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[leoboiko]

Has Toady ever made any official comment on how the symbols of the languages are supposed to be pronounced? Especially the vowels with diacritics?

I'd like to know if there's a standard version, but here's some speculation:

I assume the consonants are probably pronounced as in English, given the language of the game. I also assume that the orthographies for the in-game languages are transcribed in the same standard manner (that is, the pronunciation doesn't change between languages), as if it was a sort of international phonetic alphabet.  The Human sound <Ñ> would presumably be /ɲ/ as in Spanish; but all the rest isn't obvious to me.  Does Elven <Ç> represents a /ts/ (its original use), a /tʃ/ (as in Albanian, Turkmen etc.) or just an /s/ even before /i,e/ (as in French, Portuguese etc.?)

What about Elven <Y>, <Ÿ>; how are they distinct from <I>, <Ï>? Are they just notations for the gliding version of the same quality, as in English (note that only Elven and Human have <W>), or are they rounded, as in its original use or in Scandinavian languages, etc.?

And my most burning doubt: what about all the dwarven diacritics? Are they distinction in vowel quality, in tone, in vocal register, all of those, none of them? Which ones, exactly? Dwarvish has all of ◌̀◌́◌̂ for AEIOU: ◌̈ for AEIO; and ◌̊ for A, plus non-diacritic versions of all of them.  The limited use of ◌̊ makes me think that it's maybe a different category than others (perhaps /aː/ → /ɔ/ ablaut as in Swedish etc.; though since DF lacks both morphology and historical developments, the notion of 'ablaut' seems untenable).  Elves use only ◌̀◌́ and Ÿ; goblins, by contrast, ◌̈◌̂ but no Ÿ (but with Å); humans have only Á.  Roughly, ◌̈◌̂Å are Goblin-Dwarvish, while ◌̀◌́ are Human-Elven-Dwarvish, and YŸ is an exclusive Elvinism.  Perhaps ◌̀◌́ are tones and ◌̈◌̂ ablauts or registers, and dwarves the only species to use both?




(And yes, I realize the out-of-universe answer is likely "he just went through the characters available in Codepage 437 and assigned subsets of them randomly to each species"; but that ain't how we roll.)

[MrLurkety]

I, honestly, just pronounce the special characters like their normal counterparts: For me, Ñ would be spoken as N.

[Nolimit]

I also pronounce most of the special characters the same way as their counterparts, but with some exceptions. Ї, for example, in Ukrainian (my first language) pronounced as [yi] (Їжак - [yizhak], поїзд - [poyizd]) where [y] sounds as in 'yes'. Sometimes, I also apply the same rules to other similar characters: Ё, for example, in russian pronounced as [yo] or as [ o] with softening of previous consonant (Ёлка - [yolka], актёр - [akt'or]). There are separate characters in Ukrainian and Russian for [ya] - Я, [yu] - Ю, [ye] - Е(russian)/Є(ukrainian) therefore characters like Å Á I just read as A same with O-like characters. And Ç I read as [ts] mostly because it looks similar to Ц in some way and Ц is pronounced as [ts]. Bear in mind that I'm not a linguist, even my knowledge of English isn't perfect, but I wanted to share my view from the perspective of other languages.