Trekies can speak Klingon

I think it’s about time Blizzard hires linguists to flush out all the languages in game and make them available for study. Currently there are no study materials on amazon or anywhere else I have looked to become fluent in the different languages.

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That is in no way necessary. Aside from a few Elven and Orcish phrases peppered here and there, everyone in Warcraft speaks English via translation convention. The only reason to ever do something like that is if you are going to have characters have full conversations in another language (which Star Trek has done). And that isn’t ever going to happen.

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Why would it never happen?

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Most of the languages is just “lets swap the letters around”. It’s not something actually made to BE a proper language.

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That can be changed though, I can’t tell you the amount of time I wished I could clearly convey a thought in Orcish, It’s a limitation I think is over looked and should be considered in a RPG

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There are supplemental materials where people have copiled the few phrases used and tried to make a language out of them, if that’s your thing. There really isn’t enough there to make a language though. And, well, Blizzard is a gaming company. Tolkien was a linguist, that’s why he developed his languages. And to be frank, I would rather the resources that would be spent developing languages to go into the game instead.

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I think it would be more trouble than it’s worth.

Blizzard tends to shy away from locking themselves in on things. Trying to create a whole language - much less multiple languages - can be a nice bit of lore and world building…. but I don’t know if it works for this franchise.

I think whole new languages in LotR and GoT are great for those franchises because firstly, they were literary works to begin with. Secondly, they sprang from the mind of one man - Tolkien and Martin respectively. So, they can make the languages by fiat.

Warcraft is a story told by many people over time, changing visions and directions - consistency is difficult and possibly not worth the headache.

I was thinking- which languages would even matter enough?

Orcish. Elvish - I am not sure how similar kaldorei, shaldorei, and Sindorei languages are…. Other than that…. Gutterspeak?

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And what of the Pandaren, their cites and banners with Han Characters but when an opposite faction monk speaks it is in the Latin alphabet, it really ruins immersion

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it’s transliterated. no different than representing a chinese phrase as “wo1 sh4 de2” or whatever

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The only real other language is Furbolg, which also has its own writing (unless you have learned it in DF, then you don’t see it anymore).

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Is that a full 1:1 alphabet, I wonder?

Doubt its much of a language, but alphabet maybe.

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Not to mention, Tolkien himself was a linguist and a language professor who spoke something like 35 languages. So it’s not too surprising that he would create his own in his works. Which, as you pointed out, were literary works.

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Is this true?

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Yes, but Furbolg basically just scrambles the text with symbols until you “learn” the language by turning in items. The symbols themselves do not form a coherent language.

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I wish it was more li LOTR and those sneaky elves would only speak Thalassian so we could not track what they are saying :blue_heart:

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I bet blood evles would make great poets

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I mean, I would definitely put a collar on Alleria :eyes:

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Well, that was all wrong! Tolkien was a philologist. While philology and linguistics are closely related, they are not the same. And Tolkien did not speak 35 languages! He could speak those languages that most Europeans grow up speaking plus the academic languages that got taught in universities at the time. So, conversationally fluent: Modern English, French, Spanish, plus Latin, Greek, and maybe Old English.

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Businesses hire people to make money. How does this make them money?

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We def need a lot more linguistics to study in the WoW of Warcraft universe. i got a decent amount of elven used in my lil side story around my main character in the story i been working on in my free time, but i’d love all the languages to get fleshed out further n shown to the players.

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