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[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/)

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

There's no difference really. But yes, I meant onlt having three vowels.

When phonetics are transcribed in linguistics /slashes like these are used for pronounciaton/, whole <brackets like these are used for orthography (spelling)>. As an example, the word "seat" is written as <seat> but pronounced /sit/.

(It's actually a little more complicated, but the nuances are unimportant here).

[Jeoshua]

Ahem.

Does it really matter?

The pronounciation, I mean.  So long as there is a morpological set which certain races will use, it really doesn't matter about the precise phonetics each grapheme.  What is really glaringly missing are the grammatical components of a real language.

TL;DR or Confused, Didn't understand:
We don't need to know how to pronounce it, as long as it's spelled a certain way and used in certain words.  What we really need is a language that has connecting words and ways to use them in sentences.

[Chagen46]

You are right. I'm just a very avid fan of phonetics

[bluea]

I vote eight vowels. But this is actually a reduction in the number of vowel -sounds-.

a, e, i, o, u, y, w, shwa.

w basically because crwth are cool.

The 'long vowel' sound is made by doubling up. No pair or triplet vowel sounds other than the doubles. No 'vowel-consonant-e'. So any two (non-identical) vowels together signify a syllabic break.

[Jeoshua]

Shwa is not a vowel.  It is a placeholder for mushy indiscriminate vowels that people aren't pronouncing fully.

W is not a vowel either.  You can use it as one, but you're just replacing another phoneme with a <w>.  I can spell My name Dzhacwe but that doesn't mean that is really a proper way to spell it.

And again, does this really matter?  Does it elucidate anything about how Dwarves speak?

Ask me to "Come drink a prickle-berry brandy with me".  I dare you.

[Chagen46]

Shwa is not a vowel.  It is a placeholder for mushy indiscriminate vowels that people aren't pronouncing fully.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-central_vowel

Schwa is a vowel. Just saying.

[Nonsequitorian]

We can babble about vowels, and technically it will be "on topic," but I believe it's a waste of time. Even if we had all the vowels we needed and exactly how to pronounce them, because that nobody speaks it, peoples' accents are going to still make it nearly unrecognizable. Heck, Americans have the same vowels as Brits as it's the same language, but that doesn't mean we say it all the same way. I can barely understand a whole bunch of thick accented British people.

And besides, how we decide dwarves pronounce things is entirely an opinion because we all have different views on dwarves. Some believe they have Scottish accents, some say they have Scandinavian accents, and some say they're from totally different places.

[Chagen46]

We can babble about vowels, and technically it will be "on topic," but I believe it's a waste of time. Even if we had all the vowels we needed and exactly how to pronounce them, because that nobody speaks it, peoples' accents are going to still make it nearly unrecognizable. Heck, Americans have the same vowels as Brits as it's the same language, but that doesn't mean we say it all the same way. I can barely understand a whole bunch of thick accented British people.

And besides, how we decide dwarves pronounce things is entirely an opinion because we all have different views on dwarves. Some believe they have Scottish accents, some say they have Scandinavian accents, and some say they're from totally different places.

Oh god. Please just don't talk, you know literally nothing about linguistics.

First of all, American and British English do not have the same vowels. Why do you think accents sound different? BECAUSE DIFFERENT ACCENTS HAVE DIFFERENT VOWELS, GENIUS. That's what makes them, you know, different

It doesn't matter if we spell things the same way. The amount of vowels in English accents range from 14 to 24+ in some UK accents. Stop looking at the spelling and focus ln the core underneath everything. This is something that linguists must learn very quickly--that spelling is worthess, and completely unrepresenative of how the language actually sounds. The same sound is the exactly the same no matter what--a language gets its overall "sound" from its combination of vowels, and where it places them.

How can people be so ignorant of language ..

[Nonsequitorian]

A is still a in both American English an British English. You can't just say that if everybody had the same pronunciations it would always sound the same. Everybody can play baseball the same way, but it doesn't mean they'll all win or all lose. It's still the vowel A. If we were to take a Southerner from America and a Bloke from Manchester and put them side by side and told them to say just the letter "a," it'd sound different, but it'd still be just an "eh" and an "ee."

