Unified in-universe calendar. [Petpeeve]

Alternatively, if you don’t like using the real world names for the months and week days, just number them instead. The second month of winter, the 4th day of the week, etc. Everyone will still know what you mean and there’s no need for anyone to agree on a whole new naming convention.

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When I was doing IC diary entry/short story bits for my Blood Elf, this was what I used - x day of the y month. Her own ‘year’ that I used was ‘x year after Restoration’ i.e. after the Sunwell got restored. I found that worked pretty well.

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It’s not the sort of world building I imagine Blizzard care for but i don’t think a unified calender makes much sense given the swathes of different peoples about.

Though i would say that the orcs and humans would likely use a similar one given the whole first war is year 0 and internment camps. Which is given as the default in reference to narratives for us.

Just a dash of seasoning for everyone really.

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I have even seen people use celestial objects as a more immersive substitute: ‘daybreak of the second sun of the third moon’, to describe the morning of 2 March in a more poetic way. It is far from perfect but it does work.

That being said the real life months are used in-universe.

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Kirin_Tor_Monthly_(March_Issue)
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Kirin_Tor_Monthly_(May_Issue)
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Kirin_Tor_Monthly_(November_Issue)

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I can’t lie if someone said to me my brain would melt and I wouldn’t understand an actual word spoken.

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I know it’s not canon and merely mentioning its name will surely summon the pitchforks, but the only in-universe calendar I take any interest in headcanoning is the Hearthstone year system. Of course, it’s a bit hard to implement real years, months, days into live roleplay when the official story moves so much slower, but some things can be fun to reference if you’re in need of some in-universe flavor text. :angel:

Implicit here is the premise that a fantasy world needs fictional names for months and days of the week to feel like a fantasy world.

It does not. The Lord of the Rings uses real-world ones just fine. There is an implicit understanding that while the story is presented to us in our real-world language, it’s not the language spoken in-universe. “Common” is just being rendered as English for our convenience, but it’s not literally English. The month names, likewise, are translated from whatever they are in the in-universe language so the story is comprehensible to the audience.

(For the record, Tolkien did work out Elvish names for months and days of the week, but since they didn’t serve the story being told, they were relegated to the appendices.)

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Ideally though, a fantasy world should at least have a sensible calendar era. By that, I mean a logical choice of reference epoch that characters in the setting choose to determine the current year.

For example, the Lord of the Rings uses the calendar era of the Third Age, which determines the current year by counting the number of years that have passed since the defeat of Sauron. This is the reference epoch of the Third Age calendar era and makes a lot of sense to me, as it’s an important event in the history of Middle Earth. It makes sense that the free peoples of Middle Earth would use that as the basis for their calendar era.

Star Wars and Warcraft are both settings that handle this poorly, in my opinion. Star Wars uses before and after the Battle of Yavin (or before and after the first Star Wars movie), while Warcraft uses before and after the Opening of the Dark Portal (or before and after the first Warcraft game).
These are useful reference points for fans, but I don’t think these are sensible systems for characters in these settings to use. The only race that might possibly use the Opening of the Dark Portal as a reference epoch are orcs, as that is an important moment in their history, but why not the Founding of Orgrimmar instead?

Quibbling over days of the week or months of the year is a little too much for my taste, but I would like a reference epoch that makes sense within the setting and that doesn’t just exist for the convenience of the fans.

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Surely Thorimsday would make more sense since Thursday was named after Thor?

I’m more peeved that Azeroth’s calendar starts the year the Horde came into Azeroth. It makes no sense for races like Kaldorei or Trolls or Tauren to use " Year 6 since the Horde invaded the Eastern Kingdoms ", either, as they ( Kalimdor races ) didn’t even know what orcs were until Year 20.

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I agree. In both Star Wars and Warcraft, the choice of the in-universe calendar era makes no sense and was clearly dictated by out-of-universe considerations.

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Except, they show in the actual setting that it’s not the only calendar that’s used. ADP is used for an ease of reference. The one calendar that was mentioned in-universe was ‘The King’s Calendar,’ in which ADP 0 is Year 592.

