How many rune based languages are there in WoW and did the devs ever confirm or deny that we can translate them?
I think pandaren is one. But, I’m not sure if it’s translatable like chinese characters would be, or if you count it as runic.
Other than that maybe vykrul. But, I don’t remember seeing any texts from them. Just various symbols throughout artwork etc…
Same with Dwarven. There are a few large books ingame with runic texts.
Also, furbolg from the Winterpelt tribe in Dragonflight. You can actually get a proficiency with the language through a side quest chain and reputation grind.
I wouldn’t consider Chinese characters to be runes. That’s a primarily picto-phonetic writing system and it hasn’t often been carved into stone. Chinese characters do not represent sound. Pandaren characters I think are trying to emulate them, though there are nowhere near enough to form any sort of comprehensible language. That’s sort of the thing with WoW - lots of languages but it’s almost all gibberish. And don’t even get me started on the joke that is setting your language to Pandaren. Har har har. No, we couldn’t do something that looks vaguely Chinese. No.
Runes have often come to mean mystical or magical or something in games like WoW, but in reality it’s just an approximation of Latin optimised for cutting it into rock. It is also, crucially, an alphabet - that is there are sounds for each vowel and consonant.
I agree with your takes otherwise though. The Dwarves all write with runic scripts - the idea behind which is lifted wholesale from Tolkien, and I imagine the Vrykul would as well, and the Furbolg is also runes. Their lines aren’t straight, however they are naturally carved into stones and represent vowels and consonants, and the only reason they’re not straight is that they’re carved in via claws. In a similar vein, the dragon language alphabet of The Elder Scrolls can be considered to be runic.
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