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oui!

17 (60.7%)

aucun!

11 (39.3%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Baffler]

"I drank your ale"

A serious offense indeed

That certainly is useful as a guide on topics to cover, but as you said it would be wiser to create something unique. Also, I have been reading through the old thread, I think we dodged a few bullets already (see: gender shitstorm.)

Now, on to word order. I think I will put up a poll on the choice of the primary set. There are a lot of options for this and I think a poll would make it a bit easier to discuss. Pronunciation also still seems to be an open question. How do I remove the poll that's already there? And can we say we're in agreement on gender?

[_Ivan_]

I skimmed over this and talk about gender popped out at me. I recall reading somewhere in the wiki that a male dwarf will wear a dress without batting an eyelash (sorry, can't find it). It gives the impression that they have little thought about gender so why would it be expressed in their language?

[Owlbread]

Yeah that's exactly what we talked about, but Dwarves wearing dresses and not caring is more of a fact that the game is still a work in progress than a feature. Read through the old thread if you want to see our debate about gender. We settled on a gender neutral pronoun after a long, long discussion.

[Halfling]

@Halfling
It would be really awesome to be able to play DF in Dwarven, but IMO the constraints on the language's development are too much. Why match English? There's a whole world of options out there! What would be possible though is changing the dwarven liaison's messages, I think I saw the strings in the data file somewhere, and possibly the intro message (I know DFallout did it somehow.) That gives it all (or at least most) of the flavor, without making DF more obtuse.

That is indeed freely possible without such limitations. For windows, you'll want the "wtf2text" utility which also comes with instructions. I personally feel the main limitations of sticking to SVO for declarative sentences, adjectives before nouns being possible, adjectives not needing to match the noun they're modifying, and no in-word noun declension for simple transitive verbs is not so great, but it's your decision since I won't be developing this.

However, in my opinion, if this language is such that it matches and also gives legibility to dwarven words and combinations thereof as they are in the vanilla game, then it's interesting. If not, then largely not. The main problem is that you want to make it look like the language of DF, not like an intellectual exercise and a separate project mostly unrelated to the game. So when implementing grammar, you may not want to pad the words too much with prefixes or suffixes, especially ones not derived from the existing game vocabulary, so that it stays recognizable and doesn't end up looking like the latter rather than the former (there's already khudzul if you want to learn what seems like a mostly unrelated dwarf language).

Anyway, wish you success.

[Baffler]

Due to university, I will be offline for the next day or two.

[Button]

I skimmed over this and talk about gender popped out at me. I recall reading somewhere in the wiki that a male dwarf will wear a dress without batting an eyelash (sorry, can't find it). It gives the impression that they have little thought about gender so why would it be expressed in their language?

Grammatical gender has little to do with sociological gender. Grammatical gender is a way of categorizing nouns according to semantic criteria, word form, or sometimes only according to tradition. It just happens that the Indo-European languages most of us are familiar with happen to associate grammatical gender with sociological gender.

To avoid the confusion of the word 'gender', the term 'noun class' is often used instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_classes

[Rokh]

Grammatical gender has little to do with sociological gender. Grammatical gender is a way of categorizing nouns according to semantic criteria, word form, or sometimes only according to tradition. It just happens that the Indo-European languages most of us are familiar with happen to associate grammatical gender with sociological gender.

So true. This puzzles a lot of people. In fact, historically, there have been many languages without grammatical gender whose society wasn't, precisely, "gender-neutral" or egalitarian.

I mean, if you look at the game, every single race seems to be "gender-neutral". I always thought Toady made them like this because, you know, a fortress with half the population standing around taking care of babies while only the other half working would have been much more difficult and frustrating to manage.

But I don't think a real dwarven society would be as egalitarian as Dwarf Fortress makes as think.


BTW, glad to see other conlangers 'round here! 


I've been roaming the forum for almost a year, and I just signed up for this thread. Yes, I'm one of those.

[Loam]

I have begun an individual project of this type. I meant to keep it individual until completion (simply because I like control), but I will provide what help I can. Not that I'm a linguistics genius or anything.

