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[Chagen46]

No, he obviously mean "bo cknception if linguistics". He's so good at this shit that he's inventing new languages as we speak!

It was a misspelling thanks to the Iphone having a shitty keyboard. Nice job using that as a way to disregard my whole fucking argument, though.

Ad Hominem, much?

[SealyStar]

No, he obviously mean "bo cknception if linguistics". He's so good at this shit that he's inventing new languages as we speak!

It was a misspelling thanks to the Iphone having a shitty keyboard. Nice job using that as a way to disregard my whole fucking argument, though.

Ad Hominem, much?

I understand I may have been a bit immature there. It was intended as more of a joke than a serious attack. But now that I'm re-reading your post, I still can't seem to find exactly what your problem with this thread is.

[Nonsequitorian]

I think it's that it just isn't the way he thinks it should be. I hope you don't get this angry about everything you don't like, that would be a really dreadful, painful, friendless life you've got their. Almost makes me want to give pity.

[Chagen46]

It comes from being a conlanger myself. I've spent nearly half a damn year trying to make a good conlang. There's so much you have to define and make. It's not as simple as it seems.

We still have not defined if the language will be Nom-Acc, Erg-Asbol, or Transitive, for example. Or if it's Dative or Dechticaetiative.

However, it may be that I'm taking this FAR more seriously than you guys are. It's just....when you see some of the truly mind-blowing conlangs that have come out of the community (that far out-strip my own), it becomes hard to take less-serious conlangs seriously.

[Nonsequitorian]

You do remember we're making this for a game.

With Dwarves

It's hardly a functional language, and if it were it would only be on paper. Nobody's gonna bother with pronunciation because nobody needs to pronounce anything. Any pronunciation of "Urist" is correct because it's not like people ever really say the word enough for a certain way to say it to exist.

If we were really serious about creating a real language and getting people to speak it, then we would go somewhere else. To take this seriously is OK, but to be serious about it is not, because none of us are. Heck, we all have different views of a perfect language, and none of us are trying to make this it. If I were to do all of this on my own, I would be starting in a completely different place (probably pronunciation). I'd be learning the language as I was trying to create it.

For the most part, all of my actual Russian comes out of textbooks (I don't think chatting with Russian people is good for actual grammar). If I were to create a language, I would write a textbook about how to speak it fluently. To say that we were doing anything of the sort here is bogus. I mean, we're only gonna have short phrases, maybe paragraphs, depicting stories and the like. I'd argue that anything that resembles a subjunctive mood is highly unnecessary, even if Dwarvish was exactly like Spanish, because anything more than "This is XYZ The ABC of 123, he has sharp claws and a big nose. Beware his orange snot, it is orange!" is not likely to show up.

TL;DR, we're not serious in a "this is an actual language" sense. It is going to be a language (we hope), and is going to have at least basic grammar, but it's never going to be spoken or written in great length. Anybody who writes at all will probably use a guide to writing in Dwarvish.

[SealyStar]

At above post: my thoughts exactly.

Furthermore, we're all treating Dwarfese (or whatever) like there's some problem with it being too "European". Obviously, we don't want it to be blatantly "IMA RELATED TO INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY" or anything, but Dwarves are a very European-folkloric society. Not just in origin, but also in the way they're usually portrayed, including in DF.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, we could just make the alphabet with unambiguous pronunciations.  Japanese, for example, has the same vowels make the same sounds with no changes in stresses.  Any "a" you see will always make the same sound as in the word "at".  There is no way that an "a" can mean the vowel sound as in the word "way", and in fact, that's the sound that an "e" makes. 

Since we can create all the vowels we want to create different vowel sounds, we can make a language with very easy pronunciations.  (It was only the Great Vowel Shift that made English so absurdly difficult in the first place.)

In fact, I hope that we just create the language particularly for the simplest to learn functional grammar system we possibly can, not to make something that lets us play at grammar.  Which is, again, why I say we don't need a difference between "will jump" and "will be jumping".  We shouldn't worry about formal or informal speech or conjunctions or passive verbs, we should make the language as utilitarian and simple to grasp as possible.

