#warframe languages

Firstly, Orokin is a phonetic language, meaning that instead of each symbol representing a letter of the languages alphabet, it instead represents a SOUND which is used to make a word. An example of a real world language like this that uses symbols to represent sounds is Japanese, where "き" is a symbol that represents the sound "ki". For example, the word "Moon" or "Tsuki" in Romaji (the Japanese word written using latin script) would be written "つき" in simplified Hiragana (The symbolic alphabet that is used to spell words that are of Japanese origin).

Keeping that in mind, you might be able to see now why some words in "Orokin" look longer or shorter than they are in English. There are four "sets" of symbols in Orokin that represent the sounds of consonants, vowels, and also written numbers and punctuation. This post is going to cover reading & writing consonants and vowels to make words, since numbers & punctuation are not used very often and are also very straight forward to read and write compared to the 'writing words' portion of Orokin.

Consonants and vowels are arranged in the word in a specific manner, sometimes including a 'placeholder' letter for words that start with vowels which have no consonant attached. This is SIMILAR to how the Japanese language uses "o"/"を" to define the object of a sentance, even though it's not technically PART of any word. With Orokin however, it's more to denote that a vowel should be a stand alone sound, typically at the start or end of a word. Whether that's used or not of course boils down to HOW the word is PRONOUNCED, because that's what matters when reading/writing Orokin since it's essentially "English with extra steps" (No offense, I find it cool as shit).

** NOTE: If you look at some older Orokin writing (like what's found in relays, other early development "Tenno" areas, or even writing on some of the Warframes themselves) you can see many vowels are used a bit inconsistently. Many times 'aw', 'ae', and 'aye' are all used interchangeably, possibly accidentally, or just generally inconsistantly as the language evolved. There are also many instances where vowels on the ends of words do not use the 'h' holder, which would generally be wrong in present day Orokin.

As a result, we'll be focusing on more recent usages of the Orokin language, since DE has significantly refined vowel usage over the past few years especially. This will make translating and learning more consistent as I feel like the older writing isn't a good representation of what you're going to see in game from this point in time going forward. (Stuff changes, developers refine and redefine things all the time, and I feel like the Orokin language is no different. I'm SURE the Corpus & Grineer languages also suffer from this, but I digress.) **

Now that we have addressed some of the older quirks & inconsistencies of Orokin we can move on to: The alphabet/phonetic keycode. This is one I have made & altered MANY times over the years, and I use it to double check everything I write, as I now know how to read & write the language without this key.

I've arranged it here in a way that's hopefully familiar to anyone who has learned something like Japanese, where the primary symbol set that represents a consonant and vowel is along the top, and any 'notation marks' to that SAME SYMBOL denote a modification or additional sound. (Example: In Japanese, 'Ka' か becomes 'Ga' が with the additional mark in the upper right corner) Yes, that's right- there's actually only 12 consonants in Orokin, the other 10 are VARIATIONS on those first 12 which denote a change or addition to their sound.

In the key above, you can see the "P" & "Fh" symbols for example, share a primary symbol SHAPE, but the "Fh" symbol has a notation mark in the center. This turns the hard "P" sound into more of a "Fh/Ph", think "Pie" vs "Fly". We also have "M" and "N", where "N" is the same symbol as "M" but with the notation mark. These two specifically can also be a bit troublesome to people learning to read Orokin, because they are virtually identical to "L" and "H". The trick with these four however is to check the length of the symbol- "L" and "H" will always be HALF the length of any other letters in the word.

Specifically with the letter "H" you will see it's often used to "hold" vowels. In Orokin writing, vowels are NEVER found on their own. Looking at the chart, you can see on the right hand side, I have examples of the reading order of Orokin script in various setups. Red is the consonant, green is a vowel, gold is the 'placeholder' symbol that holds a vowel. I made this at first specifically for the 1999 version of Orokin, but the premise is the same when reading 'fancy' Orokin. You read any "holder" first, then any vowel above it, etc, you can follow the arrows on the chart.

Now that I've gone over symbols, the basics of vowels and placeholders, and you have my chart, how do you organize these so that they actually "spell" a word correctly?

Primarily, that comes down to pronunciation and how you would say it out loud. For example, let's start with the word "paper"- I'm a New Englander, so I have a bit of an almost 'lazy' accent (we tend to 'round' e sounds so they sound more like a u. Ya'll ever heard a New Yorker say "water?" ..yea. That.), so for me I say "Payepuhr". Writing that word would look like this,

You could also technically leave out the 'h' here if you wanted, but I left it to emphasis the 'puhhr' sound at the end. Now, you may have noticed, I also spelled this VERY weird. If you pronounce it, it probably sounds like it should just be ‘Payepur” right? Well, this is because there is no “Y” or “W” in Orokin. Both those sounds are made by combining usually two vowels into or above one symbol. In this case, to make “Y” I use “AYE” (like in the word (day).

You may have ALSO noticed I used tennotyper for this. While this is an INCREDIBLE tool that is super awesome, it’s only PART of the equation. It seems to have gotten better in the past few years, but until recently it was a big reason why I cringed a little when people posted something ‘translated’ on tennotyper. Before whatever it was they did to improve the translations, people would spell stuff out in plain English and not the ‘Romaji’ version of Orokin, and it would end up being very wrong.

Now, COULD you put in “Paepuhr/Payepur” and get something legible? Could you even put in just “Paper”?

Absolutely! And here's the important bit: all three of them give you a different result. Are they correct? Possibly. Due to the fact that Orokin isn’t a REAL language, and words will differ according to how different people pronounce them, you may end up with various spellings. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, all three of these COULD be correct.. but only one of them will read right according to however DE writes it.

So, let’s put a phrase into tennotyper that we know has a translation in game. Something we KNOW the 'correct' spelling of, “Honorable Death”,

Versus, how it’s written in game:

You can see in this example, DE emphasizes different vowel sounds. The one from tennotyper literally translates to “H aw n aw r aa b l d ea th” where the in game one reads “H aw n oo r aa b l d ea th”.

So at the end of the day, typically the translation that’s consistently 'correct' with what you would find in game, ends up being the one that accentuates certain vowel sounds to make it obvious what the word is supposed to be. Hence why I wrote “Paper” as “Payepuhr” originally.

Hope you guys enjoyed this silly little TEDTalk on the Orokin language, and I hope it helps you make more accurate Orokin translations!