First, as was suggested, I looked at the sounds themselves, making two lists of letter frequency and position:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

a-874 b-304 4058 vowels
^-34 c-53 a-24.6%
:-33 d-421 e-19.3%
'-18 f-50 i-19.4%
`-14 g-436 o-20.1%
@-31 u-16.4%
(-.2%)
e-695 k-485
^-29 l-645 6373 consonants
:-30 m-518 Type:(-1.6%)
'-14 n-524 stops-------36.1% (24%) (+12.1)
`-16 fricatives--25.5% (32%) (-6.5)
affricates--0%    (8%)  (-8)
i-686 r-657 liquids-----20.4% (8%)  (+12.4)
^-37 s-657 nasals------16.4% (12%) (+4.4)
:-31 t-600 Location:(-.7%)
'-17 v-86 bilabial----12.8% (20%) (-7.2)
`-16 labiodental-2.1%  (8%)  (-5.9)
interdental-5.0%  (8%)  (-3)
o-721 alveolar----58.6% (28%) (+30.6)
^-26 z-228 palatal-----4.6%  (20%) (-15.4)
:-32 velar-------16.1% (12%) (+4.1)
'-19 ng-102 glottal-----0%   (4%)  (-4%)
`-18 th-307 Voice: (+-0.0%)
sh-290 voiced------61.7% (60%) (+1.7)
u-609 tth-10 unvoiced----38.3% (40%) (-1.7)
^-30
'-13
`-15


Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

Frontal Medial Final Frontal Medial Final

b 84 142 78 stps 25.0%
t 100 286 214 fric 19.0%
d 94 174 153 affr 0%
c 19 34 0 liqd 10.1%
k 144 189 152 nasl 11.6%
g 102 253 81 glds 0 0 0

f 30 20 0 bilab 8.8%
v 42 44 0 lbdnt 3.3%
th 61 106 140 indnt 2.8%
tth 0 10 0 alvlr 34.9%
s 138 358 161 paltl 2.9%
z 79 94 55 velar 13.0%
sh 63 105 122 glttl 0%

l 107 231 307 voice
r 113 277 267 unvce

m 107 211 200
n 127 194 203
ng 17 45 40


(I think the second list is incomplete)
An explanation:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The first list shows, in the left columns, the number of times each letter appears in the wordlist (note that ng, th, sh, and tth [edh], are single letters). The symbols below the vowels represent diacritics.
The right hand column shows first the percentage of vowels. Below this is a table of consonants, order by type, location in the mouth, and voice. The first number is the percentage of these sounds among dwarvish consonants. The second number is a percentage of sound frequency based on a simplified IPA alphabet. The third number measures the dwarvish frequency against the "standard" frequency to determine a specific "sound" of dwarvish. This is all very sketchy, and probably wrong.

The second list shows, in the left columns, the number of times each letter appears at the beginning, within, or at the end of a word (not counting vowels, for some reason: it was a while back that I made these). The right hand column (incomplete) shows percentages of each type, location, and voice being used in frontal, medial, or final positions.

I then, sort of arbitrarily, decided on the basic mechanics of the language. It would be inflected for word properties, such as person or gender, but word usage would come from sentence structure, as in English. Perceiving, as I did, that the dwarves were a people fond of structure and order, their language I assumed would bear similar characteristics (with allowances for poetry and song).

Nouns were to be inflected for number, possession, and possibly gender (undecided at the moment).
Adjectives would inflect as the nouns they modified, and would follow them directly (or perhaps be appended to them).
Verbs would be inflected for tense, person, and number. Voice would be determined by an ablaut. Moods would be determined by particles, placed before the verb.

I will continue work on this, as a personal project for the time being, but I will report any developments here. I am also willing to accept critique and suggestion.

[Rokh]

I've been thinking... What do you guys thinks of taking out all unnecessary diacritics? I mean, I'm not against diacritics or anything, and it could be cool to play around with them, but I wouldn't use unnecessary diacritics.

I know some languages use diacritics to mark plurality, or gender, or even tense/aspect/mood, but they are very rare. We could take ideas from those thou'

[Loam]

Personally I like the diacritics, mostly for aesthetics: I think they add to the character of the language. Plus, if you know the keyboard shortcuts, they're not too hard to type with.

