Which word do you think is Soul in Darnassian?

Argent Dawn
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Man, I need to stop trying to give my elves lore names, material runs out eventually.

I’ve been mulling over this since last night, and I’m not sure which word makes more sense.
Since, normally, even if there’s a convection to which word comes first in two-piece words in darnassian/thalassian, all languages have exceptions and it’s better to look for the word being used in another place.

Okay, so we have “Al’anath = Frostsoul”. Clearly, either Al or anath would bean frost or soul, in some capacity. I’ve never noticed a specific pattern for which word is which, other than “Elun’dris” being Elune’s eye, but this is to denote possession, perhaps possession always takes the form of a suffix - not conclusive for the other words.

There’s a few words like Alara’shinu - finding beauty in imperfection, where my guess would be alara meaning beatury, and shinu meaning imperfect. Or Shalla’Tor, my best assumption would be Shal for shadow and Tor for rend.

So, what? Al most likely means frost, and anath most likely means soul, easy.

But then I remembered. Andrassil - Crown of Snow. If, then, “an” means snow, wouldn’t anath be more likely to mean frost, assuming in darnassian the word is derived from the one for snow? That would make “al” soul.

I’m just trying to be sure my demon hunter’s name Voranath actually means “Broken Soul”, and not “Broken Frost”, since, that’d be a bummer. Voral doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, and is prooobably taken.

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There isn’t one because night elves, much like gingers, do not have souls.

:pray: :disappointed:

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IRL a lot of names use the same phonetics as words in languages but don’t actually mean anything. I’d hazard to say that this is likely a case, especially when you consider there seems to be more emphasis on surnames.

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The main problem is that pretty much all of Warcraft’s conlang energy went into orcish and Thalassian and the others scrape by on guesswork and untranslated gibberish made up on the fly.

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This.

Darnassian isn’t a real language the way Quenya and Sindarin are. It’s a collection of stock phrases that were probably made up by different writers at different times without any coordination. Trying to analyze it linguistically is pointless. All you can do is work with what you’re given.

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It doesn’t help that Shalassian randomly injects french names into the mix and that regardless of phonetical consistency, all but a few sound american.

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The real answer is having your character name be Brokensoul, since we don’t have Tyrande either. Surnames are written in English, and for like 99.9% combination of known Darnassian words, making a surname out of them is probably just something conjured up on the spot.

I’d say Voranath sounds more like a first name anyway, so why not Voranath Brokensoul? I mean, slightly edgy and awkwardness in English aside. Could also be Voranath the Soulbroken or something.

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I’m more certain that “Anath” is “Frost”.
Other words in Darnassian like “Andrassil” - Crown of Snow or in Shalassian like “An’anora” - spoken by Ly’leth Lunastre as she casts a frost trap - indicate that “An” is the root for cold/snow/frost in the elven languages.
This would make “Al” the more likely candidate for the word meaning Soul.

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I was thinking An would be Snow and Al, due to similarities would be Frost. Just because it’s part of a different word doesn’t mean it has the same meaning imo. Like track - rack etc.

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There is that, sure. But the existence of Aldrassil or lake Al’Ameth don’t particularly help that argument.
While these places don’t have official translations, they’re about as far away from frost as you can get, especially since they got set on fire with the rest of Teldrassil.

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They’re just as away from snow as well because you don’t see snow in Aldrassil, but hey…

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Of course, that’s why I’m suggesting that “Al” means Soul, not Snow.

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But Aldrassil means ‘Crown of Snow’.

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“Andrassil”, the former World Tree in Northrend, means ‘Crown of Snow’
“Aldrassil”, the random big tree in Shadowglen, Teldrassil, is untranslated.
It’s annoying and confusing, I know…

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i have low hours of sleep

which is probably how blizz decided to make up darnassian words anyway, a fever dream

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Probably, yeah, haha.
I’d say go with your original suggestion of just not translating the word at all, just to dodge confusion.
Not worth trying to be overly clever when it’s unclear and only a few people are going to understand anyway.

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I was looking for a name, not a surname actually. But yes - it would either be Voral or Voranath , since both are free and I made placeholder characters to keep them until I decide.

I like the sound of Soulbroken, or maybe something similar for the surname in trp3, though.

… Even if that would mean, his (in intention at least) name would literally be Brokensoul Soulbroken

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As others have said, just don’t draw attention to it since we don’t know for sure what the direct translations into Darnassian are.

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If nothing else, I had completely forgotten about Aldrassil. While not really an actual world tree, I now like the headcanon that perhaps Aldrassil means “Soul of the Crown (Of Teldrassil, ommitted)”, because it’s a (world-ish?) tree inside of the actual world tree, Teldrassil. It’s where a night elf’s adventure starts, too. It would be pretty poetic in that case.

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You do have this rather nifty “dictionary” that was started on the Eu servers and was then expanded upon and maintained by people over on the US servers. A lot of it is headcanon, but it has a more expanded dictionary list and things like that. Might be worth looking into to see if you can find the words you want in there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bD2qSEdWweR7xfIqUx_Iewv_4F40gboM-6ViSgfn1O8/edit

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