Wenja language
Wenja is a constructed fictional language in the video game Far Cry Primal, developed by Ubisoft.
It is spoken by the Wenja, a fictional nomadic people in the game's world set in the valley of Oros in Central Europe.
The language was developed for the game by a team of linguists led by the Indo-Europeanist Andrew Byrd.
[3] Therefore, Ubisoft sought to project the language back in time, creating what Byrd called a "proto-Proto-Indo-European".
[10][11] During the early development stages for Far Cry Primal, the Ubisoft team struggled to create a script that sounded convincing in the game's prehistoric setting.
They found that all attempts in English sounded "trite or just plain wrong, either too much like modern man or too much like science fiction.
"[6] In search for a solution, the team stumbled upon recordings of Proto-Indo-European by Andrew Byrd for Archaeology and ultimately decided to hire him and his wife Brenna Byrd to lead a team of linguists that would recreate a language suitable for the game.
The linguists were then tasked to project the language even further back in time, resulting in what Andrew Byrd referred to as a "proto-Proto-Indo-European".
For example, PIE lack a reconstructed term for "yes", so the team imagined an expression that may develop to have that meaning and came up with "it is correct".
The corresponding phrase in reconstructed PIE, *h₃reǵtóm h₁ésti, was then subjected to the sound languages and possible syllable clipping imagined for the proto-language, and ended up as shrash in the Wenja dialect and tómhe in Izila.
[16][6] The game only translates part of the dialogues and interactions, which encourages players to learn at least some keywords in order to understand what is happening and to know what actions they should take to continue playing.
[18] Each of the peoples in Far Cry Primal speak a slightly different language, and they derive their names from their respective dialect.
[1] The Wenja and the Udam basically speak two close dialects of the same language, which are mutually intelligible to a great extent.
[5] The Izila dialect is largely based on the standard academic version of Proto-Indo-European, with "some simplifications to make it a little easier to say and in grammar and pronunciation".
[5] Since Izila is essentially the same language as PIE, this article deals mainly with the other dialects: Wenja and Udam.
[25] This creates a rhythmic feel to the language, with 2- and 4-syllable words being always perfect trochees: dácham, "ten"; kúshla, "back"; mága, "can"; shàwikwála, "shepherd"; shìyugwáyfa, "eternal life"; etc.
3-syllable words are stressed on the first vowel if this is a (shnár-hadan, "cannibal"; shwádisha, "to pull") and on the second if this is i or u (sunstáshman, "regime"; fumáygan, "piss-man"; izíla, "Izila"; hisúbar, "quiver").
[8] Wenja verbs feature three aspects (imperfective, completive, iterative), two moods (indicative, imperative) and two voices (active, passive).
[8] The causative can be indicated in two ways: morphologically adding the suffix -ay(a) to a verb (mu shnar mara haday, "the man made me eat an apple") or periphrastically by means of the verb daha, "to do" (shnar mara hada daham, "I made the man eat an apple").
The infinitive is also made up of the bare verbal stem: gwar gwan dawsam ("I need to kill the beasts").
The ten main sentence starters are:[29] Subordination is relatively uncommon in Wenja; the language generally uses conjunctions or parataxis.