If different accents have different vowels, then, it would stand that every human on the planet has different vowels, because Joe Schmo's voice is recognizable from Moe Schmo. If Joe's voice is different from Moe's, and thus is a different accent.  Just because we associate accents with nationalities doesn't mean they have to be. In fact, here's the definition:

Accent: a distinctive manner of expression: as

   a : an individual's distinctive or characteristic inflection, tone, or choice of words —usually used in plural
   b : a way of speaking typical of a particular group of people and especially of the natives or residents of a region

This is from Miriam Webster, because I wouldn't want to offend your highness with some online dictionary. Why are you so eager to pick fights? Did you get kicked from the debate club because you said something mean about somebody's mum? OK, spelling is useless, fine. Sure, maybe you need to draw a line when one sound is this and when another is that, but who's to decide where that line is? Why is a British accent comprised of different vowels from American? There's only so many sounds that a human mouth can make, don't try to make it more complicated by cutting it into even more pieces.

And when will you get it through your thick skull that it's a game about dwarves, and that this is a language that doesn't ever need to be spoken? Why do we even need to talk about pronunciation when we could have instead used a bunch of dots and dashes in place of letters? Are you gonna say now that a German straight key makes different dits n' dahs from an American one because it's a different pitch? Are you gonna say that a B # M is a different chord than a C M just because it uses a different name? How far do you take this? Am I a different species from a red haired person because I have black hair?

By just saying things are different because of minute changes is illogical and rather silly, you have to give room for the human to interpret. A B#M is the same chord as a CM, there's no way for you to say otherwise. A German straight key makes the same dots and dashes as an American one, and a British accent uses the same vowels as its American counterpart.

.

And then, with all your naval gazing, you think that because I don't see the imaginary line in the sand which you've drawn, I'm an idiot and ignorant of language? I'm not even going to waste my time in saying that I'm sorry that you're such a small minded person. There's just no point. Even if you win, what will come of it? You go back to your mother's house and try to look for fights, and I go drive MY Mercedes to MY house, and then I get to go travel around the world for work. Do you think I really care a bit that you think I don't know about language, which by the way is blatantly untrue? Sure you can say I may not "know" linguistics, but to say I don't know language is almost insulting.

[SealyStar]

First of all, American and British English do not have the same vowels. Why do you think accents sound different? BECAUSE DIFFERENT ACCENTS HAVE DIFFERENT VOWELS, GENIUS. That's what makes them, you know, different

It is true that accents do change the EXACT pronunciation of vowels (and consonants, but let's focus on vowels). However, vowel pronunciations between most accents are quite minor. And almost always, the same sounds still exist in the language-they're just used differently. For example, British people might say /baθ/ while Americans say /bæθ/. But that doesn't mean /a/ doesn't exist in American English, or that /æ/ doesn't exist in British English.

[Chagen46]

Yes, but the way that particular statement was worded irked me quite heavily.

[Jeoshua]

/jurest/, /jorst/, /iurest/.

Who cares, guys.  It's still Urist.

Use it in a sentence, tho.  Go on, try.  It means "Dagger" if I remember correctly.  But say this phrase:

"Stab the dagger into the Elf."

Seems simple enough, right?  But go ahead and try to make the words do something.  What we need is not pronunciation techniques or phonemic breakdowns of the possible positions of a tongue.  What we need is something more than just nouns, adjectives, and verbs.  We need prepositions, articles, declinations, and some way to actually use the words in any real way.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, so, have we actually agreed on anything yet, or have we just been circularly derailing our derails for 6 straight pages?

For what it's worth, this zompist thing has been a fun read, though...

[Nonsequitorian]

We haven't agreed on much, but we have got a start.

At the moment, we have nouns and verbs, and adjectives/adverbs. We don't have any prepositions, articles, personal pronouns, conjunctions, or any of the like. We also don't have an imperative, but I'm assuming we can agree on just using the verb without a personal pronoun to do that until we decide otherwise.

We'll be finished with verbs for now when we decide on a suffix for "self" to be used for the passive voice.

Then I say we move onto prepositions because why not.

[Jeoshua]

Prepositions are good.  We could work on that.  But at the same time we should think about what's behind the scenes.  We can all agree that the Dwarven Language ideally should be very sparse, logical, and straightforward.  Yes? Therefore it doesn't make sense to have all kinds of flowery verbal acrobatics to make words change.

I propose a system somewhat like Chinese, where specific additional words are used to add things such as number, place, tense, and maybe even gender.  "Dwarfette" would not be a word.  "She-Dwarf" or "Dwarf Girl" would, however, make a lot of sense in that context, yes?

Okay, so given that assumption, the gramatical structure of the sentence: "Stab the elf with the Dagger" would break down to something like:

[VERB:STAB]
[NOUN:ELF]
[NOUN:DAGGER]

But then, what separates those two nouns.  What way would we use to define, in the sentence, what that one is object, the other subject, and make it clear we're not stabbing the Dagger with the Elf?

And yes, I'm giving it in "raw" form, because that's probably how it would be able to be coded into the game.  Makes sense, right?