(In fact, looking over that language-making website, that's basically one of the big things it was talking about while slamming Esperanto - that it was designed to basically have all the same things that Eastern Polish accented speakers had in their language, which included vowel sound distinctions that almost nobody approaching the language outside of certain cultures could appreciate, instead of being an easily-learned language.)

[SealyStar]

I was just thinking: we haven't given much thought to pronouns. Even personal pronouns, which are rather simple. I couldn't think of any particular words, but I gave consideration to two ideas:

One, an ambiguous-gender third-person (comparable to the so-called "informal" "singular they" in English), for entities known to be animate (sapient?), but whose gender is not known.

Two, three different forms of "we". Everyone knows about the "inclusive" and "exclusive" uses, but I've noticed (perhaps not entirely seriously) a third use-the "semi-imperative", or "speaker-exclusive", wherein an authority figure or other leader states that "we are doing something" to suggest to his/her group that "you must do something!". I notice it a lot amongst public-school teachers. And it would be a perfect fit amongst the humorously (if ineptly) obedient Dorfs.

[Nonsequitorian]

I like that, actually. I've never thought of a non-gender 3rd s. personal pronoun that wasn't "it," yet on multiple occasions, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, I've called a baby or person whom I don't know "he" even if it's actually a "she."

In fact, the above sentence is a good example. Should I say that instead as "I don't know 'he' even if she's actually a 'she.'"?

I mean, if we could just use "it" without the connotation that it's a non-animate, it would make so much more sense.

[Chagen46]

Any "a" you see will always make the same sound as in the word "at".  There is no way that an "a" can mean the vowel sound as in the word "way", and in fact, that's the sound that an "e" makes.

Okay, I know this REALLY doesn't matter but:

The vowel of "at" is /æ/, a somewhat low vowel pronounced in the front of the mouth. The Japanese <a> is /a/, pronounced low and in the center of the mouth.

Second, "way"'s vowel is the diphthong /ei/ (technically it's something else but that's the closest I can get on a normal keyboard). Japanese has a straight mophthong /e/. English doesn't have /e/. It USED to, but during the great vowel shift, it raised to /i/--this is why /i/ shows up spelled as "ee", for example in peel, see, reed, and the like.

/useless linguistic nit-picking

[Nonsequitorian]

If we're making the language, I don't see why we can't decide which "a" sound A sounds like. Heck, we could say that e is ye as in "yes," because of Slavic e's. Not that we would, but we could. I suggest as straight a group of vowels as possible, no differentiation based on where it is, like in English.

[SealyStar]

If we're making the language, I don't see why we can't decide which "a" sound A sounds like. Heck, we could say that e is ye as in "yes," because of Slavic e's. Not that we would, but we could. I suggest as straight a group of vowels as possible, no differentiation based on where it is, like in English.

This. It's probably going to get booed for being too "cliche" or "normal", but I'd KISS for the vowels.
ah, eh/ay, ee, oh, oo. Like pretty much every non-English language on Earth.

[Chagen46]

Well, we have a vowel inventory: /a i e o u/

(Do note that that is not actually as common as you think it is. Many languages use /i a u/ or /e a o/)

[SealyStar]

Well, we have a vowel inventory: /a i e o u/

(Do note that that is not actually as common as you think it is. Many languages use /i a u/ or /e a o/)

Are you referring to only having three vowels, or how they are pronounced, which I can't glean from your given text?

[Jeoshua]

Three vowels...  Quechua for example:

Quechua uses only three vowel phonemes: /a/ /i/ and /u/, as in Aymara (including Jaqaru). Monolingual speakers pronounce these as [æ] [ɪ] and [ʊ] respectively, though the Spanish vowels /a/ /i/ and /u/ may also be used. When the vowels appear adjacent to the uvular consonants /q/, /qʼ/, and /qʰ/, they are rendered more like [ɑ], [ɛ] and [ɔ] respectively.