Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[DS]

Due to a project I've recently been working on, I've run into the question: does the dwarves' language in DF use letters (as in the Latin alphabet) or runes (similar to old Norse)?

I've searched the forums, and either this hasn't been brought up before, or my search-fu is weak. Either way, it is an interesting concept to consider. In game, the dwarven language is represented with Roman letters, but the representation of dwarves themselves as smiley faces is obviously symbolical. Thus, the lettering for the language may only be representative itself.

Thoughts?

[G-Flex]

Er, I don't think the dwarven writing system has ever been examined at all.

Also, you're drawing a false dichotomy. Runes were letters. "Rune" doesn't mean anything special, it just refers to the letters used in those alphabets, although in their early history they may have been used more for magical/ritualistic inscription than mundane writing.

So yeah. Dwarves might use letters, might use runes (which are the same thing except referring to specific languages), or might use one of any number of other writing systems. It's not apparent in-game and I'm not sure Toady's said anything about it before.

[DS]

Well, seeing how I was referring to runes specifically in the context of a Norse lettering system, I wasn't drawing any real dichotomy there at all, especially since it was in contrast to an alternate Latin alphabet. I'm aware of the historical usage of runes, which is why I've brought up the topic. I didn't mean it in any magical/ritualistic context at all.

But it seems as if Toady One hasn't mentioned it, and it's a fairly insignificant issue, relative to anything else. I was merely wondering if someone else had any opinion on the matter.

[hermes]

Good question...

Tolkien used dwarven runes in two different ways.  In The Hobbit, the runic words were transliterations from English, great for kids and big kids like me because it's a fun deciphering game to find out what is written, and it isn't too hard.

But I'm checking the back of The Return of the King now, and he lays out a table of 60 runes that have dwarvish sounding phonemes (or punctuation).  He also describes the regional variations of those characters.  Oh my.

Obviously, if it were the former then the characters could be simply substituted.  But since the names in DF seem to be drawn from linguistic elements specific to each culture, I'd guess that the latter system seems more applicable.

Alas, despite these ramblings I cannot answer your question.  Apologies!

[Kogut]

IMHO they use angular shaped letters, as most/all alphabets used for carving in wood or stone.

[Kilroy the Grand]

IMHO they use angular shaped letters, as most/all alphabets used for carving in wood or stone.

This, I picture then being straight lines, and geometric shapes.

[612DwarfAvenue]

IMHO they use angular shaped letters, as most/all alphabets used for carving in wood or stone.

This, I picture then being straight lines, and geometric shapes.

I'd imagine they use Nordic Runes.

[G-Flex]

Something of that sort would be appropriate (for carving in stone and all), yeah. However, that only gives us a vague idea of the shapes of the glyphs they use, not how they're used or what they represent. For instance, is it an alphabet, or a syllabary, or something else?

Judging by the lack of repetitious structure, I'd say it's probably an alphabet.

[Urist McDagger]

Aren't the engravings basically ideograms?

[Wayward Device]

Aren't the engravings basically ideograms?

This, although you could also fairly call them pictograms. As part of immersing myself when I play, I like to look for messages in sequences of engravings and so forth. On of the best ones I've had recently was after the death of a miner. I make a habit of putting up slabs for retards who died stupidly  at the place of their death, as an example. The miner had managed to obsionize himself when digging my new cavern lake canal (I obsidionized the lake, let the magma evaporate and dug it out, now idea how this he managed it, the magma was gone). Just next to where this happened there were two unmined black opal clusters with a space between them. I ordered the slab built in the gap and the gems smoothed and engraved. The result was an image of a shield and of a dwarven fool, which I read as "Protect us from fools like this one". 

[G-Flex]

Aren't the engravings basically ideograms?

The in-game engravings aren't ideograms, I don't think, or pictograms, just outright images of a scene. Dwarven writing would be something else entirely.

[Cruxador]

Dwarves don't write yet. When they do, Toady will make them a runic script, but until then, there's no right answer to this.

[DS]

Hey, thanks for the input everyone. It's certainly and odd topic, and completely irrelevant as far as the game is currently concerned.

It occurred to me yesterday that since the dwarven language is made of words or fragments which all have a specific meaning, heiroglyphs could be possible. For example, the name of a dwarf "Urist Mountaintheater" would be engraved as a dagger, a mountain, and a theater. Then again, there's absolutely no basis for heiroglyphs in DF at all, but it's something interesting to think about.

[rhesusmacabre]

Sort of relevant, somebody created a 'runic' tileset a while back:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=2319

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've no idea how realistic it is though.

[Kogut]

It is hard to tell what "realistic" means in this context.