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[dwarfhoplite]

If -tun was the suffix for plural, wouldn't the love+tun be pluralized verb then?
daggers = dagger+tun
we/you/they love = pronoun+love+tun

[Owlbread]

I think I agree with you both. I like nonsequitorian's idea that it could mean different things; lovelove or "avalaval" is the intensified version of that special kind of verb (I don't know what you would call a word that can be a noun and a verb like that), whereas avaltun would mean "very much" or "a lot of love". Maybe Dwarves would say "I have a lot of love for you", whereas if they want to say that they really love you they'd use "avalaval". However, I don't think we should use "a lot of love" as a verb because then it can get confusing as Dwarfhoplite says.

This is what we have (I've used some placeholder pronouns/sentence structure):

Avalaval:

verbal form - intensified form of love, "really love" or love i.e. "Kroz avalaval daroztun" - "I love you(plural)"

noun form - intense love

Then we get the problems:

Avaltun

verbal form - to have a lot of love for something i.e. "Kroz avaltun daroztun" - "I have a lot of love for you(plural)"

But here's the problem. Does the verb change depending on how many people do the action? If so, it would make sense to use -tun as a suffix as dwarfhoplite says, but that conflicts with the verb "to have a lot of love". What do you guys think? It's a bigger question than it seems at first glance.

Don't underestimate how cool that kind of stuff can be - in Russian, because the verbs conjugate so much that they always agree with the personal pronoun before it (I, we, etc) you don't actually need to say the pronoun every time. You can just say the verb, because from the verb it is apparent who is doing the action. I will show you:

Russian verb for "to work" - Rabotat

"Ya rabotayu" - I work
"Ty rabotayesh" - you(familiar, singular) work
"Vwy rabotayetye" - you(formal, plural) work
"On rabotayet" - he works
"Ona rabotayet" - she works
"Ono rabotayet" - it works
"Mwy rabotayem" - we work
"Anee rabotayoot" - they work

You don't have to say "I work" every time, you can just say "Rabotayu", because it is obvious that you mean "I".

Rabotayem vmestye - we work together.
Rabotayu lyetom - I work in the summer.

Do you guys see what I mean?

[dwarfhoplite]

I thought about it a little bit. Here I conjugated the verb in count of the subject

I love him = Kroz aval beroz
I love him intensely = Kroz avalaval beroz

I love them = Kroz aval beroztun
I love them intensely = Kroz avalaval beroztun

We love them = Kroztun avaltun beroztun
We love them intensely = Kroztun avalavaltun beroztun


You can't tell who is/are the object(s) of the action because the pronouns are identical. (assuming that word order is not strict)
Similarly, you can't tell who is the subject.

We could conjugate verbs by the person, like you suggested (?), and make the language more flexible. Suggestions if, and how should we do it?

[Nonsequitorian]

Having studied both Russian and Latin in free time (and gotten very good at both), I really like the whole "verbs are conjugated to death so that you don't always need a personal pronoun, and can mix the structure up a lot" thing. Makes it sounds both poetic and strong and simple. Structure and strength and such are really important to dwarves, or at least the dwarves we know, so I don't see why their language would be any different. A typical Dwarven structure can be almost anything, their sentences should be also.

I just think it'd reflect dwarve's superimposed-culture by having a sort of extremely conjugated verb and a lack of real specific sentence structure.

Also it would make poetry easier

[dwarfhoplite]

Also it would make poetry easier

And make learning less so. Although, I'd almost claim that Whatever written in Latin is poetry.

Perhaps we could do a compromise and conjugate the present tense in person, and add small words to form other tenses and conditionals etc.
Nobody is willing to learn Latin without the Latin again.

Is free word order possible without catload of cases?

[Owlbread]

Also it would make poetry easier

And make learning less so. Although, I'd almost claim that Whatever written in Latin is poetry.

Perhaps we could do a compromise and conjugate the present tense in person, and add small words to form other tenses and conditionals etc.
Nobody is willing to learn Latin without the Latin again.

Is free word order possible without catload of cases?

I'm afraid cases are pretty necessary for the free word order. Simplicity for learning was my original goal when I was designing my language proposal but I've drifted away from that as I now just think we should look for what's cool and Dwarven. I recommend not making a compromise and just going balls out, at least within reason though so it's not like the language becomes an extremely complicated form of binary or whatever. It should at least be learnable, but I class Arabic or Mandarin Chinese as learnable.

[dwarfhoplite]

It will be hell but I'm in.
I suggest that there will be as little declensions as possible and no irregularities.

If we changed I -pronoun from kroz to koroz/korosh we could do something like this

koroz= I
daroz= you
beroz= he/she/it

Present tense

I love = koroz avalkor
you love = daroz avaldar
he/she/it loves= beroz avalber
we love = koroztun avalkortun
you love = daroztun avaldartun
they love = beroztun avalbertun

They love bloody daggers = beroztun avalbertun uristrabultun        (uristrabultun still needs an accusative case)
They really love really bloody daggers = beroztun avalavalbertun uristrabulrabultun

Note that it's not really longer than English even though the words are longer.

