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[Jeoshua]

We deffinitely do need Articles in the language.  As well, it would be nice to have a separate section for "place names".

-ton: om
-ville : im
-fort : os
-dale : den

So you would have names like Uristom and Rakostden

I still say this all should be found in the raws.  Actually as part of a project I am thinking about incorporating those place names as well.  It can be done with Symbols and having entities select the proper symbols for places, and carefully crafting the "words" to appear at the end of a compound every time.

[Starver]

For place-names, exchanges of territories during worldgen make me want that to be far more complicated.  "-ton" and "-ville" and "-borough/-burgh" and "-by" and all kinds of other suffixes got used by various different cultures to dominate various parts of British territory, at various times (and I know the same applies to everywhere else in the world, possibly with the exception of Antartica ), and sometimes it's a brand-new name, but often it's either a corruption or addition to the name the incomers picked up from the remnants of the old natives, or perhaps the peskily still-resisting ones that they were still 'taking over from' (militarily or culturally).

By "addition", I'm talking of the like of Pendle Hill. "Pen" being "hill".  As is "Dol", more or less, which made the local name of "Pendle" mean "hill hill".  But again the reference to the hill is forgotten/ignored And so "Pendle Hill" is "hill hill hill".  And of course "Torpenhow Hill" is more famous as being "hill hill hill hill", but there's doubt about this...

But, certainly, any "River Avon" is actually "River River".  Or similar.  And in fact most rivers, at least here in the UK are "River River", or "River Water" in some manner, and I know that "the Mississippi River" is "big river river".  (Another colonial repetition is "The La Brea Tar Pits" which, IIRC, if you make the Spanish bits English means "The the tar tar pits.")


For a change by corruption, there are many examples I could give you.  But the one I always like explaining is Barmouth, a locale on the coast of Wales.  The Welsh name is Abermaw.  "Aber=>Bar, Maw=>Mouth", right?  Well, no.  "Aber-" is "The mouth of-" bit, and it is the "River(/Avon) Mawddach"[1] that is flowing out, not any river by the name of anything like "Bar".  (I'll let you investigate for yourself the various possible origins of the name "Mawddach"...  But I'd also consider looking up system of mutations that Welsh uses, for even more fun... )


[1] Pron. "Mautha(hk)", roughly.  With a hard 'th' and a similar ending to the Scottish 'loch' that I can never explain in text only to anyone not already familiar with it, but I'm giving it another go anyway!

[soiducked]

I would love to see DF be given the ability to act as a conlang generator. I really believe that as a history generator, it has the potential for this.

Start with each race having a set of anatomically possible phones, and then generate random phonemic inventories for each civ as it starts. Have it randomly decide on certain linguistic features (phonotactics, word order, head positioning, affixing, agglutination, etc, etc - perhaps it could get stats on these from The World Atlas of Language Structures?), generate some arbitrary function words and morphemes, and from there on just have it create new morphemes (and words from those morphemes) for concepts as the civ first interacts with them. Civs interacting with other civs (trade, war, etc) would have a chance to get loanwords from that civ, especially for new concepts introduced - and those loanwords could be garbled into the phonology of the acquiring language. There could even be systematic phonetic drift added in each generation to make the language change over time - maybe throw in some possibility for reanalysis of word morphology, or even syntactic changes - that way different colonies would develop different dialects, and eventually possibly whole new languages.

As a linguist, it would add a whole new dimension of entertainment to the game for me. The big problem I see with generating a plausible conlang would be in generating conceptual metaphors and idioms. There might be a way to do it  - things with similar properties in their RAWs are more likely to generate conceptual links?? names of notable historical figures get associated with their legends? - but I'm not certain what would be a good way to go about it.

[Jeoshua]

I just worry that any kind of procedural generation of a language would lead to languages that are not quite realistic enough to be believed.  And if the system were robust enough that it really could generate something you could speak, understand how it works, see how it evolved, has it's own unique phrases and what not.... how complex do you think that code would be?  How involved, and how much time, would Toady have to devote to making the language system that involved.

Plus, it would be a language generator designed by a mathemetician, not a linguist

The alternative to all this is actually making a language somehow and having it be predefined.  That actually adds to the "nerd-value" because we could actually sit here on the forums and talk in Dwarven a little bit.  "Actual" Dwarven.  Not some kind of randomly generated thing.

As a parallel, if I tell you "Hey you know that Dragon in the Volcanic Deserts?  He's nasty isn't he?"

You will not know what I'm talking about, since it's from the latest Adventurer game I played.  I wouldn't want language to be the same way.

"Why do you keep calling your Dwarves Urist" is not a question I want to hear from anyone."

[Reudh]

While procedurally generated language is a good idea, in my mind it consumes too much time for not enough return.

[Jeoshua]

Let me put my previous statement another way:

If Toady makes a random language generator, it will likely be more easy to say:

"Kill elf entity if, and only if, sum of militia power greater than sum of elf militia power."

than it will be to say:

"Hey buddy! Wanna go get a drink with me?"

[Niyazov]

We deffinitely do need Articles in the language.  As well, it would be nice to have a separate section for "place names".

-ton: om
-ville : im
-fort : os
-dale : den

So you would have names like Uristom and Rakostden

I still say this all should be found in the raws.  Actually as part of a project I am thinking about incorporating those place names as well.  It can be done with Symbols and having entities select the proper symbols for places, and carefully crafting the "words" to appear at the end of a compound every time.

This is a good idea. I imagine that when naming their settlements, the subterranean-inclined dwarves would be likely to pay less attention to features like dales, brooks, meadows and springs; and more attention to mineral seams, mountain peaks, caves, and magma vents.