Print

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

at all how

0 (0%)

to delete poll.

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 0

[Nonsequitorian]

I believe that Toady has given us the means to create the dwarven language in a simplistic form in the form of language raws. This being the case, I think that we should, as a community, create and agree upon the dwarven language and its makeup. Until I see that there is at least one person who'd at least want the community to work on such a thing, I'm going to hold back my ideas.

OK:
Poll added to this thread.

Nouns:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is a genitive and nominative, and a plural for both. This is the same as in English: Dog, Dogs, Dog's, Dogs'.

Verbs:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1s: -mi  1p: -mos
2s: -si  2p: -sos
3s: -ti  3p: -tos
These are the endings for verbs. Prefixes decide tenses. Ni/Nim is for past, Kur/Kr is for future. Nim and Kr are before vowels, because Kurabla is longer than Krabla, and Nimable is easier to say that Niabla. Kurbla and Nibla sound better than Krbla an Nimbla/ are shorter.

Just makin thing's logical. If Ni and Kur sound too ugly, we should vote on another word. Po will be a universal "more" prefix, and Be could be a universal "less" prefix.

This means that, if we assume Bolo is "to tie," and we are to do every tense in the 1s, then it will look like this:
Bolomi - I tie
Kurbolomi - I will tie
Benibolomi - I was tying (because be is less and ni is past, so "less past.")
Nibolomi - I tied
Ponibolomi - I had tied (because po is more and ni is past, so "more past.")
Kurnibolomi - I will have tied (because kur is future, ni is past, so "future past.")

Adjectives:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Added onto the end of Noun being modified.

Adverbs:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Added onto the end of Verb being modified

Pronouns:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No suggestion yet on what they are, but we need them. We need them in multiple cases if cases are used, and then genders if we do genders.

Articles:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No articles such as the or a, but there will have to be some and a negative article (probably just the word no).

Conjunctions:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And
But
Or/Nor
So
For

These are the big ones in terms of coordinating conjunctions. There are tons of others which we may need later on, but they could be amalgams of multiple words.

Either/Neither
Whether
Also
Both

These are the big correlative conjunctions. Again, we will need more than just these.

Prepositions:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is huge in terms of importance or size. There are just so many. I'll come back to this later.

Questions:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How (+ Where to and How much). This is easy enough, but ordering of sentences around it are also necessary.

Sentence Structure:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also gonna use the poll for this if we can't decide here. I think there shouldn't be any really, but I ain't in command.

[Bytyan]

How would creating the language in the raws be different from how the language currently exists?

[Nonsequitorian]

All the words in it are nouns and adjectives. As it stands, grammar consists is nonexistent.  Noun X is the same in Nominative, Genitive, and Accusative. There is no differentiation conjugation, even though the game indicates different meanings. The vocabulary in the game is relatively small. There are no subject words, nor are there any definite articles. All there are are a few nouns and a few adjectives.

The addition of verbs would mean having verbs, because there are none at all. In terms of adding it to the raws, you'd have to have multiple entries for different person and number, but I believe it is worth it.

In terms of actual game function, probably nothing would change. It would only add a larger amount of words and more variation for meanings.

[Bytyan]

I see. If grammar were to be dictated, I think it should be done in ways that are easily relatable to English. changes to sentence structure would be minor and predictable, more like the difference between English and German than English and Chinese. Also, I would want the dictionary to be standardized from player to player, and new versions to be released with new versions of the game. I'm kind of getting a feel for dwarvish, if it were generated differently from world to world and person to person I could never relate any dwarvish terms to anyone else, and I could never get the hang of understanding dwarvish in game. Under these conditions, I would be all for it.

[Nonsequitorian]

A randomly generated language would be too nonsensical, and also quite a bit harder to do than just add words.

If I were to be in control of everything, sentence structure would be more like latin. That is to say, there really is none to speak of, but it is common to see linguistic term x in place y and linguistic term a to come in place b.

Because adjectives and nouns are already squished together in names and titles, I think adjectives in dwarvish should be smushed onto the noun it modifies. This would further extend the needlessness of structure (as the only reason for structure in latin was for more complicated sentences where for example a participle could effect two things).