Or why not to use whole pronoun as a suffix (avalberoztun = they love/they are loving)
What say you?

[Inarius]

Is there a "he/she/it"? The noun cases already exists, don't they ?
It's "intelligent things/all living not intelligent/non living things.
I suppose we should find the "he, his, her, etc." for these noun classes...

[dwarfhoplite]

I didn't know whether we had come to a conclusion or not so I used what I could find from earlier.
To be more specific:

I = kroz/krosh
we = kroztun/kroshtun
you = daroz/darosh
you (plural) = daroztun/daroshtun
he/she/it = beroz/berosh
they = beroztun/beroshtun

The -z form was for friendly things and -sh for hostile things.
The consensus seems to be for gender-neutral 3rd person pronoun, for now.

But right now we're discussing the plural form for nouns, verbs and adjectives. And that got us to personal verbs and case system.
The case system means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

[Owlbread]

It will be hell but I'm in.
I suggest that there will be as little declensions as possible and no irregularities.

If we changed I -pronoun from kroz to koroz/korosh we could do something like this

koroz= I
daroz= you
beroz= he/she/it

Present tense

I love = koroz avalkor
you love = daroz avaldar
he/she/it loves= beroz avalber
we love = koroztun avalkortun
you love = daroztun avaldartun
they love = beroztun avalbertun

They love bloody daggers = beroztun avalbertun uristrabultun        (uristrabultun still needs an accusative case)
They really love really bloody daggers = beroztun avalavalbertun uristrabulrabultun

Note that it's not really longer than English even though the words are longer.

Or why not to use whole pronoun as a suffix (avalberoztun = they love/they are loving)
What say you?

I like your avalberoztun bit. That's great. Think of the fun we could have with that. But still, we would lose the freedom that the verbal conjugation idea would give us. We could use both, one as an alternative way of saying the other (more poetic opportunities), maybe with the longer version being more emphatic. That said, the use of the pronoun as the suffix looks pretty Dwarven. I could imagine it engraved into a stone tablet like that.

I think though, case-wise, the most we need right now would be nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. Those should allow for very free word order and we can add more intriguing ones as we see fit. Other cases that may be interesting would be the vocative case, once present in Russian (still to an extent in Polish) but has been fazed out, but is still very common in Scottish Gaelic. I'll give you an example:

The Gaelic name for Malcolm is "Calum". If you want to say "Good morning, Calum" you say "Madainn mhath, a' Chaluim". Because you are addressing Calum, you say "a' Chaluim" rather than just Calum.

Another handy case is the instrumental, common in Slavic languages. As I understand it, it chiefly means "with something".

As a suggestion, perhaps the way to show accusative would be through the suffix "-ak".

That way you get: They love bloody daggers = beroztun avalbertun uristrabultunak

Or perhaps to avoid confusion, use it as a prefix:

They love bloody daggers = beroztun avalbertun akuristrabultun

The "case ending" as they're often called could actually be "case prefixes" in Dwarfish, so you could have:

nominative: *none*
accusative: -ak
dative: -am
genitive: - az
vocative: -af
instrumental: -ag

I also recommend using the dative for the indirect object i.e. "I give the book to you", "book" is the direct object and takes the accusative and "you" take the dative because you are the indirect object. That's what they do in German anyway, and I think it really frees up the sentence structure.


Examples

Accusative:

They love bloody daggers: beroztun avalbertun akuristrabultun

Dative:

They sing a song to them: beroztun osalbertun akosal amberoztun

Genitive:

The book of lies: thikut azostun

Vocative:

Urist!: Afurist

Instrumental:

Geshud walks with Monom: berdangeshud agmonom

[dwarfhoplite]

Wow you keep updating your post. Every refresh something new 

In Latin (which I've studied for a week) they use nice idea with dative.
My name is = Julius mihi nomen est = Julius to me a name is (direct translation)


In Dwarvish we could say: I love you a lot
but also : I have a lot of love to you (dative)

Say, to have was "ibal" and love (noun) was avul

I love you very much = koroz avalavalkor akdaroz
I love you very much =  avalavalkoroz akdaroz             (which is better?)

I + to you + love + I a lot have = koroz amdaroz avul ibalibalkor
To you + a lot i have + love = amdaroz ibalibalkoroz avul (havehave = to have a lot?)

I like case-prefix better, since I find  the rhyming tun-endings appealing.
Should we scrap personal verb (avalkortun = we love) and just use (avalkoroztun)?

[Owlbread]

Wow you keep updating your post. Every refresh something new 

In Latin (which I've studied for a week) they use nice idea with dative.

