Statues in Dwarf Fortress seem to be the classic greco-roman design. They're big, heavy and cumbersome. It doesn't make sense for a trader to drag these things from their homelands when they can just trade in regular trade goods like figurines.
Statues should have to be a custom order from an artist of that region. Custom made statues from other lands should be expensive to both make and import but they should be quite favourable among your population.
This is Dwarf Fortress. We don't need logic here.
I hate when people say that.
The game's still in alpha, guys. Anything you cite is probably a bug or underimplemented feature.
I hate it when people say that. We can't use 'the game is in alpha' as an excuse for much of the game's nonsense. Like Urist being a popular name: no self-respecting dwarf would name their kid 'dagger'. Or the ability to walk through tiles diagonally, or being able to fit 300 dwarves, 250 animals, a dragon and a partridge in a pear tree on two 3x3x3 metre tiles. The pear tree would need its own tile.
My initial statement was... irrelevant. So was this, I suppose.
Alpha means it's incomplete. Don't expect perfection in alpha. Most games are working on making it impossible to walk through walls and the like at this stage of development.
no self-respecting dwarf would name their kid 'dagger'.
No self-respecting Spanish person would name their little girl 'pillar'. Except they do. Because that's called culture.
The Spanish would have some reason for doing so, that would be in their culture. My point is that dwarf-culture (although nigh-on indistinguishable from much of the Bay12 culture) is more accommodating to names like 'Axe', 'Hammer', or 'Magmacarp the Elf-Slaughter of Death'...
Not 'dagger'.
Daggers are weapons, and "Urist" is actually a fairly uncommon name in-game. Like Bob; everyone knows it's common from fiction, but I can't think of anyone I actually know named Bob.
And, again, alpha. Once Toady has the physics quirks worked out, he'll give each culture a procedurally generated list of common names, some selected from the list of words and some not; until then, don't accept it as the final word.
Human and Elf female sculptures could spruce up the joint. Remember: Its not porn if it has an urn in it.* I just want to setup some statues for dwarfs to vandalize. A vandalized Human and Elf statue could generate happy thoughts, once vandalized. Vomit upon, throw kitten corpses atop, get bent out of shape and develop bad thoughts off of and then engrave over top it, etc.. The normal FUN stuff in DF, with a twist of lemon and lime.
*not my quote, Pratchett I think said this.
One of his characters, actually. More or less. It was from
Thud!, sadly the only Discworld book I've read to date. It was explained that way to Nobby Nobbs for reasons which would derail the thread further.