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[Jeoshua]

Right.  PIE is a conlang that is a "semi-mythical recreation" of the Ur language that linguists imagine that all European and Indus languages must have evolved from.  It's mostly guesswork but provides a sort of framework.  That article wasn't the best example or treatise on the topic, by any means, but more of an introduction so you could all know what I was talking about.

The base of it is: it has all tenses, cases, and declensions that exist in every Indo-European language.  All pronunciations (which really wouldn't be used here very heavily) are amalgamations of the best-guess of the word's true etymology.

Really it just gives an idea of what a language must contain to be considered as complete as possible, and to evolve into many multiple languages.

Honestly, I'd be happy if the languages just seemed related to each other

===

You "could" get rid of the 2nd person plural, but that forces the language into agreement with Modern British English in a rather arbitrary way.  Even we Americans have found multiple ways to add that back in ("Y'all", "You'ns", "You's", "You's guys", etc) since it often comes up that one must talk to a group of others that is physically present, and make it clear that you, the speaker, mean ALL of the assembled group instead of a specific person.

Besides, in actual speach, "-te" (pron: Tay, rhymes with "they") and "-ti" (pron: Tee, rhymes with "He") don't sound very similar at all.  It would make more sense if the conjugations were more regular tho:

1s: -mi  1p: -mos
2s: -si  2p: -sos
3s: -ti  3p: -tos

ORMOS! <-- Theoretical Dwarven equivallent to "Cheers" or "Na zdrovyeh"  (lit. "We Drink!")

===

The conjugations would be something that could probably best be defined per-entity.  That would allow maximum versatility, and let each language sound more unique.  Plus, it would allow, say, the human entity to drop certain types of conjugation for, say, nouns or verbs individually, allowing for a "dropped second person plural" if the creator of that language so wished.

[Chagen46]

Guys, before we start the grammar, we may want at least an inkling of the phonology.

Does it have uvular consonants? Are umlauts used to indicate front rounded vowels or something else? Does it have a apiration or voicing contrast? I conlang for fun, and this is stuff that matters eventually.

[irmo]

I say make it as simple as possible. No cases. No genders. No conugations. No pronouns. Think caveman speech.

That's not "caveman speech". That's Chinese.

[Nonsequitorian]

Te and ti don't really sound similar, but I think they sound too similar when compared to how different the rest of them are. It's like lining up a banana, an apple, a clementine, and a grapefruit. The clementine and grapefruit are obviously different, but next to a banana and apple it just might slip somebody up. I like mi-mos better. It looks like people want no cases and no genders. Personally I feel that's too modern, but I'm not going to speak for everybody when we know the majority doesn't want it.

At the moment, pronunciation is least important. This is, as you may remember, a language for a game. One could say that it is almost strictly non-spoken. Heck, we could use a bunch of random scribbles instead and have no pronunciations at all, but that will make for really really hard learning.

On the subject of verbs, shall we do prefix tenses? It's simple and pretty darned unique. I've seen it in Russian with the future, but even then it varies a lot. I suggest that nim/ni- is future, kr/kur- is past, and po- is just a universal "more" prefix. Nim- and kr- are like "an" in english, comes before a vowel. Pluperfect is pokur, so  "We had drank" would theoretically be "Pokrormos." "You (pl) will have liked" may theoretically be "Kurnibüzsos" because kur is past, ni is future, so kurni is past-future, or Future Perfect.

Pretty easy to get a hold of, I think.

[SealyStar]

I say five cases. In Latin, there are six (the Instrumental and Prepositional are merged to form the Ablative, and the sixth is the vocative, which is really quite useless). So, I'd say Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc, Abl.

No genders, or minimal genders. We don't need to know if a rock is male or female.

Adjectives are added to the end of nouns, to form compound words.

A paucal number. That is, we'd have "one", "few" (paucal), and "many" (plural). Why? Because it's useful, and very few extant languages have it.

As for articles, I'd say we have six. But they would be added to the word, like adjectives. They'd just be single-syllable morphemes-definite and indefinite-for all three numbers.

Use prefixes to form conjugated verb tenses. Or suffixes, like in Latin with "paro" becoming "parabam" in the imperfect.

[Jeoshua]

Why? Because it's useful, and very few extant languages have it.

This seems almost like an argument AGAINST, instead of for.  The language system should probably not try to incorporate things that very few languages ever have or find a use for, but rather be as universal as possible and use things that most languages DO have a use for.

Guys, before we start the grammar, we may want at least an inkling of the phonology.

We already have a system for phonology by predefining the words in the language_*.txt files.  What we are lacking in the current system is, actually, any sense of grammar at all.

Moreover, phonology or even morphology does not matter in this circumstance.  The game adds some flavor-gloss over the words, but if you look at the words in Dwarf or Legends mode sometimes, you'll find that "Rakustenir Babingeshud" is supposed to mean "Tombbeguiler the Friend of Fortresses".  But really as far as the game is concerned, it's just [Tomb][Beguiler] [Friend][Fortress].  The same word could mean The Beguiling Tombs, Friend of the Fortress, or The Tombs of Beguiling, Fortress's Friend, or many other things.

