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A Destiny player spent two years decoding an alien language

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To get you ready for when Destiny 2 launches in October, you can now learn some of the language of the Fallen, a race of hostile aliens you’ll probably be shooting in the face. It’s only taken the person responsible for the translation two full years of hard work. 

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The Fallen’s dialect is guttural and raspy, but the YouTuber has discovered 87 of their words, from nouns to adverbs. All the data was collected from the first game’s House of Wolves DLC even though it’s never explicitly explained to the player.

It seems like a lot of work to create a proper alien language that nobody will ever parse, but it shows how much faith Bungie clearly put in their players. In this case, it’s paid off. I imagine it changes the context of the game quite drastically once you understand the Fallen’s utterances.

In the video above, you can see exactly how the player pieced it all together, along with some examples of sentences, with literal translations turned into proper strings of words a real intelligent being would say.

For example, “NE SHAR DI” is literally “I brave death,” which means “I am not afraid to die.” It’s really clever stuff.