20 years of Starcraft

[ragnarok]

What I meant is that the wiki treats all sources of lore as equally valid unless they explicitly contradict one another. Unlike the writers paid by Blizzard, they actually bother to keep track of what the lore actually said at any point in time. So when you read their synthesis of many differences sources written by different writers who made stuff up as they went along with no regard for internal consistency, that synthesis comes across as bizarre and convoluted.

It's actually from the wiki that I got into the SC universe after WoL's release. By then, despite not having read any of the SC books (usually they're using the SC2 lore) I already began to see some contradictions and such from SC1 and SC2's lore, hence why I had to turn to the wiki to see what was REALLY going on. It was why I had to rely so much on the wiki for my fic back then....

[Mislagnissa]

It's actually from the wiki that I got into the SC universe after WoL's release. By then, despite not having read any of the SC books (usually they're using the SC2 lore) I already began to see some contradictions and such from SC1 and SC2's lore, hence why I had to turn to the wiki to see what was REALLY going on. It was why I had to rely so much on the wiki for my fic back then....

The wiki is missing a few things too. The book Liberty's Crusade mentions that the Confederacy telepathically interrogated zerg test subjects (although it was apparently quite painful). From this they learned that the zerg considered other species food for their young and material for their creations, and that the protoss were genetic purists that purged the galaxy of life which grew out of control or did not meet their standards of perfection. None of this is mentioned on the wiki.

[ragnarok]

The wiki is missing a few things too. The book Liberty's Crusade mentions that the Confederacy telepathically interrogated zerg test subjects (although it was apparently quite painful). From this they learned that the zerg considered other species food for their young and material for their creations, and that the protoss were genetic purists that purged the galaxy of life which grew out of control or did not meet their standards of perfection. None of this is mentioned on the wiki.

Oh I know about missing stuff, that's why I check every few days to see if they eventually get filled in

[Mislagnissa]

Oh I know about missing stuff, that's why I check every few days to see if they eventually get filled in

Here is another example from Magic's commentary on the Brood War script:

Incidentally, in my discussions with Rommel about StarCraft, he suggested where the names for the main zerg cerebrates, Daggoth and Zasz, could be derived:

'Dagoth' is a character in the Marvel comics universe and also the movie Conan the Destroyer. It's also the combination of 'Dagon' and 'Shoggoth', names from the works of HP Lovecraft, who perhaps in turn took Dagon from the Semitic god. There's also 'Dagoth Ur', the main antagonist in the game The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, though it was released well after the original StarCraft.

Meanwhile, Zasz may be derived from serial killer Victor Zsasz, one of Batman's many enemies.

That is the sort of thing that could be added under the trivia subheadings of the articles about those characters. Which reminds me...

Looking at the known cerebrate names: Araq, Auza, Daggoth, Gorn, Kagg, Kaloth, Nargil, Zargil, Zasz. Although if you wanted a strict correspondence between spelling and sound it would be best to render some of these as Daggoθ, Kaloθ, and Zaß. They seem to be loosely based on Mesopotamian languages such as Sumerian and the Semitic languages, but {th} or /θ/ is Greek and {sz} is... not English, but here apparently stands for /s/ (I think?). Or they might be based on the names of 80s cartoon villains like Zarkon in Voltron. The maximal syllable structure is apparently CVGCC and almost all consonants are voiced except /θ/, /k/, /q/ and /s/.

Contrast that with Protoss names, which are generally limited to CVC syllable structure and have few voiced consonants. The {kh} digraph pops up a lot, probably as a simple weird fantasy spelling, but in real languages {kh} could indicate aspiration /kʰ/ or a fricative /x/ a la Greek chi.

The interesting thing is that the protoss language ("Khalani") takes a number of terms from Roman Latin, such as "templar." This is shown in "khassar de templari" meaning "justice comes from order"... except that khassar means "order" and templari means "justice" near as I can tell, so de is essentially the grammatical opposite of the Latin ex. Unfortunately Khalani is not a real language so the grammar varies by the writer: while some writers seem to use a fusional (or rarely synthetic) grammar, the quotes in Starcraft 2 that I was able to find a translation for (a number of units say the same phrase in English and Khalani) were a substitution cipher of English grammar (which is highly analytical). On the templar census from the beta website (which I should have recently archived and linked to elsewhere), the human translator mentioned that the protoss still used ancient tribal languages and rendered these in Latin (presumably to give the same feel that protoss would get from reading it) while the modern language was translated in English.

I am really disappointed by Blizzard's lazy approach to the protoss language. I would have preferred if they hired a linguist to design it, or just used Latin instead as a translation convention. For example, in Latin the khala ("path of ascension") would be via ascēnsiōnis, khaydarin ("focuser of the heart") would be focus cordis, dae'uhl ("great stewardship") would be vīlicātiō magna, and "khala's law" (a phrase from the manual) would be lēx ascēnsiōnis ("law of ascension"). In Chinese, "path of ascension" would be translated as 提升之路 tíshēng zhī lù (I googled this to make sure and it is a real turn of phrase). You will notice that protoss words and phrases, at least those invented early in the lore's development, are much shorter than the equivalent in human languages. In fact, more than a few key concepts were never actually given Khalani translations, such as the "Chain of Ascension" (in Latin vinculum ascēnsiōnis).

Honestly, the word "khala" itself has become overused and refers to multiple distinct concepts. It refers to the protoss' telepathic/empathic communication method or whatever it is called since there is no consistent terminology for it (which was never really explained in much detail, not distinguished from regular telepathy), a power source for psychic powers (possibly a conflation or confusion with the psi matrix), a scientific theory for harnessing psychic power, a declaration of a caste system, a religion and law system for enforcing its use, an internet, an afterlife, etc.

[ragnarok]

Interesting script indeed, I'll see what ideas I can pull out of it