Two millenia since, you say? to me it seems like we’re in year 2025 AFT (after first tide)
Spinning off from this, there’s the question as to whether the ‘Common’ spoken in Arathor is the same as the Common spoken in the present day human kingdoms. The Hallowfall Expedition would suggest that it is? (Then again, there are no difficulties speaking with Nerubians either).
The Romance language example makes a lot of sense. You could even envision Common as a Latin analogue, being relatively unchanged due to elite, clerical and religious use.
The Elven languages have the opposite problems though. The Shalassian and Darnassian especially. Its whether you envision the Highborne Empire actually have linguistic division before the War of the Ancients, or if its a distinction that’s emerged in the last 10,000 years. Either way, for my own head-canon, I tend to imagine all the Elven languages as having a degree of mutual intelligibility. Especially for Darnassian and Shalassian.
I would personally raise the idea that the Arathorian Empire speaks a mutually intelligible dialect, given the difference in spelling of names that would otherwise be common
I think it´s unlikely, given that the date Chronicle provides us for fracturing of Arathor is 1200 years ago.
King´s Calendar has only ever been used in Warcraft 1, so I really doubt it has any connection to any event within the canon lore. It´s just a relic from 30 years ago that RPers keep using (ironically, often in settings tied to different human kingdoms that wouldn´t have used the calendar from Stormwind anyway).
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https://imgur.com/a/kYZBukU
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Yeah, Thorim sounds more fitting. Thorim’s day
Might be the founding of the Wrynn Dynasty. Either way my point is that I want them to explore the Kul Tiran calendar starting from the First Tide more.
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For me I don’t call it by month, but instead by the moons. For example, January being the first month, so Jan 21st for example would be “Twenty first day of the First Moon”
That would be accurate for orcs. According to the Lord of the Clans, orcs track passage of time by phases of the moon and years by the seasons (“The war ended eight winters ago”). The moon is an important thing in orcish culture with old Kosh’harg ceremonies opening with a religious mass under the full moon’s light and a child’s Naming Day happens under the next full moon.
Most of their history and culture follows oral tradition, which is why the internment camps effectively killed the Clan culture because the parents refused to teach their children out of shame, believing their ancestors would never accept them again for what they had done and birthing a generation of clanless orcs. They don’t write calendars for this reason and track time by the cycles of nature that are easily observable.
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Interesting idea, and nit-picky yes!
It’s already hard enough to schedule things, without having to remember fantasy dates and months on top of it.
And don’t forget the majority of world events ARE based on real life events.
Star Wars’ would make sense if it was before and after the Empire. Palpatine the kinda guy who’d say “my ascension marks a new era, restart the calendar to commemorate me”.
tbf - if the rebels wrote the history i could see why they wouldn’t want to let the wizard tyrant dictate what year 0 is.
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In a universe where Palpatine changed the calendar to reflect himself, I imagine that the Rebels would return to the Republic’s calendar (representing a return to democracy) after he got thrown down the Death Star’s trash compactor
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Draenei maintain three separate calendars - one that still uses Argus years, one uses Draenor years, and one uses Azeroth years. Argus+Draenor years are both different lengths to Azeroth years because they’re other planets with different suns and rotations and whatnot.
Trolls track years solely by who is God-King/Queen. We’re now in Talanji 8.
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My stupid headcanon is: Gnomes do not track years instead they keep time based on what is essentially unix epoch time starting at some arbitrary day in the past. This is generally completely incomprehensible to anyone else and so Gnomes have developed converters to other people’s calendars which are usually correct.
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Languages change over time and diverge based on geography, even if their speakers are long-lived or immortal, because language changes do not need generational changes to stick (generational turnover just makes languages change faster).
While this is of course fictional evidence, Tolkien made his Elvish languages evolve over time. The phonetic differences between Darnassian, Thalassian and Shalassian are, if anything, less severe than the phonetic differences between Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin, which evolved from a common ancestor being geographically separated by the ocean.
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It’s been over seven years in-universe? But wasn’t BfA like… yesterday…
…ouch.
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The timeskip that they basically did nothing with other than “and now everyone is friends :)” does a lot to mess with perception of time.
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Time flies when you’re having fun. And the writers had loads!
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