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[zacen299]

I.E. say in Boatmurdered the Dwarf Name Koganusan has a circumflex over the last A in it, and what I want to know is how do you pronounce that? considering all the languages that have a circumflex use it differently.

[Putnam]

I'd say you probably don't want to think about it too hard >_>

You could probably err to german or dutch, but I'm not sure if either actually uses a circumflex.

[10ebbor10]

I'd say you probably don't want to think about it too hard >_>

You could probably err to german or dutch, but I'm not sure if either actually uses a circumflex.

I'm pretty sure dutch doesn't use it. Can't say anything about german.

[Cruxador]

From DF Talk 2:

Rainseeker:   Well the main question that I think the whole community wants to know, and this is kind of dovetailing on an argument that's been going on for years about Dwarf Fortress ... [15]How do you pronounce Urist?
Toady:   Of course we haven't decided on any phonetic information for the languages yet, which is something that's going to go in; but just in my own mind or whatever, when I saw that question, it kind of polluted it forever ... I don't really know? Do I say Oo-rist, or Yure-ist, or (other - difficult to transcribe - examples)? I think I've used all of them since I saw that question. I'm pretty sure that that question had an answer before I saw it, but I don't even know. In the end I'm not sure what the phonetic information is going to be like. It's just one of those superfluous things, but it's one of those things that's fun to know as well; what the languages actually sound like, and so on. Maybe there'll be regional variations, we can have regional variations in the phonemes between the different dwarven civilizations so that some of them might say Oo-rist, and some of might say O-reest, and some of them might ...
Rainseeker:   Urst!
Toady:   Yeah, Urst. Or they can do the things where you add 'a's and 'r's and stuff on the end, or cut off the 't' entirely. But I have to disappoint; I don't really have an answer, I don't have an official answer. But if people want to ... you'd probably be able to change the phonemes if I put them in, they'll just be sitting there in a raw file. Although I'd hate to write up the phonetic representations of every word so probably they'll work with the alphabet representations when they're trying to come up with their phonemes. So, you'll have an answer sometime.

In other words, there's no right answer yet.

[redsector]

No idea how to pronounce it, but I can tell you that it doesn't come from German either. "Native" German actually doesn't use any accents at all, only the four umlauts: ä = ae, ö = oe, ü = ue, ß = ss. The first three can be used however you want, for ss/ß there are some subtle differences, but even the majority of Germans probably doesn't really know the finer grammatical aspects of that, so whatever. The vowels e and i can have the "double dot" (called trema) above them as well, but that's extremely rare (I don't even know how to type that on my keyboard - only possible via numeric ASCII code, I guess) and not a real separate character, it only indicates that you have to pronounce that vowel seperately from the vowel before it (e. g. oï would be "oh-eeh" instead of "oy").

Apart from that, we use nothing except strictly standard Latin characters unless the word in question was adopted from another language, e. g. French - in that case, it's usually left unchanged and keeps whatever accents there may be, along with their respective pronounciation.

That's my contribution to your daily dose of useless trivia, you're welcome.

[Richards]

That's my contribution to your daily dose of useless trivia, you're welcome.

Thank you. That information was actually quite good to learn about. Do you have any more?

[zacen299]

Of the several places I knew I could get this kind of answer I am so happy it got replied to for it made me happy. I'll be honest I had two reasons for doing this 1. I did want to know and 2. I wanted to see what kind of answer I could get.

[Trif]

Well, in French, a circumflex usually means that a letter after the vowel with the circumflex was deleted in the development of the language.
For example, hôpital originates from hospital - the s was deleted. Or forêt means forest - again, the s got left out.

The vowel isn't pronounced differently, it's just a linguistic quirk. I'm sure that the circumflex has different meanings in different languages, though.

[miauw62]

I'd say you probably don't want to think about it too hard >_>

You could probably err to german or dutch, but I'm not sure if either actually uses a circumflex.

I'm pretty sure dutch doesn't use it. Can't say anything about german.

No, dutch doesnt use any circumflexes.

Also, to above, both languages originate from latin with a different influence afaik, you cant simply say that english is the base for french. (mayby you are right, but i think you arent, i'm not sure either).
But i think that you are right about the circumflex, as the latin for hospital is hospitalis

[Trif]

French is an Italic language, and English got a lot from Latin, too. I didn't mean to say that these French words were originally English words, they were just convenient examples because both words originate in Latin, and English and French use them.

Also, forest and hospital were correct French spellings a few centuries ago, but for some reason (probably pronunciation) they got changed into their circumflexed counterparts forêt and hôpital.

[FearfulJesuit]

Well, let's look at the letters Dwarven uses, including digraphs that look like they're probably single phonemes.

a á à â ä å b c d e é è ê ë f g h i í ì î ï k l m n o ó ò ô ö p r s sh t th u ú ù û v z

That's all of them. The problem is that that is equal to 25 vowels, and that's a lot. A possible phonetic interpretation (which would be completely and utterly unstable; a vowel system like this simply cannot hold:

/a ɑ ɐ ʌ æ ɶ b ts d ə e ɛ ø ɵ f g h ɨ i ɪ y ʏ k l m n ɔ o ɤ ɒ œ p r s ʃ t θ ʊ u ʉ ɯ v z/

However, it is theoretically possibly. Maybe I could record some sentences in Dwarven on these principles...?

[Mr S]

Great, so they need a Speech Pathologist AND a Psychothereapist.

Actually, that explains a lot.  How could they possibly be expected to follow even relatively simple directions when they're spending all of thier alchohol limited concentration just figuring out THIER OWN LANGUAGE!!!???

So, in short, Manager has additional role as Keeper of the Vernacular.
CMD must be adept in Speech Therapy (and it would hurt to pick up some PT/OT as well, for the bits that don't heal straight).