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[Uristsonsonson]

I started screwing with the language RAWs about December or so I think. A lot of stuff got in the way, then my laptop keeled over, but now I think I'm in a good place to restart and finish it. Basically the idea is to give words real parts of speech, better define which forms they can take, and possibly add a pale imitation of grammar. For instance, Armoredpicks the Ancientaxe would be something like Tosadtekkudi ha-Zustashlibash, with tosad being the participle of tosid, tekkudi being the plural of tekkud, ha-Zushtash being the definite singular of ancient, and libash being axe. I know i couldn't do much with it right now, and the difference would be purely cosmetic, but it still seems like something worth doing before the new version comes out. Would anyone really be interested in something like that though? Right now I'm just setting the raws up for the initial second attempt. (The original files were on the pc that suddenly died.)

Also, I'm kind of thinking of adding Kalderashitska as an alternate language. It's the... most international I guess is how you'd describe it form of the "Gypsy" (Vlax Romani) language. That would probably take the most work, just from trying to fit an inflected language with somewhat uncommon features into DF's hardcoded, half-finished grammar system. Especially as a non-native speaker. I'm up to the challenge if it'd be worth the effort to enough peeps though.

[darkflagrance]

From what I understand of the language raws, the actual words are hardcoded into dwarf fortress as tokens which correspond to the language. I can't see any tokens that would differentiate the range of plurals you would need to accomplish this.

[Uristsonsonson]

Nope. They're stored as RAWs. I'm away from my lappy at the moment, but I believe the one with the archetypal words is called language_system or something like it. The race-specific ones just provide translations for those archetypal words. By default, the former has a word, then forms for different parts of speech under it. My plan is to cut each into separate forms based on part of speech. For example, axe and axes would technically be two different words. Axe would only be singular. Axes only plural. Both would be given different words in the racial language RAWs. It sounds a lot more complex than it would really be, but the end result would be going to the fort naming screen and being able to choose between, say, libash for axe and labish for axes. I've played around enough with it to know it more or less works. There just isn't enough - or a flexible enough - code yet to support anything more complicated than part of speech, singular or plural, nominative or possessive, and definite-ness. It couldn't handle any other cases, real or differentiated grammar, or much anything else.

[Nopenope]

What if the dwarven language didn't actually have plural forms? It strikes me that the dwarven language is maybe intended to be extremely straightforward and barebones so as to reflect the straightforwardness of the dwarven mind. And it's still possible to compose songs in dwarvish after all.