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oui!

17 (60.7%)

aucun!

11 (39.3%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Baffler]

It lives once more! I quite like that font btw, but why are there characters for letters that don't get used anywhere?

[Kaelem Gaen]

Possibly to ease in Language Translation, kinda like how Japanese has Katakana for Foreign Loan words.  I think that's the only place you find an actual symbol for the V line... I think... I'd have to re-look it up.

Guess I was wrong, I thought it had combos you'd only use in loan words.

[Loam]

I put them in for English transliterations. I've updated the font to include special letters for Th, Sh, and Ng, and to have lowercase letters. It looks like a mix between Greek and Cyrillic now (which are very similar to begin with).

Spoiler: Sample Text (click to show/hide)

In reality, a lot of those angles would be curves, but curves are hard to do in the program I use.

[Kaelem Gaen]

I thought one of the topics about dwarven (Alphabet) decided that the Straight Lines would make more sense for etching into stones. Kinda like Ogham from the ancient celts, or at least the Irish group that was part of the Celts.   Granted I believe those inscriptions were found in wood carvings and not Stones.

[Loam]

True, but I imagine dwarves write on paper as well; they could have an "etching" alphabet for carving, and a slightly different (i.e. more curvy) "scripting" alphabet for writing. At least, that's what I was thinking.

[Baffler]

I actually quite like the stark look of it, very dwarfy. This would look pretty good on paper, though it may be a bit difficult to write quickly. Your choice.

[StrangeMood]

And while I'm late to the thread, I hope you seriously consider the importance of dwarven culture on their language.

I think this is a vital point. After a lot of searching I finally found a post I read a long time ago that is a very good read: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=45684.0

[BlackMuffin]

I actually quite like the stark look of it, very dwarfy. This would look pretty good on paper, though it may be a bit difficult to write quickly. Your choice.

This actually brings up a concern of mine as well.

Languages that have hard-to-write characters (like Chinese and Japanese) can be painstakingly lengthy to use in a manner that both looks and reads well. Generally people will find ways to shorten the time it takes to write things, which can make reading manuscript much more difficult. Even in some simpler alphabets such as the Roman alphabet I'm using right now to write this message it can be tough to read a manuscript if someone is trying to write it too quickly (which I do very often, and my handwriting looks like I used a pencil stuck up my anus to write).

Therefore, we need to balance out the visual and time-related aspects of this alphabet. Of course, Loam's the one deciding what the alphabet looks like in the end. Just putting in my two cents.

[Baffler]

Nobody expects engraving on stone or metal to happen quickly though, which is where most writing the dwarves in game do seems to go. Perhaps some kind of shorthand could exist for stenographers. Anyway while that's going on, I've taken the time to come up with a proposal on verb and pronoun forms. One I recover my password, I will put this on the wiki page, but until then, here it is.

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Dwarven pronouns follow a very simple formula, based on number and grammatical person.

Pronouns	First Person	Second Person	Third Person
Singular	kes	kesh	gesh
Plural	kos	kosh	gosh

Verbs are given a suffix to denote tense, and are immediately followed by the subject or subject pronoun as the case may be. The object follows the subject. Verb suffixes are as follows, and are the same for all verbs.

Infinitive	Present	Present Progressive	Preterite	Imperfect	Future
masos	masos	masoszod	masosbod	masoszon	masosbon
to talk	talks	talking	talked	was talking	will talk

A few simple examples...

Urist fights the monster.
Bardum Urist ushang.

Catten is drinking
órzod Catten.

He talked to the dog.
masosbod geshòd idar. (òd comes from my own proposal on gender forms, here)

The smiths were running the furnace.
rurzon eshtân sarvesh.

It will eat the Hammerer.
debbon gesh ùnil.
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[Loam]

It seems strange to have the verb come before the subject, without being otherwise marked for agency. I don't know of any languages that do that, and it might be difficult to understand; we don't know who the agent is until after we know the action, which could be confusing. Some kind of pronominal ending or sound shift might make it easier to understand.

Other than that it looks good, aside from maybe being too similar to English.