If you break it down, what we need is grammar.  Some way to make it clear that the words mean a certain thing.  The game can put any kind of gloss over it they want.

[Tomb][-adjective][-singular][Beguiler][-subject][-singular]

Technically that's agglutinate style grammar, but you see my point?

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, normally, adjectives are before nouns, but you could have a grammar system where adjectives are after nouns to make a language distinct. 

Yoda speech, it is like.

We don't want to just have simplified English with a word cypher, after all.

Making a variable system where some things like rearranging whether nouns come before verbs or vice versa would make more sense than forcing everything to use the same basic grammar. 

[SealyStar]

Well, normally, adjectives are before nouns.

"Normally" in Germanic languages, yes. But noun-before-adjective is the norm in Romance languages. And Arabic. And a lot of other languages I'm forgetting.

[Nonsequitorian]

As for articles, I'd say we have six. But they would be added to the word, like adjectives. They'd just be single-syllable morphemes-definite and indefinite-for all three numbers.

Use prefixes to form conjugated verb tenses. Or suffixes, like in Latin with "paro" becoming "parabam" in the imperfect.

For the most part, the articles we have are either definite or indefinite. When I say only two, I mean a definite article or indefinite article. There are multiple other ones that we use, as does every language. A negative article and partitive article are necessary, but we can do it like we do in english, no and some.

I don't know if I'd call the imperfect in latin a suffix, because third and fourth conjugation verbs break some of those rules. That's really nit picky, though. I think we shouldn't have suffixes for the sole reason that there are adverbs that can go there.

On Adjectives, no we don't want a word cypher, but I'm taking grammar from the game so we don't have to do everything. The game mushes nouns and adjectives together, so why don't we? Adjectives come after nouns because I think we will want to know what we're talking about before we start describing it. Adverbs just make sense in doing it the same way, because then we wont need any sort of difference.

[SealyStar]

I don't know if I'd call the imperfect in latin a suffix, because third and fourth conjugation verbs break some of those rules. That's really nit picky, though. I think we shouldn't have suffixes for the sole reason that there are adverbs that can go there.

You've got a good point. I guess if we want "Dwarvish" to be as agglutinative as possible while still making it intelligible to us silly westerners, attaching adverbs to verbs is probably logical.

That being said, though, the only difference in the 3rd/4th conjugation imperfect is the -ie- in 3rd-i and 4th verbs. The future, of course, is a different story.

[Nonsequitorian]

That is true. I assumed when you gave an example of the imperfect you were just talking in general about verbs, because at first it looks as if future also uses suffixes.

[Jeoshua]

"Normally" in Germanic languages, yes. But noun-before-adjective is the norm in Romance languages. And Arabic. And a lot of other languages I'm forgetting.

Correct.  And ideally those languages are all within the norm of what should ideally be supported by an ideal DF language system.

Arabic uses inflections to form a lot of it's grammar too, such as:

SLM - root word for "peace"
muSLiM - "the people of peace"
iSLaM - "those of peace"
aSaLaM - "with peace"

etc etc etc.

That may be a bit too hard to  render faithfully in any way, but it is something to think about.

[bluea]

For the verb conjugation, I'd like a -combination- of prefix and suffix.


English uses multi-word verbs for some tenses: "He jumps. He will jump. He will be jumping. He has jumped." Make 'will',  'be', and 'has' prefixes. (And, basically, all of the 'to be' and 'to have' bits) But do -all- of the 'present tense' conjugations by manipulating the -suffix-.

English is somewhat anemic in the present tense conjugations compared to pretty much all of its ancestors. I'm in favor of having both 'you' and 'you all' as distinct subject types. And in favor of the 'personal' and 'formal' forms. The 'formal' forms could be as simple as "just like the personal form with an -additional- suffix of -ser" (Or whatever.)

Dwarves seem exceedingly methodical to me. This implies -regular- verbs. And as much inter-usage of the same word base as possible. That is - exclude the 'verb conjugation suffixes' from usage by nouns, adjectives and adverb. So "making" unusual verbs is trivial. "To magma" is probably a pretty regular dwarven verb But the same sort of idea. And have a simple modification to go from adjectives to adverbs. (Like '-ly') And -distinct- conjugations for each of the possible subject-verb combinations - English collapses too many of them IMNSHO.

I jump. You jump. You all jump. We jump. They jump.

On conjugations, can we -please- have 'and + or' as a distinct word? (Or, hell, do something odd and make explicit words for other Boolean operators: NAND, NOR ...)

But 'andor' comes up pretty frequently.

Iff - 'if and only if' is handy too.

[Helgoland]

A good idea I think (once cultural differences are added) is to only loosely define "human", "dwarven", "elven" and "goblin" languages-the actual in-game languages could then be slight variations. Think of it as each race representing a language family-maybe dwarves are russian ( ) or even arab, humans greek or roman (I really think of them as a type of antiquity or renaissance type of culture), elves french (damn I need a trollface smiley) and goblins... who don't we like? No offense, but the arab language's sound seems kind of fitting.

TL;DR: Each civ gets slight randomly generated variations of a proto-language that is determined by their race.

[Jeoshua]

Actually, Goblinese always looked like Lojban or Esperanto to me.