Nerglish

Speak murloc.

What you type goes out as Nerglish gurgle. Anyone else running the addon reads it back in plain English. Everyone else just sees a murloc talking.

you type      hello friend, need a summon to Winterspring
goes out      mrglez mmmrrglllmz mgllnz mrglgrrz rurmglz shmurglegulruk...
they see      a murloc
addon sees    hello friend need a summon to Winterspring

There is no hidden payload and no addon communication channel - the gurgle itself is the message. That is what makes it work everywhere: say, yell, party, raid, guild, whispers, even a numbered channel. Your friend only needs the addon, not a group, a guild, or anything else.

Commands

Minimap button: left-click settings, right-click on/off, drag to move.

While it is on, the chat box wears a NERGLISH marker, and reads nerglish off here in a channel you have switched off - so you always know which one is about to happen.

What it will not touch

• Anything sent by another addon. Only text sitting in the chat box when you press Enter is translated, so boss warnings, raid announcements and automated whispers go out exactly as they always did.
• Lines containing an item, spell or quest link - the cipher would destroy the link, so the line goes out as typed and the addon tells you.
• Slash commands. /dance, /cast, macros - untouched.
• Text that is already Nerglish, so pasting gurgle back never double-encodes it.

Every channel is on out of the box, and each one can be switched off in /nerg. Two worth a thought: whispers are unreadable to anyone without the addon, and numbered channels (General, Trade) are a good way to collect reports.

How it works

A message becomes a list of units joined by z. A unit is either a word from the 1486-entry Nerglish lexicon (mrgle = "hi"), or - for a word the lexicon does not know - a cipher block that spells it out letter by letter between two shmurgle markers, with gul marking a capital. Nothing is ever lost: names, numbers and made-up words all survive the round trip.

Nerglish runs about 2.8x longer than the English it replaces, and chat lines cap at 255 characters, so long messages are split on unit boundaries. Each line decodes on its own, so a long sentence simply arrives as consecutive lines.

Incoming lines are only decoded when they carry a structural marker that ordinary English does not, so normal chat is never mangled.

Install

Drop the Nerglish folder into World of Warcraft\_classic_era_\Interface\AddOns\ and restart the client. Everyone you want to talk to needs it too - it is a shared cipher, not a broadcast.

Notes

• No third-party libraries. Plain Lua, written from scratch, every line readable.
• Classic Era 1.15.9 (interface 11509).

Dedicated to the greatest murloc I know: Don Froggo.