Languages of Tyria
From Guild Wars Wiki
Contents |
[edit] "Common"
Line 1: ABCDEFGHIJKLM.
Line 2: NOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
Never explicitly named, most of Tyria's intelligent creatures appear to speak various dialects of the same language.
Known speakers of "common"
- Asura
- Centaur
- Charr
- Demons
- Djinn
- Dragons
- Dredge
- Dwarves
- Forgotten
- Heket
- Humans
- Jotuns
- Mursaat
- Norn
- Seers
- Skree
- Tengu
- Yetis
[edit] Human languages
[edit] Old Canthan
The old language of Cantha has been largely supplanted by "common". However, a number of words and phrases have been integrated into the Canthan dialect of "common".
[edit] Elonian
Elonian words are generally only used in place names, making it difficult to determine their meanings through context.
| Known words and phrases. | |
|---|---|
| Ahai | Greeting. |
| Anur / onur / nur | Suffixes used in the names of various settlements. |
[edit] Old Kurzick
The only known example of Old Kurzick is the Songs of Arboretum, performed by the Tree Singers during the Eternal Grove mission, its lyrics are as follows:
- "A sanctu al defender zu arboretum."
- "Par itzkein zein mysterium."
- "A eternum al arboreum."
- "Per edora resurrekti zu mortikum."
The chant appears to be a mixture of English, Latin, Yiddish, and German.
A rough translation is...
- "A holy defender to support the arboretum."
- "Equal in the mystery."
- "An eternal tree."
- "By which we resurrect the dead."
[edit] Charr language
The Charr seem to speak a dialect of common with a number of unique words and idioms.
[edit] Grawl
The only known Grawl word is a noise rendered as "*oot!*".
[edit] Titan
Known phrases
- "Shith Mal Hacto!"
[edit] References
- Many of the Tyrian writing systems are the work of Matthew Medina:
- "<...> Actually, while there are other languages in the Guild Wars lore that are close to old Norse runes, the choice for "Old" Ascalonian was to base it in Phoenician because of its importance to many of our own languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Greek scripts. I didn't change the shapes of many of the original runes, and added a few of my own, so that it would be easily translatable into English, and hopefully recognizable to even non-English speakers. This is probably the first and last Guild Wars language to follow a real language so literally, but since this was an exercise to see how many players would spot the language and translate it, I wanted to make this first test fairly easy to read. As Guild Wars has evolved so have the languages - so far I haven't seen that anyone has translated the 100 or so Canthan symbols. One word of caution though - not EVERY language in the original Guild Wars universe actually translates into anything - I believe I was the only artist on the team that actually made readable languages, so some of the runes, glyphs and scripts you see in the game will be just for "show".--Matthew Medina 15:13, 15 January 2008 (UTC)" [1]
