Smarkaka, Winja sakush! Hay shayar miyi sama mashwar, ha Winjas dabu warham. Gashjas @The_DeadKiller “prashrawa” “jawpur”-kwa warshtas twita. Ubas warhamas, “prashrawa” shaja “jawpur”-kwa shayar.
Hello, Wenja friends! This morning I have some time to say a little about Wenja. Yesterday @The_DeadKiller tweeted about the words “waterfall” and “star”. We’ll speak about both, “waterfall” today and “star” tomorrow.
The Wenja word prashrawa means ‘waterfall’. You never really hear it in game (maybe one time in a side mission), but you’ll see it in big letters on the map of Oros: “Prashrawa’s Birth” and “Great Prashrawa”.
There are other words in Wenja that are related to prashrawa. The word for “river” is shrawman, “river rock” is shrawshash, “river water” is shrawadar, and lastly the word meaning “to flow, glide” is shrawa. You can see the connection of the last word with the others: the root “to flow” is within each of them.
Where does this shrawa come from? From PIE of course! More specifically, from PIE *srew- ‘to flow’. This word becomes Greek rheo ‘flow’, continued by English dia-rrhea ‘that which flows through’. The root is directly continued by English stream (= Wenja shraw-man [more or less]), with a -t- inserted in between the s and r because sream is difficult to say. Note that in Sanskrit *sreu- becomes sravati ‘flows’, and one of the words for waterfall is prasravam, literally meaning ‘flowing forward’ (a fro-stream, if you will).
My girlfriend is studying Sanskrit for her Master Degree and was very excited when I told her about the language in this game. We deeply appreciate your work and it means so much to see the PIE being used in such an immersive way.
I'll let her play the game once she finished her final presentation. 😀
Gwarshta, Madastro! I'm teaching Sanskrit at the moment here at the University of Kentucky — so much fun.