More importantly, it's not so simple to learn an entirely new language spoken by people who are largely hostile toward your kind.
To be fair, humans aren't that hostile towards Qunari. They may be suspicious and slightly racist towards them, but it's nowhere near as bad as with elves. I'd place Qunari squarely between elves and dwarves in terms of how much aggression they face from humans... obviously Tevinter doesn't count since they're actively at war with them...
To be fair, humans aren't that hostile towards Qunari. They may be suspicious and slightly racist towards them, but it's nowhere near as bad as with elves. I'd place Qunari squarely between elves and dwarves in terms of how much aggression they face from humans... obviously Tevinter doesn't count since they're actively at war with them...
Have you ever seen qunari employed by humans as anything other than mercenaries? There is no doubt in my mind that common qunari would not be able to coexist peacefully with humans - the only reason that the Arishok was tolerated in Kirkwall was because he was powerful, politically speaking, and forcing him out would almost certainly be interpreted as an act of war. From a survival perspective, it would make far more sense for any Tal-Vashoth seeking a way out of the Qun to band together and form their own insular community.
I agree there is basically no reason to pick Qunari except that they are taller than humans and have horns...
It would have been better to just leave the option out I mean the Qunari Inquisitor is basically human
no deep voice, no knowledge of Qunalt, no idea about the Qun really like an outsider
As a fan of the Qunari (I find them very interesting especially in DA:II) this is a major disappointment for me
Well atleast the Elf fans get their Dalish Elf
No idea why the can play as extreme guys and not us
Even if QunQuizzy was not raised in a Vashoth community or at least by qunari parents, the experience will still not be the same as playing a human. The devs have said as much; QunQuizzies will face the most prejudice, and there are certain quest options you cannot pick as a qunari.
In fact, I plan on playing a hornless qunari. I like playing races and characters that are "not quite human".
I also would have preferred to play a city elf instead of a Dalish.
The demo got me thinking... Does he (or she) know how to speak his native language? If he doesn't have at least a basic understanding of it... Disappointment is putting it mildly. My South American parents insisted that I spoke Portuguese and Spanish at home while growing up. And while the Inquisitor and his parents are different in that they have essentially left that culture behind; it'd be hard to imagine them not speaking the language. This is also the first/best opportunity for us lore buffs to get a our own meta-understanding of Qunlat. Hopefully it wasn't squandered.
Not really, deep voices arent a product of communities, its a physical trait. Being 7ft usually guarantees a deep voice, plus it just feels right, in no way would i take a light pitched qunari seriously when he started to become angry
Unless the qunari Inquisitor's family knew Qunlat (which remains to be seen), I doubt that he or she will know how to speak it.
What do you consider a deep voice? The English voice for the DAI discover whatever trailer is a VO for the male Inquisitor and to me his voice sounds deep. So did Hawke's voice. Just what is "deep" for you?
Deeper than those. To me they dont fit a qunari, feel free to disagree but the topic is clearly subjective so i dont see where this is going
Maybe... It's not like I have first hand knowledge of this, so my perspective is admittedly limited. I guess I was just looking at it as a total rejection of the Qun, which includes the parents' ancestral tongue.... but maybe it's not so simple to just let everything go because you disagree with certain aspects of your culture.
It probably also depends on whether there are ex-Qunari enclaves where they can still communicate effectively in Qunlat. So far 100% of the ex-Qunari we've seen have been male, all except one of them mercenaries or bandits. Do ex-Qunari tend to live all together in cities? Do they live in individual families? Do they even FORM families? (They don't have family units where they come from, after all, the concept might seem laughable to them.) For all we know the Qunari inquisitor was raised in what we would consider an orphanage, with child-raising "workers" who were not biologically related to them doing all the childcare tasks. They might have been booted out the door when they were 12 to fend for themselves--or even younger. Even kids that are raised with full language immersion tend to lose it if they don't practice it as an adult, and if they spend their lives surrounded by non-qunari at their various workplaces, then yes, they probably don't speak Qunlat.
So, there are a lot of factors in play there. I'm betting no Qunlat simply because we haven't seen even the slightest indication that ex-Qunari are inclined to stick together and have families, which is the major pre-requisite for generational language transmission. Show me an ex-Qunari family living in an entire enclave of Qunlat-speaking ex-Qunari and I might change my mind.