My name is = Julius mihi nomen est = Julius to me a name is (direct translation)

In dwarvish we could say: I love you much
but also : I have a lot of love to you (dative)

I like case-prefix better, since I find  the rhyming tun-endings appealing.

Haha, sorry, I just kept thinking of stuff and I wasn't sure if anyone had posted yet. But that's an interesting idea about the dative. Maybe there could be a lot of alternative ways of saying stuff depending on your meaning. Do you think it would just be for emphasis (long = more) or do you think it could mean something else?

When I was trying to come up with stuff for the vocative case, I realised it would be good to put some imperatives (commands) in, so stuff like "Walk!" or "Dance!" or "Drink!" or even "Drink this mead!"

I thought maybe you could do "zur" as a prefix to the verb, so as an example:

"Mebzuth, drink mead!"

"Afmebzuth zurol akthash"

Of course, I'm not using any commas or exclaimation marks so it looks a bit less expressive but you get my meaning.

I just had an unrelated thought there. Maybe when you're referring to something being a particular colour (just colours and hues and such though, if you applied it to all adjectives it would be tough), you could describe it as "of white" or "of red" and so on.

An example would be "The red flag" - solon azang - "flag of red".

Say, to have was "ibal" and love (noun) was avul

I love you very much = koroz avalavalkor akdaroz
I love you very much =  avalavalkoroz akdaroz             (which is better?)

I + to you + love + I a lot have = koroz amdaroz avul ibalibalkor
To you + a lot i have + love = amdaroz ibalibalkoroz avul (havehave = to have a lot?)

Should we scrap personal verb (avalkortun = we love) and just use (avalkoroztun)?

I like that. Ibalibal - to have a lot. So yes, that looks great. Fantastic sir. Amdaroz ibalibalkoroz avul - I have a lot of love for you - "To you have have I love".

I think we should keep both methods, leave it up to choice. Maybe the more common (conversational?) way would be to use the second method but I don't see why you couldn't use the first method in a literary setting or if you so fancied. Keep the personal verb idea because if they weren't different there would be no point to using the pronouns and verbs seperately.

In Scottish Gaelic (and other celtic languages I think) there is an interesting way of saying "I have". They say "Be *x* at me".

So as an example,

"Tha muncaidh agam" - "Be (there is a) monkey at me" - "I have a monkey".

The preposition in Dwarfish for "at" could be "aram", or maybe we could combine it with your Latin suggestion.

If we say that the verb "to be" is "un", as an alternative way of saying "I have a dagger" in Dwarfish one could say:

"Un urist aramkroz" - "There is a dagger at me"

"Un amkroz urist" - "There is to me a dagger"

To say that "I have no dagger", you could use "ban" for "there is not", so you'd say:

"Ban urist aramkroz" - "There is no dagger at me"

"Ban amkroz urist" - "There is not to me a dagger".

[dwarfhoplite]

I think avalkoroztun is better than avalkortun.

Do you think koroz is better than kroz? It would be more logical with daroz and beroz.

I think your vocative loses its power in written text. Compare "Urist!" to "Aurist!"
I want capitalized Urist.

Another problem: we need a rule for making nouns from verbs and vice versa as in "aval" and my "avul" (which i randomly chose)

And another thing: We should discuss how we will do our verbs.
Do we go rather indo-European way and make a verb with positive condition and use "no" to change its meaning to the opposite, or do we make separate verbs those two conditions.

[Owlbread]

I think avalkoroztun is better than avalkortun.

Do you think koroz is better than kroz? It would be more logical with daroz and beroz.

I think your vocative loses its power in written text. Compare "Urist!" to "Aurist!"
I want capitalized Urist.

Another problem: we need a rule for making nouns from verbs and vice versa as in "aval" and my "avul" (which i randomly chose)

Kroz could be the shortened, slang-like version, koroz is more formal. The same could apply to the rest - droz, broz and so on. As an idea, maybe if you wanted to insult someone you could say: "Zurgastdrosh aktig aglibash azmonom" - "Cleave a shite with a paper axe".

Hmm. See though, if Dwarfish will be written in its own alphabet, capitalisation won't be an issue. That said, one could always just make that irregular and say "Uristaf" instead of "Afurist". Don't worry though, the rhyming -tun would survive. If you wanted to say "You men!" you'd say "Udosaftun!"

The act of creating a rule that could be applied across the board for creating a noun from a verb could be difficult if you went by a change in the second or only vowel i.e. the "a" in the noun form of "aval" becomes "u" if it's a verb. The problem is you'd end up with quite a few rules there unless we use prefixes or suffixes or something again.

[dwarfhoplite]

The problem is you'd end up with quite a few rules there unless we use prefixes or suffixes or something again.

Or
We could decide to make every verb end in consonant in the nominative. Then add something regular to it to make it a noun.
Consonant ending verbs seem to be a rule already.

I liked un-ban

PS:This was a creative night. Hopefully others will like the case system.