World of Warcraft®

Aka'magosh, readers! A blessing on you and yours!
Wait, what?
I'm confused by this. They both mean the same thing. In RP on the Horde, we compromise that Orcish sounds just like English (or Danish, or Klingon) to we Hordelings. So there's English Orcish, the widely used version. But then, instead of saying "Well met," we can also say "Throm'ka" with the same meaning.

I think, and this is awful guesswork, that Orcish is like English. English comprises of Modern Orcish - "Stop graveyard camping, noob!" - and then it has select phrases that nod back to Old English - "Goodbye".

Orcish might well be the same thing, then. When we use English for the sake of RP, it's actually Modern Orcish. When we say "Lok'narash" or "Aka'magosh," we're using centuries-old words of Old Orcish.

The thing about Modern Orcish is that it's impure. Before Orcs met the Draenei, and then the Humans, and then the rest of the Horde, they spoke pure Orcish (Soon to be called Old Orcish by an arrogant forum user). Then phrases from these other languages were cannibalised into Modern Orcish. Only the few phrases translated for us by Blizzard remained pure, for some reason.

So where's the rest of Old Orcish? Is it like Latin, spoken by only learned scholars? Or is it like old English, easy to make by adding "eth" onto the endeth?
Does that mean that filthy Low Common has corrupted Orcish vocabulary?
If anyone out there knows a bit about languages, lend me a hand. This is getting me all confused.

-eth.

I think, and this is awful guesswork, that Orcish is like English. English comprises of Modern Orcish - "Stop graveyard camping, noob!" - and then it has select phrases that nod back to Old English - "Goodbye".

Orcish might well be the same thing, then. When we use English for the sake of RP, it's actually Modern Orcish. When we say "Lok'narash" or "Aka'magosh," we're using centuries-old words of Old Orcish.

I think you answered your own question there.

Sounds very plausible. Languages evolve over time, and Orcish has been in touch with several other languages in the last few decades. Also, orcs of the New Horde gaining new allies created a dire need to adapt to other languages or perish. So yes, the difference between "new" and "old" Orcish is quite similar to that of modern day and 15th/16th century English. New speakers can, at least in most cases, understand speakers of older languages and use some phrases themselves, but speakers of the old language may have hard time understanding all meanings, as words may have been shortened or mixed into other languages. The transition into a much more warlike and militaristic culture, along with huge development in technology (nomadic orcs couldn't have had engineering, let alone industry of any kind) must have created several new terms. Orcish is likely full of Goblin!

Ah, the joys of linguistics accompanied with geopolitics !

I think that phrases like "Lok'tar ogar", "Bal'a dash malanore" and so forth aren't as much archaic remnants of Orcish or Thalassian etc. as they are Blizzard's attempts of making the players conscious of the different languages there supposedly are in World of Warcraft. It wouldn't make much sense to make a race speak in an incomprehensible language all the time (especially since none of the in-game languages have much vocabulary or grammar rules devised to structure them), so they have made up a few phrases to spice up the NPC dialogues a bit and to make Azeroth seem more foreign to us.

It's a bit similar to how a French person might use words like "oui", "monsieur" or "mon Dieu" (instead of their English equivalents "yes", "sir" and "my God") in a fictional work even if the rest of their dialogue would be in English. With just those few words, we become conscious of their origins and of the fact that the language they normally speak wouldn't be the English as we know it.

Throm'ka narkol, interesting prospect, although there are more. LOK'NARASH= Look out! Akala'ma! Form up! ...nerdmode deactivate