there are still occasional reminders in the rest of the setting that such isn’t really the case in-canon for the world at large, and communication may be largely facilitated in the general populace by way of most people who expect to deal with myriad races having learned both Common and Orcish as languages of trade by the time of modern WoW.
There may also be some magic involved in certain situations; there’s a sense overall that creatures aligned to the cosmic planes as a rule are automatically able to understand and speak to anyone else from any other plane of existence comprehensibly.
I think Blizzard flip flops between whether Common is a human language, or one that’s, ahem, “common” to everyone, and between whether Common canonically sounds like English (or whatever your game client’s language is), or has its own vocabulary.
The only substantial example of Common I believe has been the lament for Invinicible.
In my head it’s a human language. The reason why it’s the lingua franca of Azeroth (and not just the Alliance) is because humans are clearly the center of the universe.
The overwhelming majority of people don’t spend all their time dwelling on race, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc. However, the ones that do are loud and see these things everywhere. I’m amazed at how some of them actually get through life sometimes.
I’ve always figured it was because of the Franchise’s D&D roots where everyone just spoke common.
You so cool.
Can someone please explain how Orcs are “African American” coded? No really, I would love to see someone explain this without looking like a racist, because it is racist.
Do they dwell on election fraud nonsense and covid denialism instead?
Believe it or not, there are more than just two camps of people.
I’m referring to that person’s history, specifically. Their short post history is filled with that stuff.
I’ve never really thought about Orcs being African American coded… they seem a lot like your typical tribal fantasy orc in a lot of ways outside of a questionable concept of honor.
There are for sure some races with racial-coding, with Trolls and Tauren being the most egregious and in-your-face example. Others if they are I have to squint and turn me head to try and see it.
they are more mongols then african…^^
and they were never descripted as this…“african people”
Some people do I am sure. I am personally of the belief that there is always some level of dishonesty in any election. Here in South Florida we have joked about dead people voting in the city of Hialeah for years. I would think anyone with a brain would like to see more transparency in the vote counting process, which is a much larger issue than any fairytales about Russian interference.
As for covid, believe what you will. Triple mask while you are driving or in your house for all I care. Take a shot every 6 months for the rest of your life if it makes you happy. I will continue to deal with it by doing my best to remain healthy and by putting as much good stuff into my body as I can. What I won’t do is take another shot or accept absurd lockdowns and restrictions that do nothing other than negatively affect society.
Still not sure why it is relevant, it’s not like what he said was wrong.
Sure I can see how the issue with Zekhan and Lor’themar is odd, but I am not necessary convinced it is racist. Zekhan being illiterate isn’t super unbelievable, the Darkspear don’t have any big metropolitan cities or urban centers, reading and writing wouldn’t be prioritized over more practical survival skills.
It is odd that Lor’themar is teaching him Orcish, if that is really what is going on. I feel like Lor’themar teaching him Common is much more intuitive and makes sense, and perhaps the real issue was miscommunication and a lack of quality control. After all, Warcraft has been in decline, and there has been several walk out, layoffs, and the idea that they would cut corners to cut costs isn’t a long reach.
And even if the people at Blizzard were just straight up racists, I feel like even they would understand that they can’t afford another big PR problem.
He really saw orcs being aggressive and living in huts and decided to say, “oh this fantasy race must be African-American coded” while placing his prejudices on the rest of the playerbase by claiming everyone has known this since vanilla 
In my opinion we are slowly heading into a dangerous direction as internetstorms are happening because of bigger and bigger trifles (doesn’t mean that this book is a trifle, but I mean real trifles like this “Greenskin” from Trollbane).