Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

oui!

17 (60.7%)

aucun!

11 (39.3%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Baffler]

All that sounds pretty good, the only change I would propose is changing the ö sound from (boy) to (bow). It just seems like it would be easier to pronounce. Other than that minor quibble, I like these a lot. Do you plan to incorporate them into your font?

I am currently working on verb proposal V 2.0, expect it either tomorrow or Wednesday.

[Loam]

the "ow" sound is already taken by ä, so I needed another sound for ö. The accents are already incorporated into the font.

[Baffler]

the "ow" sound is already taken by ä, so I needed another sound for ö.

How did I miss that?

The accents are already incorporated into the font.

Maybe I should just go home...

[Loam]

I've put the font on DFFD if anyone's interested. It's not exactly set in stone (ha ha) by any means, especially the numerals (which right now are just placeholders), so commentary is appreciated. Also for some reason it's really small, so you might need to use 18-pt just to make it legible.

Maybe one day I'll get back to work on the actual language...

[Baffler]

The usual apologies for taking so long to get something up here. I've modified my proposal somewhat to make it a bit more intelligible for people who aren't native Hebrew speakers

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The original pronouns remain unchanged, and are included for convenience.

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

Verbs are given a suffix to denote tense as before. In this revision, The subject or subject pronoun directly precedes the object or object pronoun, followed by the verb. Verb suffixes are as follows, and are the same for all verbs. I quite like the idea of phasing out the future tense. The conjugation itself has been re purposed to create a subjunctive.

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

A few simple examples...

Urist fights the monster.
Urist ushang bardum.

Catten is drinking
Catten órzod.

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

The smiths were running the furnace.
eshtân sarvesh rurzon.

It will eat the Hammerer.
gesh ùnil debbon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I do like the idea of conjugating verbs for agent, but I am not sure how to go about it. Adding another suffix would make some words difficult to pronounce, or just really long. My working theory is to take my gender endings linked above, and add another set for a neutral and plural case. Or the male/female could just double as the neutral for the purpose of conjugating verbs. Thoughts?

[Rhyme]

If I remember correctly we have 6 vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y) and 6 grammatical persons. What about adding one letter to the end of the verb. Then if it was "I talk" it would be "masosa", while "We talk" would be "masose".

And I don't think that dwarves would care much about gender.

[Loam]

or just really long.

This is pretty much a given when dealing with inflected languages: Latin, for instance, comes up with monstrosities like "appropinquovissimus," which I think means "we might have had been approached," and I understand German has some long word mash-ups. But in reality they aren't that bad, they just look that way to the untrained eye.

If I remember correctly we have 6 vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y). What about adding one letter to the end of the verb. Then if it was "I talk" it would be "masosa", while "We talk" would be "masose".

"Y" technically doesn't appear in the canonical lexicon, so there's really only 5 vowels, although you could include longs or umlauts. But actually Dwarvish words never end in vowels, so I doubt their endings would either. You'd at least have to say "masosam" and "masosen" or something like that.

[Baffler]

appropinquovissimus

That aside, that sounds like a solid idea. Should that be appended to the different tense forms? Or could they be combined somehow? If they can't, does something like this sound good?

Pronouns	First Person	Second Person	Third Person
Singular	-at	-ot	-ût
Plural	-sat	-sot	-sût

[WoobMonkey]

PTW, with great interest.

I've just read the entire thread, and am surprised that nobody has mentioned a simple workaround for all questions of pronouns, verb suffixes, and the like:  what if dwarf society, and therefore linguistic structure, were built around the passive voice?

After all, there are a few constants to dwarf lifestyles:

i) All dwarves (the cursed being a notable exception) are described as 'Slaves to Armok.'  What slave does anyone know of who was a master of hir own destiny?;

ii) The scientific method is based on the passive voice, drawing attention to the verb and its object, rather than to the subject.  Why should the !!SCIENCEY!! method be any different?;

iii) Lives are cheap, and given names are commonly shared.  This seems to point to a lack of concern over specific actors in dwarven society.  It's not important that Urist built the dam; what matters is that the dam was built - this also meshes well with how (correct me if I'm wrong) most players approach DF;

iv) Last, and perhaps most important: Dorfs be different from Humes.

     Examples:

Human English:  'Urist was in the kitchen, cooking a plump helmet roast.'
Dorf:  Plump helmet roast cooked in kitchen; was there: Urist.'

H.E.: 'Somebody had better link up that blasted lever.'
D: 'Lever get linked; anydorf?'

H.E.:  'I'm too sober for work.'
D: 'Work undone; sober me.'


--------

Just thought I'd throw that idea to the crowd, here.  It somehow seems more... dwarfy to me, to try to model Armokian to the way DF plays, rather than trying to model it after our own common usage of language.

OR

Idea was thrown to crowd.  Seems (seen to be) dwarf.  Is made model of game; is not made of us.  By humans heard weird(ly); sense to dwarf.

The second way of putting forth the concept sounds, to me, more likely to come from a bearded, drunken, quarry-bush stinking, dwarven mouth.