[lue]

I have now created The Dwarf Fortress Languages Wiki!

If you want to contribute, you'll currently need a wikidot account (though if this truly becomes way too difficult for everyone, I'll enable anonymous people to just edit pages). And yes, I did set the wiki up for potential future projects on the other languages, but I made sure to mention "only Dwarven at this time" wherever I mentioned the "multiple languages" idea of the wiki.

Hope you all can enjoy, excited to continue working with the language and documenting it.

[Owlbread]

I tried to make an account there but for some reason I'm not receiving a confirmation email.

[lue]

Huh. I would suggest the usual spam folder check if you haven't done that already. My only issues consisted of turning on enough javascript in NoScript.

[Baffler]

I'm back! The project I needed to work on wasn't nearly as time consuming as I'd anticipated. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming:

@lue
I just got done signing up for the Dwarven Languages Wiki, but have not yet made any changes. I did read ALL the pages while it's still small enough to do so. Good work btw, . Will I need to register as an admin or something to make changes or am I good after signing up on the page? And is there any way to get rid of the donate page? If not, it should just redirect to Bay12's donations page. Maybe it should even if it can be deleted. Either way, I'll set up a link.

@Button
Thanks for the clarification on noun class, I'll be sure to use the correct terminology in the future. Am I hearing agreement on what we're doing with that? If nobody has any major objection, I am adding it to OP+1.

@Rokh
I'm almost embarrassed by how long I lurked before making an account...
Anyway, welcome aboard.

@Owlbread
Do you have Gmail? Wikidot sent my confirmation email to the social folder for some reason, maybe that's where it ended up.

[Loam]

Okay, I've made some progress. I decided to up the amount of inflections for nouns, creating a few cases. The system roughly follows Latin now.
As I have found in the past that translating a piece helps in creating a language, I decided to translate something into Dwarvish. For this test I chose the prologue to one of our favorite stories, Boatmurdered:

In the year 1050, the dwarven civilization of Kinmelbil, "The Oaken Tomes", exhausted the last of its mines. Driven by lust for gold and rumors of the priceless and all but mythical metal adamantine, a team of seven colonists was dispatched to build a new home for the dwarves of Kinmelbil in the Smooth Points of Pride. The first year of diaries from the ill-fated foreman of the mine was recovered, giving some hint as to the beginnings of the fortress that once stood there, if not its mysterious and presumably gruesome fate...

Ak îdàl MMLZ, osorötovon Kinmelbil faken avuz uläl izodin. Sterîsethìl nethgönàlaz limìlbar van tithlethìraz kelîanteshkathin van latholéthin kelïdorin, tomêm zizmolösasinis goshâthen bar aban bomöir tovoninis Kinmelbilin ak Umaräkil Nikuz. Îd uthar atosinis erarin enem-taremin avuzin atölén, omamath tul nabsalin ikutathinis geshudin izod savotâng sûl, am åsh taremïshoveth van gimbir egdûbesh izodin…

Literal translation:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the year one thousand fifty, the dwarven civilization Kinmelbil drained its last mine. Driven by lust for gold and by rumors about the priceless and most mythical metal adamantine, a group of seven colonists was sent for to build a new home of Kinmelbil’s dwarves in Umaräkil Nikuz. The first year of diaries of the ill-fated leader of the mine was found, giving some hint of the beginnings of the fortress that had stood there, if not its mysterious and presumed gruesome fate…

Analysis (quite long):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ak îdàl MMLZ: a prepositional phrase of location (in time), preceded by the preposition ak (in). Îdàl is in the ablative case. MMLZ is an abbreviation or numeral system for maglod-lataz (one thousand fifty).

osorötovon Kinmelbil faken avuz uläl izodin: a pretty standard sentence, with basic subject-verb-object structure. Osorötovon demonstrates modifier coupling: osor (kingdom) is coupled with tovon (dwarf) with a stem -ö-, based on the gender of osor (masculine; o-class). Kinmelbil is an appositive, and so agrees with osor in case. Faken is the verb. To the infinitive fak (drain) is appended the ending -en, showing the person, number, and tense of the verb (third singular past). Avuz uläl is an uncoupled noun and its modifier (uncoupled because uläl begins with u). uläl also agrees with avuz in case and gender (hence uläl instead of ulol). Izodin is in the genitive case (ending -in), showing possession. As a pronoun, it agrees with osor in gender.

