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[Dame de la Licorne]

Now, I realize that this is a long way in the future, but I've been thinking about it and decided to throw out the idea and see what people thought.  So my idea is as follows:

Currently all of the dwarfish words are in a list and some of them are labeled as verbs, some as nouns, but most don't have any labels at all.  Now, in an attempt to make the coding and language generation somewhat easier and more logical, I was thinking that maybe every word in the language should have an extra tag labeling it as a noun/verb/adjective/preposition/adverb/etc.  Each word would then have a series of endings/prefixes that would indicate tenses and number (single vs. plural), as well as any other relevant parts of speech.  Words like "the" and "a" etc., which in English (and those European languages that I'm familiar with) are included with nouns (among others), would then be implied rather than overtly stated.  Included in the code would be example declensions (if appropriate for nouns) and conjugations (for the verbs), and if there were more than one family of each, the tag could read: [VERB_1], [VERB_2], etc.

This would have the advantage of following logical rules, which would make it (I think) easy to code, but it may end up more confusing to learn.  It would also make each language present more individual.

I hope I explained that clearly enough.  Thoughts?

[praguepride]

Remember that like any language, a 100% accurate translation is impossible. You lose a lot of grammar in the translation (look at literally subbed anime, and laugh!).

[Footkerchief]

There is in fact already some support for specifying parts of speech -- check out language_words.txt in the raws.  Currently it's only used for English phrases and English translations of phrases, but the same format would presumably be used for other languages as well.  Of course, it's probably just a placeholder that will get blown away by the following:

# Core97, IMPROVED PHRASE STORAGE, (Future): The current system of storing names is not very extendable, so it needs to be altered to support later changes.
# Core98, BASIC GRAMMAR, (Future): The abstract phrases can be realized by each of the in-game languages in vastly different ways, and a framework for this needs to be realized in the raw files. Requires Core97.

[Dame de la Licorne]

Remember that like any language, a 100% accurate translation is impossible. You lose a lot of grammar in the translation (look at literally subbed anime, and laugh!).

Yes, I realize this and I'm trying to not directly translate, if it can be avoided, but rather make the DF languages logical and learnable in their own right.

There is in fact already some support for specifying parts of speech -- check out language_words.txt in the raws.  Currently it's only used for English phrases and English translations of phrases, but the same format would presumably be used for other languages as well.  Of course, it's probably just a placeholder that will get blown away by the following:

# Core97, IMPROVED PHRASE STORAGE, (Future): The current system of storing names is not very extendable, so it needs to be altered to support later changes.
# Core98, BASIC GRAMMAR, (Future): The abstract phrases can be realized by each of the in-game languages in vastly different ways, and a framework for this needs to be realized in the raw files. Requires Core97.

These dev notes actually caused me to begin thinking about how they might come about.  I looked through the raws, and the only labels that are currently implemented (and not consistently, at that) are [(insert word here)_VERB] or [(insert word here)_NOUN].  These labels are only used for some words that are both (which one depends on the sentence), and not used at all for the many other words.  I was trying to come up with some idea to make the raws more consistent and actual language generation easier. 

[bjlong]

While this is kinda nitpicky, I would like to see the language raws opened up to be able to "model" non-Romance languages. What I mean, is that we should be able to come up with a extremely rudimentary understanding of English, a (mostly) isolating, SVO language, and Choctaw, an agglutinative, OSV language. We should also be able to have some sort of tag about main features of a language, for instance, making all adjectives verbs. (For example, "The car is being redded" would be a literal translation of "the red car" in some languages.)

Just some things to think about.