Have you ever seen qunari employed by humans as anything other than mercenaries? There is no doubt in my mind that common qunari would not be able to coexist peacefully with humans - the only reason that the Arishok was tolerated in Kirkwall was because he was powerful, politically speaking, and forcing him out would almost certainly be interpreted as an act of war. From a survival perspective, it would make far more sense for any Tal-Vashoth seeking a way out of the Qun to band together and form their own insular community.
Armaas, the Tal-Vashoth merchant who you can hire in Awakening.
I'd disagree that people wouldn't be able to co-exist with common Qunari, as we never get any indication that anyone has a problem with you bringing Armaas back to the Vigil (and if they did, I'd suspect it'd be more because he used to work for the Architect, rather than because he's Qunari).
And while not strictly common Qunari, I'd argue that having the former Tal-Vashoth Maraas being able to find work as a mercenary, as well as Taarbas, an actual follower of a Qun, be able to freely wander around Kirkwall post-Qunari invasion and not be immediately lynched implies that most people in Thedas only really have a problem with Qunari when they are around en-masse, but are able to tolerate individual Qunari more easily.
In regards to Qunlat, I have always thought that it might have been a Conlang created by early Qunari as an easy to learn language for themselves and those they brought into the Qun. Since they had already cast of the shackles of their former society, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine that they might have gone about creating a new language for this new era.
And having a fixed, simple language would certaintly more efficient to learn than try and teach someone an ancient tongue with lots of complicated grammar and rules that can vary, as well as eliminating the possibility that it could end up fracturing into a million different dialects, pidgins and creoles like English for example. Qunlat in Region A would be the same as the Qunlat you'd find spoken in Region B and C, rather than say, the changes in words, spelling, pronounciation and unique quirks native to different regions you'd find in UK English, US English and Jamaican English, just to pick at random.
Personally, I hope that a Qunquisitor will be at least be proficient at swearing in Qunlat, since that's the easiest and most believable part of the language for a Vashoth to learn. Who wouldn't want to tell followers of the Qun to go screw themselves in their own language?
Doubtful, it's assumed the Qunari Inquisitor has never been a part of the Qunari themselves since birth, therefore the better description would be 'Kossith' rather than Qunari.
Doubtful, it's assumed the Qunari Inquisitor has never been a part of the Qunari themselves since birth, therefore the better description would be 'Kossith' rather than Qunari.
They've already confirmed that you're a Vashoth and were never a follower of Qun.
(You'd only be "Kossith", if you were over a thousand years old)
Armaas, the Tal-Vashoth merchant who you can hire in Awakening.
I'd disagree that people wouldn't be able to co-exist with common Qunari, as we never get any indication that anyone has a problem with you bringing Armaas back to the Vigil (and if they did, I'd suspect it'd be more because he used to work for the Architect, rather than because he's Qunari).
And while not strictly common Qunari, I'd argue that having the former Tal-Vashoth Maraas being able to find work as a mercenary, as well as Taarbas, an actual follower of a Qun, be able to freely wander around Kirkwall post-Qunari invasion and not be immediately lynched implies that most people in Thedas only really have a problem with Qunari when they are around en-masse, but are able to tolerate individual Qunari more easily.
I haven't played Awakening (though I really should...), so I'm not aware of who you're talking about. Either way, you may be right.
Another alternative that I have yet to mention, however, is the possibility of the Chantry teaching any repenting Tal-Vashoth the common tongue for conversion purposes. It's possible that the qunquisitor will have an Andrastian upbringing if this is the route their parents took.
therefore the better description would be 'Kossith' rather than Qunari.
"Kossith" is outdated and archaic. A good distinction between the religion and the race is that the former is capitalized,while the latter is not (i. e. Qunari religion vs. a qunari).
I haven't played Awakening (though I really should...), so I'm not aware of who you're talking about. Either way, you may be right.
Another alternative that I have yet to mention, however, is the possibility of the Chantry teaching any repenting Tal-Vashoth the common tongue for conversion purposes. It's possible that the qunquisitor will have an Andrastian upbringing if this is the route their parents took.
Armaas isn't really a major character, he's basically just a Qunari merchant you discover working for the Architect in exchange for not be experimented on or tainted, who the Warden can offer a better job (with less risk) bringing his trade to Vigil's Keep. He's only really notable as one of the few non-hostile Tal-Vashoth and the only one we've seen so far that became a merchant rather than a merc.