Sterîsethìl nethgönàlaz limìlbar van tithlethìraz kelîanteshkathin van latholéthin kelïdorin: a long participial phrase, beginning with sterîsethìl, which comes from sterus (drive). To get the perfect passive participle “driven” we must first:
   Make it passive: sterus becomes sterîs.
   Add the participial adjective ending -eth.
Sterîsethìl is also in the ablative case, because it agrees with the agent in the passive-voice clause that follows (the agent is unstated; it is osor from the previous sentence).
Nethgönàlaz shows another ablative use, this time with the particle az. This use shows causation (by lust). Limìlbar shows purpose with the particle bar (for gold); also, note that limul (gold) does not become limulìl – the -ul is cancelled out by the -ìl ablative ending.
Tithlethìraz is a plural causal ablative, hence the ending -ìr not -ìl. Kelîanteshkathin is genitive of reference: the ending -in that would be found on kel in the genitive case becomes -î- when the modifier anteshkath is appended; anteshkath receives the ending -in to agree with kelin. Latholéthin is a stand-alone modifier of kelin (hence genitive case). It is also superlative – “most mythical” – shown with the -oléth ending. Kelïdorin is an appositive of kelin.

tomêm zizmolösasinis goshâthen: a passive clause. Zizmolösasinis is a genitive of composition (a group made up of seven colonists). -inis is plural. Goshâthen, infinitive gosheth, is a passive verb: passivity is marked (in 1st conjugation verbs) by alteration of the last vowel sound, according to a pattern – thus, -e- becomes -â-. -en is as before, the simple past singular ending.

bar aban bomöir tovoninis Kinmelbilin ak Umaräkil Nikuz: an infinitive phrase denoting purpose. Bar here is free-standing, followed by the infinitive aban (for the purpose of constructing). In bomöir, note that, unlike uläl above, the adjective ir is appended with the stem  -ö-: in general u is seen as a weaker vowel sound that cannot be coupled without elision. Tovoninis is genitive, denoting possession (a home of the dwarves, belonging to the dwarves). In ak Umaräkil Nikuz, note that the place name does not receive an ablative ending.

Îd uthar atosinis erarin enem-taremin avuzin atölén: a simple clause with lots of genitives. Atosinis is genitive of composition (year made up of diaries). Erarin is genitive of origin; enem-taremin may either be seen as a modifier of erarin, or as a genitive of description (a leader of ill-fate). Avuzin is a possessive (the mine’s leader). Atölén is a 2nd conjugation verb and so forms its passive differently. Instead of an ablaut of the final vowel, it has somewhat different endings (-én instead of just -en).

omamath tul nabsalin ikutathinis geshudin: the first part of a participial phrase, and the apodosis of a negative conditional. Omamath is a present active participle of omam (give), with ending -ath (contrast past ending -eth). Nabsalin is a partitive genitive with tul (some of a hint). Ikutathinis is a genitive of reference (about the beginnings). Geshudin is possessive.

izod savotâng sûl: a relative clause describing geshudin. Note that the pronoun izod is used both generally and as a relative pronoun, agreeing with geshud in gender. Savotâng is pluperfect (had stood): the infinitive savot receives the past ending -en, made perfect with -g (-eng), and pluperfect with the ablaut changing -e- to -â-.

am åsh taremïshoveth van gimbir egdûbesh izodin: the protasis of the aforementioned conditional. Am (if) is negated by åsh (not). Taremïshoveth is standard coupling. Egdûbesh (presumed) is an adverbial participle modifying gimbir (gruesome). Rather than the adjectivial ending -eth it receives the adverbial -esh. The ablaut is the same (from egdob).

Again, it's far from done, but this is a framework at least. I'm not quite set on all aspects of it, so if anyone has any ideas, they are appreciated.