If anything, ADP proves that many calendars could exist for multiple races based on important events. For example, the night elves might use a calendar in which year 0 is the beginning or end of the War of the Ancients, in which months are replaced by lunar cycles - hence the Lunar Festival being a whole lot like the Lunar New Year in real life.

A unified calendar for everyone, though? That just would not make sense, unless it is something such as the First War, the Second War, the Third War, and so on - and even then, it is just used because it’s an easy tool to keep track of recent events.

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This is interesting and problematic, because in the real world, we already have a day named after Tyr, and it’s…Tuesday. Yeah, the english apparently struggled with pronouncing that and turned it into Chewsday, but in the scandinavian languages it’s still Tirsdag (literally Tyr’s Day).

In fact, most of the weekdays are named after norse gods.
Monday (named after the norse moon god Måne, literally meaning Moon’s Day)
Tuesday (Tyrs Dag, Tyr’s Day)
Wednesday (Named after Odin, via one of his alternate names Wotan, with Wotans Dag eventually becoming Wednesday)
Thursday (Obviously named after Thor, although probably originating in the variant name Thurz, which incidentally also means “Strength”)
Friday (Frey’s Day)

With that knowledge, we can keep most of the weekday names the same, by just saying that they’re named after the various Titan Keepers in the faux Norse Pantheon in Northrend.

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Mispronounced?! I think you will find the Old English god Tiw is just as valid a name as Tyr.

As for Odin? Never heard of him. Woden on the other hand? Now that’s a famous god.

But the etymology of the days of the week (with the Germanic languages adopting the Roman styling after the planets - just with their own substitutes) does show how having a universal calendar seems a bit unlike from an in-universe perspective. You’d expect every spoken language to have different names for the days of the week, even if they share an origin.

Probably best not to open the Warcraft languages can of worms though… is Common derived from a Titanic language? Who knows.

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Presumably - given the humans are descended from titanforged vrykul - common is ‘similar’ to English sitting between Germanic and Romance languages as a being a weird titan descended language with a lot of elf loanwords especially around magical or academic subjects.

I would be surprised if Blizzard had ever thought much about it.

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Thor and Tyr are different gods - Tyr was the god of war, and (at least in Scandinavia) the day named after him is Tuesday.

So I suppose rather than

It should be:
Tuesday - Tyrsday
Thursday - Therasday

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Its not something that’s given any real emphasis on, no. Beyond the in-game function of selecting languages, which is in part arbitrary. Gutterspeak standing out as the main example.

You’d presume though that the different Human Kingdoms would, after thousands of years, derived their own languages. Presumably there is an element of mutual intelligibility amongst the different Elven languages? But its all head-canon at the end of the day.

A lot of the awkwardness is the habit of Warcraft lore to have events be thousands of years apart.

Eh, the humans probably don’t have all that much linguistic diversity, they were all one nation a little over 1 thousand years ago (according to the timeline on the wiki) and bar Stormwind and Kul’Tiras they’re all very localised to one subcontinent which is dominated by one of the Kingdoms (Lordaeron). Probably it’d be more of a Romance language situation where they’re all very clearly descended from a common ancestor with similar grammar. Its recent enough your ruling class might even just speak the same language.

Therefore - Stromics speak Italian, Lordaeronian’s speak French :stuck_out_tongue:

Elves, idk - elves live a long time. There’s not actually that many generations for the elf languages to diverge from one another super hard. The Nighborne and Night Elves in particular are weird given some of the individuals are people who were alive when the societies split.

One day, I want to see a fantasy setting where the world was created like, 700 years ago. It would still be as rich and storied as all the other fantasy settings, it would just be appreciative of how much stuff can go down in a year.

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Likely tracking the founding of the Kingdom of Stormwind as the kingdom is about 600-700 years old, youngest of the Seven. Stormwind is also the only place where the King’s Calendar was seen used, so other human nations unlikely use it.

From Siren Isle we’ve discovered the historical term for the time period of settling of Kul Tiras and founding of the Tidesage Order being called The First Tide, with a mention of how the Tidesages have been mapping all of Azeroth’s seas and islands for “Two millennia since the First Tide” giving insight to how Kul Tirans seem to use that as their reference epoch for calendar keeping.

Unfortunately we don’t know the current year since the First Tide, something which I would very much be interested in as a Kul Tiran main.