In English, adjectives come before nouns. If an apple is red, we say the red apple. In French, adjectives come after nouns, so the apple red. In Dwarvish, due to having all names be amalgams of other words, I think it would be fitting for the red apple to instead be "the applered." just for continuity, nouns should come before adjectives, so you don't have to say  the redjuicylargeripeapple just to get to the apple part. It could get annoying for people to have to read a long word before they know what's being talked about.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Hm. I think that stuff like that could also be raw-defined. So, Dwarvish for "red apple" might be applered, but in Human it might be "red apple," in Elvish "apple red," in Goblin "apple-red," or whatever.

What should the Dwarvish sentence structure look like?

[Nonsequitorian]

If we have cases for nouns, and verbs can have subjects built in (like in amo means I love, amas means you love, amat means he/she loves...), then sentence structure matters not because the subjects, objects, adjectives (and thus participles), and almost everything else needs not rely on any other word.

In english we say "I ate food."

But because we know I has to be the subject (because otherwise it wouldn't be I),  the sentence "Ate food I" is still "correct" in the sense that, save for the order of words, the grammar is correct. This is how many ancient languages worked, why not dwarvish?

[Bytyan]

For me, it more important for dwarfish to be conceptually simple to an english speaker then for it to be technically logical. Language is something best enjoyed with others; it should serve the community, and in order for the community to learn to use it, it should be both accessible and interesting. Though I suppose this community has a much higher than average tolerance for inaccessible enjoyment.

I'm not disagreeing with what you've said, but that it a consideration when we move the language structure from Germanic to Romantic roots.

[Osmosis Jones]

I actually quite like Nonseq's idea. Are there any examples in the existing raws of slight variations to words so that we can get an idea for some standard modifications? Sort of like the amo/amas/amat example before, or Urist means dagger, Urista = big dagger, so on so forth? That way, we can at least start to expand the dwarven dictionary.

[Bytyan]

Perhaps if you guys are serious about starting a potential dwarvish dictionary and grammatical rule set, we should set up a central file starting with the language raws as they exist and producing our own versions with a change log.

[Nonsequitorian]

I actually quite like Nonseq's idea. Are there any examples in the existing raws of slight variations to words so that we can get an idea for some standard modifications? Sort of like the amo/amas/amat example before, or Urist means dagger, Urista = big dagger, so on so forth? That way, we can at least start to expand the dwarven dictionary.

I've looked and it doesn't look like it. There is some way that is used to define whether participles and present 1st verbs have irregular past tense forms, and what part of speech a word is. I can't figure it out, but it works. No dwarvish words change, they're all static. Past participles and present 1st person singular verbs are the same as the nouns they take after. Clap/clapped is nasib, but clapped is irregular in the past participle as it has an extra p, but I don't know how they did that in the raws.

Also, Non has more commonly been used than Nonseq. I find Nonseq too long.

[bluea]

A full half of the general types of English words is doable in practically no space at all.

Articles (a, an, the)
Conjunctions (and, or, nor...)
Pronouns
Prepositions.

A -complete- list for English is shockingly short.

Add a trick (like "-ly" in English) to make -any- adjective into an adverb, and you're down to, basically, just the darn verbs.

'To be' and 'to have' both need to be -short- for all tenses. They're ubiquitous - and they're the core of most of the non-present tenses for all the -other- verbs.

The only other verb we need is ...
To Magma.

[Helgoland]

I could really see the human language (to go slightly off-topic) as being like ancient greek. They already have that sort of armor, and a general historic feel like that would be kinda cool. Myths and all...
Maybe germanic for dwarves and native american for elves?
(No offense intended with cannibalism  )

[NW_Kohaku]

Dwarves are typically portrayed as Norse, actually. 

And "Native American" is too broad a cultural spectrum to have any particular meaning.  It's like saying "Eurasian Culture".  You'll have to narrow it down a little.

Anyway, I do like the idea of adding conjugations and prepositions to dwarven language, although it would seem odd why they didn't exist until now.  Maybe they are very short? 

Also, while it would take a *gasp* *heresy* new font/tileset to have such things, I would really like to see some eventual use of a full new alphabet to go with the procedural language.  Something like how Ultima used Futhark.  If we had an option to turn on dwarven runes, and speak to one another in runic script over the forums (Translation: Haha, stupid noobs, you can't even read Futhark!  Go back to scaling the insurmountable learning cliff!) that would be a fantastic leap.

[Kattaroten]

This sounds fun! What if we structured this like an open source project? As in anyone can make "patches" for the language. With one or two editors to accept and edit patches so as to make it coherent. If this takes of we could maybe even get a dwarvish language subforum xD

EDIT: (As in a forum where we could only speak dwarvish)