Magic: The Gathering has a secret language that few can translate

Complex as The Gathering: Magic and the Gathering is — with all its various and ever-changing keywords, strategies, products, storylines, even entire gameplay formats — would you believe it also has its own secret language?

Phyrexian appeared for the first time in 2010. It’s a language spoken in-fiction by a loathsome species of cybernetic monsters on the plane of Phyrexia. It is still not fully explained by Publisher Wizards of the Coast. For more than 12 years, an amateur group has worked tirelessly to translate the text, translating card after card, with just a few lines added occasionally with new cards. What they’ve discovered is a tongue that’s simultaneously alien and also very much a part of our world.

Fernando Franco Félix, a science advisor for PBS’ Space Time, is perhaps the foremost expert in Phyrexian outside of Wizards. A polyglot — that is, a master of multiple languages, in this case including English, Spanish, and Esperanto — he’s been fascinated with Phyrexian for years now, and maintains a small but dedicated following on YouTube.

“I’ve always liked languages,” Félix told Polygon from his home in Aguascalientes, Mexico. “What I always say is that a language is like an art gallery, and every aspect of the language is like an art piece. Languages are the most collaborative piece of art ever created in human history. You have millions of people and, without even realizing it, they are creating this system, which is beautiful.”

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Of course, Phyrexian wasn’t created over thousands of years across multiple cultures. It’s a constructed language, also called a conlang. That makes it similar to the languages found in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books, or modern conlangs like Star Trek’s Klingon and Game of Thrones’ Dothraki and Valyrian. You can find online documents that teach how to talk like an elf, or Klingon. Phyrexian is a different story.

“They explained that it was a real language [and] that they hired linguists to create this language,” Félix said, “but they have never explained how it works. And so I saw that as a challenge.”

As it turns out, Félix was more than up to the challenge. Felix and his collaborators created a Phyrexian Dictionary. It was his first attempt to translate the word “Phyrexian” in January. MagicBefore the English-language card version was available to the public, a card in Phyrexian was created.

What is the secret? Félix says it’s largely a guessing game.

“You try to make good guesses,” Félix said. “You try to see if your guesses hold up. If they can’t hold up, you try to come up with something else. If they do hold up, you probably got it right and you can continue moving on.”

Félix explained that while Phyrexian is a unique construction, it derives many of its quirks from existing languages. It uses consonantal roots, similar to Hebrew and Arabic, in order to make a variety of word stems that are easily identifiable. But Félix thinks its system for conjugating verbs is clearly derived from German. The alphabet has many similarities to Hangul in Korea. The script that is used to create Phyrexian has similar features as Hindi and Sanskrit. Phyrexian has a strict set of punctuation markers, which include notations for marking tense or quotations and at the start and end of sentences. There’s even a caesura that marks the spot where a reader must pause in order to breathe, which is embedded within the grammar of Phyrexian.

But, over the 12 years fans have been able only to see Phyrexian within a very limited context: the rules printed on collectible cards. Sometimes there’s a bit of flavor text at the bottom of those cards, a quote or a pithy epithet presented with limited context. Félix and his community are hungry for more. These are fragments from Phyrexian Literature.

“My dream is that one day [Wizards publishes] a very short story, less than 1,000 words, but it’s all written in Phyrexian,” Félix said. “Then they just let us go to town with it. I’m pretty sure we could decipher it.”

Is it possible to actually speak Phyrexian This may require more time to fully understand. Phyrexians, who are also part machine, have elements in their language that native speakers must use to highlight.

“We have very few examples of spoken Phyrexian,” Félix said, “and the ones we have are very distorted because they are supposed to be spoken by these monsters, and they’re very hard to understand.”