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oui!

17 (60.7%)

aucun!

11 (39.3%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Baffler]

That's just fine, I've never taken any kind of class, other than learning Spanish in high school.

I think I will make a proposition here on the gender question...

Most words don't have any explicit gender. You can't have a male or female boat, after all, but for some things it could be useful to specify gender, like saying "tom" instead of "boy cat." At the same time the Dwarven language seems pretty receptive to prefixes, suffixes, and compound words (see section on adjectives.) To stay with the same example, cat currently translates to "kun." To speak of cats in general that would be fine, but Urist wants to talk specifically about a female cat. He could manage by saying "aral kun" (literally: woman cat) but that can be quite a mouthful. I propose the addition of male and female suffixes, such that...

Cat           --> Kun
Male Cat    --> Kunòd
Female Cat --> Kunòn

The grave marks in this case denote that the sound is stressed. This also distinguishes it in this example from a similar word: "kunon" meaning hobby.

[Button]

I won't volunteer to do any of the work here, because I get irrationally attached to conlangs I work on, and I would take over the project and start defending it from any other potential contributors while snarling.

But I have a BA in linguistics, some experience with constructed languages, and would be happy to help if you have any questions about properties of language, or whether or not something makes sense.

Observations on dwarven as it exists in-game:

• No definite article
• Adjectives are extremely synthetic
• Genitive case exists, but is not marked morphologically. This is very unusual given the high degree of synthesis between adjectives and the nouns they describe, and implies that modern dwarven is the outgrowth of recent heavy cultural exchange between speakers of a polysynthetic language and speakers of an extreme isolating language. Alternately, since we're not describing a human language, in dwarven universal grammar genitive case is the unmarked/base case, which would play well with the idea of dwarves as greedy/possessive.
• Singular/plural distinction is probably not obligate, and is almost certainly attached to the verb when it is present (as otherwise it would be part of the noun phrases we are already able to see).
• Word order of noun phrases with complements is head-final, but word order with adjuncts is head-first, which also lends credence to the 'recent heavy cultural exchange' theory. Unless dwarven UG is sufficiently different that a possessive phrase is not a kind of noun phrase, but its own thing, with the possessor as head.
• Judging by the strictness of word order observation in our samples, I would guess that its sentence-level word order is equally strict. However because of the heavy typological irregularities above I can't say what the S/V/O order is likely to be.

[Snaake]

True gender-neutral language would have no gender differentiation in words. Maybe a word addition. Like Dwarf-female and dwarf-male. And sheep-male and sheep-female.

Yes.

You whacky Germanic/Romance language speakers and your noun genders....

eg. Finnish has no noun genders. In some words for professions and such, there are suffixes. Such as "-ess" as sometimes used in English (stewardess, etc.). Or it's possible, if a bit clunkier, to just add woman- or man- as a prefix (English equivalent is eg. "male nurse", which isn't really a prefix, but you get the idea). I think for dwarves, neutral being the assumed form, and some rarely used suffixes and/or just adding another gender-defining word to the compound.

...Also nice would be avoiding a mirror image of English's lexicon. We could separate the meaning of "that" like in French, as a simple example.

English: "I enjoyed that." and "We know the method that will let us win."
French: "J'ai aimé ça." and "Nous savons le mode que laissera-nous gagner." (apologies for any possible French language mistakes, natives of the language)

We could also combine meanings that are represented by different words in English. My point here is that the Dwarven-to-English and vice-versa dictionaries shouldn't have easy lives .
...

It's been a while since I properly studied French, but I might translate the latter sentence to "We know the method which..." as well. But I see your point. Are there any cases in the existing English-Dwarven dictionary where one word translates into two different words (in either direction), or is it just a one-to-one mapping?

[Baffler]

It maps one-to-one... in a way. Dwarven words as they stand have no distinction between forms, see the death, die, died example. I can't think of any others off the top of my head but I know they exist. No dwarven word shares multiple english translations, and I haven't noticed any cognates either, though that is to be expected.

I think for dwarves, neutral being the assumed form, and some rarely used suffixes and/or just adding another gender-defining word to the compound.

The system I proposed a few posts back is essentially this. The suffixes aren't needed but can be included if the speaker thinks it's worth noting. As always though, any ideas are welcome.

[lue]

I like the idea of gender being something that's mentioned only when necessary, and gender-neutral being default.

Here's my rough idea of the pronunciations. Feel free to adjust as you see fit. Most of these come from either English, German, or French, along with other bits from other languages or made up as needed.

Spoiler: Basic Phonology (click to show/hide)

Letter | IPA transcribed sound
a    ɑː
b    b
c    k
d    d
e    ɛ
f    f
g    ɡ
h    h
i    iː
k    k
l    l
m    m
n    n
o    o
r    ʁ
s    s
t    t
u    uː
v    v
z    z
à    a
á    aː (?)
â    ɑ  (?)
ä    ɛ
å    oː
è    e
é    ɛ
ê    ɛː
ë    ə
ì    i
í    iː
î    ɨ
ï    i  (?)
ò    œ  (?)
ó    ɔ
ô    o  (?)
ö    œ
ù    uː (?)
ú    uː (?)
û    uː (?)

Digraphs:

th   ð/θ
ch   x
sh   ʃ
ng   ŋ
mg   ɱ

(?) means I didn't like what I picked too much. These should either be most susceptible to change sounds, or alternatively be grammar-change-only diacritics, or maybe even removed from the transcription of dwarven entirely.

Also, if we *really* want to make the letter c as terrible as it is English, I propose (modern?) Latin's method: it's pronounced tʃ instead before i and e. car -> kar, ceiling -> tʃeiling. But please don't. If we change the pronunciation of "c", I'd rather it be one consonant sound not yet in the list.

