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[Nostril actor]

A necromancer visited my fort today...

[Kaelem Gaen]

Honestly I think this is incredibly interesting.  I also wish I could help more.


my vote would go with the abugida style and being able to link them together, similar to Sanskrit.   While I think Vertical style would be nice, it might be easier for people to work with as a Horizontal script.

[Supermikhail]

I think it would be the easiest and most interesting for people to do pictographs; fun to decipher and easy to participate in creation.

Just a random thought.

[Sevi]

I like the idea of only having signs for VC-syllables (äb, ug etc. ) and it would make the alphabet unique from real world alphabets.

[Sevi]

So I just calculated, if we had one glyph for all 18 consonants, plus one for every possible VC-cluster ( 15 consonants x 5 vowels ) that would be 18 + 75 = 93 glyphs
Amn't sure about the Abugida Style because I would prefer every glyph to look similiar without interruptions by little dots etc for vowels, it just wouldnt look as dwarfy imo. I like the 5x5 idea. I might try my hand at writing the lord's prayer in dwarven so we can eventually convert it into dwarven letters

I present you the first ever try (probably) at translating the Lord's Prayer into DF dwarven:

Sanreb nïmurem ög dasâl,                 Own godfather over heaven
kab kiron sanreb,                              name holy own,
osor ög zalud sanreb,                        kingdom over future own,
Nïmurem ud tinîth udos ud,                godfather will equal man will,
ög ber tinîth dasâl.                             over earth equal heaven.
Adalod, åm okzak udos,                    Sunday, bread carry man,
Sanreb arìllumil nanothimil,                 Own deepgold nevereverword,
Tinîth sanreb arìllumiludos nanothimil geth. Equal own deepgoldman nevereverword past
Nanoth becor,                                   Never tempt,
sebãr gedor ög udos ker.                            hide evil over man eye
Amen.

As you can see I invented alot of words, but it isn't really meant as a serious attempt to translate it but more an attempt to create a sort of lorem ipsum for future reference. I also noticed that the letters g and c do actually appear behind vowels, so aren't tailless. (see ög, becor...) that adds another 10 possible glyphs, totalling at 103 glyphs. (If we use that system)

[RedKing]

Nice work. I don't think we'd need glyphs for the consonants seperate from VC clusters, you'd just use a subset of clusters (ab, ac, ad, etc) and use a diacritic to denote the unvoiced vowel. That drops it back to 75, plus a handful of diacritics (one for unvoiced vowels, and a few others for vowel shifts (like ög instead of og). That's a lot, but then hiragana does it by doubling up on voiced/unvoiced consonant pairs (e.g. sa and za use the same glyph, with a small diacritic to denote za.)

Udosnol doesn't have quite as many easy pairings as Japanese, but it could be done with:
k-g
s-z
f-v
and possibly t-th and n-ng

That would compress it down to 50 glyphs, which is very close to the size of the hiragana and katakana syllabary. Katakana might not be a bad palce to look for inspiration: the glyphs are typically simple and angular.

[Sevi]

b, c, d, f, g, k, l, m, n, r, s, t, v, z, st, sh, th, ng
could be compressed to
b, c-sh, d-t, f-v, k-g, l, m, n-ng, r, s-z, st-th
which would make 55 individual VC-glyphs.
You would need one diacritic to show that the vowel is dropped,
one to show "voiced/unvoiced", about 7 diacritics to show vowel changes (úéîöü etc.)
which means all in all about 64 individual signs to learn, which isn't that bad if you compare it to for example chinese.

Tried making some glyphs: here are 55 5x5 glyphs. Since they are so blocky, I call them "Kastaril" - blockwords. Not sure if you'll like them, as most people here preferred a cursive writing style, but I thought ultimately if you want to use the system ingame it will have to be sort of blocky so you can build the glyphs with walls etc.
Btw heres the dictionary I use, very useful: http://daisyct.org/daniel/EnglishDwarfDictionary.html

[Kofthefens]

Awesome! If you get anything good, I might be able to make a program for it. Here's one I did (very quickly and crappily, backspace hardly works) for an alphabet I made up. http://www.mediafire.com/?2dmz33zzhho1fnz It's in Java.

[Sevi]

Here is an image showing my suggestion for a syllabary script system: Kastaril

And here an engraving:

[izak1399]

Awesome! If you get anything good, I might be able to make a program for it. Here's one I did (very quickly and crappily, backspace hardly works) for an alphabet I made up. http://www.mediafire.com/?2dmz33zzhho1fnz It's in Java.

That's pretty cool Kofthefens. I always appreciate some java.

This whole thread is pretty neat.

[qwertyuiopas]

That engraving seems rather hard to read. The rock appears, to me, to be too shiny.

[Skyrunner]

It looks cool! O_o

[Williham]

Here is an image showing my suggestion for a syllabary script system: Kastaril

And here an engraving:

A thousand times this. But I think dwarves might have a more cursive method of writing besides what they use for engraving.

[Skyrunner]

That engraving seems rather hard to read. The rock appears, to me, to be too shiny.

This is slightly easier to read o_O

I don't know about writing... they don't seem to ever have paper around.

[bitesh]

If we go for the abjad, or abugida, I'd like to point out that, since accents change the phoneme that is being produced, accented vowels could have their own distinct diacritic mark, rather than having accent diacritics marking vowel diacritics marking consonants, which seems too convoluted and impractical, even for dwarves.