Wenja Language: gwayfa

Su shayar!  Shaja hafchu kraybam. Ha “Survival Mode” Far Cry Primal-su chamshmas (taw-tawsam), aysh paramna warshtas warha walham: gwayfa.

Good morning!  Today I will write quickly.  In order to prepare for “Survival Mode” in Far Cry Primal (I’m super happy about this), I would like to speak about an important word: gwayfa ‘to live, survive’.

Of course, this was a very important word in Oros. It was for the Wenja, who simply want to survive in a world that brings not only disease (swargati) and predators (gwaryatar), but also outsiders (akistar) capturing them for either food (hatra) or to become slaves (kwal). It was also an important word for the Udam, whose debilitating “skull-fire” (kapalpur) brings their tribe near extinction.

As with nearly all of the words discussed so far, gwayfa has a rich life in the Indo-European languages.  In PIE it was *gʷeih₃- ‘live’,  a word continued by Latin vivus ‘alive’ (English viv-acious, viv-ify, etc.), Greek bios (English bio-logy, bio-dome), Sanskrit jivaḥ, and believe it or not English quick, whose original meaning ‘alive’ you can see in the fixed expression the quick and the dead. The word for ‘alive’ in Wenja is gwifwa.