Anyways, gonna follow this thread keenly.

[Loam]

Should that be appended to the different tense forms? Or could they be combined somehow?

In Latin, the tense endings and pronominal endings are combined. So the present 3rd person ending "-t" (amat = ama- + -t "he loves") in the imperfect becomes "-bat" (amabat = ama- + -bat, "he was loving"). It also does that for voice (amat "he loves" --> amatur "he is loved").
Pro: It's very concise and keeps words from getting stacked with endings (appropinquovissimus notwithstanding)
Con: LOTS of forms. A first conjugation verb in Latin has 108 endings in the indicative mood alone. Granted, they're very similar to each other and follow a logical pattern (usually - I'm looking at you, 3rd conjugation i-stems) but it's still a lot to keep track of.

As for appending them, Tolkien's Quenya (High Elvish) does that. I believe the word "melintye" means "I love you" (meli- "love"; -n "I [subject pronominal]"; -tye "you [object pronominal]"); the pronominals remain the same even when the tense changes (mellentye "I loved you").
Pro: Fewer forms, and the ability to make whole sentences out of one word.
Con: Vowels make a language smooth. Quenya has lots of vowels (most if not all of the words end in vowels) so smoothness isn;t a problem. Dwarvish (as I said earlier) has no words that end in vowels, and probably no endings that end in vowels either; therefore, all endings would at least be [vowel + consonant]. Too many consonants could lead to a very staccato and nasty sounding language (which seems more suited for Goblins than anyone else).

[RiordanIX]

After all, there are a few constants to dwarf lifestyles:

i) All dwarves (the cursed being a notable exception) are described as 'Slaves to Armok.'  What slave does anyone know of who was a master of hir own destiny?;

ii) The scientific method is based on the passive voice, drawing attention to the verb and its object, rather than to the subject.  Why should the !!SCIENCEY!! method be any different?;

iii) Lives are cheap, and given names are commonly shared.  This seems to point to a lack of concern over specific actors in dwarven society.  It's not important that Urist built the dam; what matters is that the dam was built - this also meshes well with how (correct me if I'm wrong) most players approach DF;

iv) Last, and perhaps most important: Dorfs be different from Humes.

I really like that idea.  I've been following this for a while now, and this sentence structure makes a lot of sense.

The idea of letting the culture of the Dwarfs shape the language is a good idea.

[dwarfhoplite]

I like the passive voice idea. My stance has always been that the language should be easily learned and making it conjugate like Latin doesn't help. I would also suggest to change the second person pronoun to something different from 1st person pronoun like: des, dos

When it comes to sound system, I wish we stayed sounds that can be easily expressed with standard Latin alphabet. After all, standard Latin alphabet is universally accessible to everyone.

[Loam]

The idea of letting the culture of the Dwarfs shape the language is a good idea.

It is an excellent, and indeed the only acceptable idea, except for one thing: there really is no Dwarven culture. Due to the openness of the game everyone plays it whatever way they want, and so the dwarven culture varies from player to player, or even from game to game. Add to this that histories are procedurally generated (and history plays a very big role in culture) and it simply becomes implausible to discover a single "Dwarven culture."
Several people here have said that Dwarvish should be a short, curt language made for efficiency. Personally, my dwarves would eschew such a language, preferring poetry and song and embellished tales of great and glorious deeds to a tongue that was only made for the transfer of information. I'm not saying that's a bad language to create, but it could never be universally acceptable to everyone's idea of the essential Dwarven soul. Some people's Dwarves are hive creatures, operating only for the good of the swarm - that's fine, and they should have a language that can efficiently transmit important information and nothing else; such a language would make excellent use of the passive voice. Some people's Dwarves are individualistic, even glory-seeking like old Anglo-Saxon heroes, and their skalds craft beauteous songs filled with metaphors and kennings and all sorts of completely "unnecessary" figurative devices - this is also fine, but they need a language capable of such poetry, and preferably one that used the active voice to emphasize the heroes, not the deeds.

In short, we can't create a language with a single idea of "Dwarven culture" in mind; we must make a language malleable enough to be used in all kinds of ways - efficient, poetic, and everything in between - so that it can be easily adjusted to anyone's play style and personal opinion of the dwarves.

[WoobMonkey]

I beg to differ. 

There are some constants to dwarf culture, from world to world.  Their vocabulary is limited (cf. shared given names, incredibly literal family names); their works of art are entirely representational and non-imaginative (all engravings/artifact decorations relate directly to specific historical events or group emblems); their sources of happiness and sadness are material in nature ('Urist admired a fine door lately' - NOT 'Urist read an epic poem about the nature of love'); etc.

There is a great deal left to the player's imagination, because the dwarfen imagination is so very, very limited.  As much as we may prefer it otherwise, there is nothing abstract about dwarf culture.

[Baffler]

At least, not yet. Music and poetry are planned features: for the tavern arc, I think. Even now though, we see the rudiments of purely imaginative works in religious artwork and the occasional engraving of a griffon or centaur.