I can see the Qunquisitor as being exposed to Andrastian culture even if they weren't brought up to follow it, simply by virtue of it being the dominant religion in most of Thedas. A good example of this kind of cross-cultural influence at play is Varric, who was brought up in Kirkwall as a Surface Dwarf, while the rest of his family were born in Orzammar. As a result, he's ended up slightly polytheistic and appears to believe in both the Paragons and Ancestors, in addition to Andraste and the Maker.
And having a fixed, simple language would certaintly more efficient to learn than try and teach someone an ancient tongue with lots of complicated grammar and rules that can vary, as well as eliminating the possibility that it could end up fracturing into a million different dialects, pidgins and creoles like English for example. Qunlat in Region A would be the same as the Qunlat you'd find spoken in Region B and C, rather than say, the changes in words, spelling, pronounciation and unique quirks native to different regions you'd find in UK English, US English and Jamaican English, just to pick at random.
Efforts have been made to rationalize languages like this, and they've all been enormously unpopular and ultimately useless. Anyone here speak Esperanto?
Natural languages are as messy as they are for a reason, namely that nobody can sit down and consciously create a language that's going to have rules for all possible usage cases and constructions. Discussing certain vital concepts is going to require lengthy phrases. The brain strives always toward unit-efficiency with language because there's only so much stuff you can keep in your conscious mind at once. So, those phrases get pared down, new terms are substituted in, new constructs arise, and boom, you've got a messy pile of exceptions and weird usages glued to your "rational" language.
And even if you do succeed in keeping on top of this tendency with a rigid cultural taboo against "incorrect" speech and a huge body of formal communication etiquette, you've now severely handicapped your population when it comes time to deal with foreigners and foreign languages. Think learning another language is hard when you already have a deep fluency in a natural language of your own with all its mess and subtlety and idiom? Try learning a natural language when your own sole experience is with a strictly regimented "rational" system.
No wonder the Qunari supposedly use metaphorical speech most of the time. Actually communicating an idea any other way is probably a near-impossibility. The Arishok indeed said: "I am no more equipped to explain than you are to understand." Well, yeah. Because their very language is probably structured in a way that makes *explanation* of concepts virtually impossible. You either know, and no explanation is necessary, or you don't, and explanation is impossible.
Efforts have been made to rationalize languages like this, and they've all been enormously unpopular and ultimately useless. Anyone here speak Esperanto?
That's true, but no-one has thus far has conquered a nation and forced the people learn Esperanto (as far as I'm aware), which is what the Qunari are known for doing when converting new regions and "educating" the bas.
That being said, I should have clarified that while Qunlat is the language of the Qunari, it might not necessarily be the one that's most spoken. It's possible that it's simply the lingua franca that's spoken between the Qunari and Viddathari, with the Qunari speaking Qunlat as their native tongue, but the Viddethari probably having it as a second language and still use their native language between themselves.
As long as those under the Qun can understand orders and instructions in Qunlat, I don't see why the Qunari would necessarily object to people using a different language in an everyday context.
After all, the Qunari are known for their efficiency and as you pointed out, it'd be a colossal undertaking to replace a language with an entirely new one and one that would most likely end in failure, which is why Esperanto has never really taken off. But teaching them Qunlat as a secondary language that everyone can understand and easily facilitate communication between is far more easier and in a few generations, you'll probably end up with many non-native people speaking it as a first language.
We've already seen something similar within the lore, as the Common Tongue originally started out as the Dwarven Trade Language which they used when dealing with Humans and Elves, which ultimately ended up supplanting the Ancient Dwarven language entirely and was adopted throughout Thedas.
I'm Chinese-Malaysian and I don't speak any Chinese dialect. I suppose I am a disappointment?
Now you're confusing me...
I doubt as a Qunari Inquisitor we'll know any Qunlat, maybe a little. Leave it to the Iron Bull.
I hope that the Qunari Inquisitor can atleast use Qunlat words every once in awhile like Sten or the Arishok did when you talked to them.
I want to scream out "Parshaara" every now and then. And great people with "Shanedan".
I want to scream out "Parshaara" every now and then. And great people with "Shanedan".
If my character is going to speak a foreign language, I want it to be 100% obscenities that they could never put in the game otherwise. I'm going to be the most foul-mouthed qunari in the history of Thedas. I will summon murderous clouds of demonic energy JUST BY SPEAKING.
Wait, now I have a new theory about that whole Breach thing . . .
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