[Rhyme]

I'm really interested on this, and I'd like to help. Regarding verbs, here in Spain verbs are modified not only by their tense, but by the agent, so names and agents aren't usually named.  (I sing would be "Canto" while We sing would be "Cantamos" slightly changing the end) I believe that could be used for dwarven. It allows for fast comunication, although it is complex to learn.

[Baffler]

Welcome aboard Rhyme, Spanish verb conjugations were actually a source for my proposal a few posts below, Though I decided to have it require a subject in the way it does now that isn't set in stone. I haven't even come up with all of the verb forms we'd need. I plan to add a subjunctive to my proposal in the near future, and probably explicit command and interrogative forms.

[Rhyme]

Well i still have to read the wiki and the things that have been set up. I proposed using the Spanish conjugations because I believe it will provide a very dwarfy element of shortness. I've always imagined the dwarves as trying to shorten their sentences as much as they could when speaking in an informal way, and with this, because the verb already says which person you're refering to, you only have to give the name of that person or object the first time.

As an example: Imagine you want to say that Urist found gold and then he mined it in two sentences. In the first sentence you would mention Urist, and use the past perfect tense with the conjugation that refers to the singular third person. In the second sentence, because you and the listener already know who you are talking about, you would only have to use the past tense and the verb with that conjugation, with no need for a "he" or naming Urist.

Some might say that having to add a different conjugation for each person already makes the sentence longer, but in my experience with languages (I know 2 languages and I'm learning other 2) adding more words, no matter how short they are, makes the sentence longer than changing the end of a word.

[BlackMuffin]

Welcome aboard Rhyme, Spanish verb conjugations were actually a source for my proposal a few posts below, Though I decided to have it require a subject in the way it does now that isn't set in stone. I haven't even come up with all of the verb forms we'd need. I plan to add a subjunctive to my proposal in the near future, and probably explicit command and interrogative forms.

I understand if you want to leave conjugations as a subject for the future but I still want to put my two cents in right now. The more done the earlier, the better, if you ask me.

In any case, I second what Rhyme suggested, but shortening the sentences may not be that necessary. Dwarven (or Dwarvish?) could be spoken really fast and efficiently even with the use of agents. For example, French speakers in Canada like me tend to speak with blunted vowels (and in my case, really fast), shortening the time and effort it takes to say even a long sentence. Dwarven words also seem rather short as a whole, and the removal of articles makes otherwise long sentences become much shorter than their English counterparts.

Getting back to what Rhyme said, though, changing the end of a word can shorten sentences immensely, but it's rather complex to learn. Therefore, what I suggest is omitting the future tense completely and switching to the Spanish style of conjugation. Therefore, there's less tenses needed, as present tense can also be used for future tense. Sure, context might be needed to define what tense it is, but it works fine in Japanese. So with a little tweaking we might be able to combine what Rhyme said with the idea of removing a tense.

Although, with Dwarven it could sound a little weird, but it seems dwarfy to me that dwarves would try and make their language as short and simple as possible. Their brain capacities have little room for language due to the vast amounts of stray beard hairs, booze, and XxsocksxX floating around in their skulls.

[Loam]

A little off-topic, but I decided on sounds for the accented characters, mostly based on real-world usage:

å: a long o sound; såkzul [soak-zul]

Circumflex (^): indicates a long vowel;
     unâl [u-nahl]
     agêk [a-gayk]
     ogîk [o-geek]
     kôn [koan]
     ûbom [oo-bom]

Acutes and Graves would indicate pitches, which would be basically indistinguishable for us non-Dwarvish speakers.

Umlauts (two dots) represent vowel sound shifts. Because Dwarvish has no diphthongs, I decided to use some of the more common diphthong sounds in most of the shifts:
     ä becomes au (ow)
        umäm [um-owm]
     ë becomes ø (basically, the sound e makes before an r, e.g. "kern" [kørn]; sounds kind of like "uh")
        asën [a-søn / a-suhn]
     ï becomes ai (long i sound in English, e.g. pie)
        sïsal [sai-sal]
    ö becomes oi (boy)
        tömud [toy-mud]