Amazingly, there's no word for "dwarf" in the language!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

How about armoktilat, for "armok child". Maybe throw in some diacritics, årmöktilat.

By the way, I approve of the German-style construction of words (specifically, stringing a bunch of words together into one new word.)

Last thought: perhaps there should be a wiki or something to keep track of this information? The forum's a great place to talk about the language, but I feel it's perhaps not the absolute best way to keep track of currently decided information.

[Gentlefish]

I think dwarves, being as neat and orderly as they are with their stocks, would keep their language so as well. Heh.

So for sentence order, maybe Subject/Object/Verb? That's make it sufficiently different from English. "I drove the car" becomes "I car drove."

Or, in more dwarven manner, "I goblin killed."

For words with more than one object, as in, "I dropped the kitten in the magma", I believe it should turn out like "I kitten dropped magma" to keep the main object, the one being acted on, in the proper place and describing what happened to it.

Thus, if a dog dropped said kitten, it would be "Dog kitten dropped magma."

[Baffler]

@lue
If that table is your suggestion, I agree mostly. My only sticking point is on the subject of the letter c. It isn't a very common sight (at least in my admittedly cursory inspection, though it does turn up occasionally.) It could probably even be absorbed entirely by the letters k and s, if we so choose, but I am a bit reluctant to get behind changing existing words.

Also, what is that QR code?

@Pufferfish
There are a lot of different directions we could go with that, but it's rare for a language to only use one form. Then again it would fit in with Dwarves' culture to use only one or possibly two forms. Perhaps we could have the "primary" form be SOV, and use another (VSO perhaps) as a "high" variant for formal prose or speech. IIRC most variation in existing language of the order arises from changes in tense.

[Halfling]

Very nice little project! Languages with completely free word order exist too.

If you wanted to make the language such that you could actually implement it in the game in a mod in full, which would be relatively easy, then you would want to do it as Chinese does things: by extra words - there's no real difference to suffixes and prefixes other than in typology.

So you would have e.g. "Did you murder Urist, the cheesemaker?" as e.g.
You murder [past tense marker word] cheese [genitive marker word] make [agent indicating word] [genitive marker word] Urist [question word]
using preceding genitives to also mark compounds.

If we imagine "you is" "dvoral", past tense marker is "-th" from geth (past), genitive marker is -reb from own (sanreb), and agent indicating word is -cim from ducim (work), and question marker is lal from kulal (wonder[verb]), then that would be using separate words:
"Dworal usán geth shokmug sanreb dobar ducim sanreb Urist kulal?"
and using short form of the words as suffixes, like a synthetic language like German or Finnish:
"Dworal usanth shokmugrebdobarimreb Urist lal?"

[lue]

@Halfling: Seeing that dwarven sentence made me smile, for some reason.

@Baffler: The QR code is a space-separated list of the number "42", repeated 42 times.

I only brought up the "c" issue because it's such an annoying letter in English. You usually avoid it in transliterating other languages or assign it just one sound. That's why I'd prefer to do one of the following:

• Make "c" = "k" all the time. (As my proposed initial list does).
• Assign "c" some other sound (e.g. c = tʃ (English "ch", as in "change")).
• Remove the "c" from the transliteration of the dwarven language.

Also, in cases where I gave vowels differing only in diacritics the exact same sound, those could potentially either be grammar-based (instead of sound-based) diacritics, or just a case of alternate spellings. Something like "More noble topics of discussion tend to write ú as û, as if pointing up towards nobility" perhaps. I know that's a terrible example, but better cases would come if/when we decide regional changes to the language. Hill dwarven speech is lazy and merges diacritical vowels into diacritic-less ones, etc. etc.

On that note, I propose that this initial work is on "Standard Dwarven", i.e. the "official" form of Dwarven.

I like the idea of different word order as an aspect of register (how you communicate with different kinds of people). As well the possibility of no real word order. Or anything in-between.

Some people have already tried that.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=108579.0
This thread should give you some ideas to work with.

I have to remember to read through this thread, preferably soon. It'd be a shame to throw away 25 pages of preexisting discussion.

Edit: This discussion so far has shown me that I need to gain a better familiarity with linguistics (a passing knowledge on par with Button's above post, at least) to discuss more complex and intricate topics. And to keep my one conlanging book on standby .

[lue]

If nobody objects, I'd like to setup a wiki to keep track of this information (wikidot, wikia, better?). Reasons being

• Scrolling through all the posts so far will only get worse with time. While the first two posts will most certainly contain all the currently decided info, finding if someone has mentioned some aspect of the language before that's yet to be set in stone will be decidedly less easy (there is the "this topic" search, but still...)
• Having a series of pages on various chunks of the language feels nicer (IMO) than all the pertinent info crammed into a couple of pages.
• Easy for anyone to edit anything that's been suggested. My basic phonology list, for instance, would be more open (and easier) to change on a wiki page anyone can edit.

Of course the lively discussions would still happen here. But having a separate reference to what's been/being discussed can make life a lot easier, especially for newcomers to the future 20/30 page thread I suspect this will become.

I suspect I really want this to happen soon because I'm just paranoid about having a project this massive being kept as "just" a sequence of forum posts for very long .

[Maw]

You could probably branch off the DF wiki?

[Halfling]

Notably, if you get a following, you'll eventually be able to translate DF itself into dwarven language by editing the binary. On Linux and OSX you can just use strings+sed (assuming Apple did not horribly mutilate the UNIX below so it shuts up, stays in the corner and doesn't scare people looking for an expensive toy... ahem) to freely edit most of the human-readable strings, and for Windows you can download and run a third party .executable some Russians made to do the same... Thread in modding forum.

So it would be possible to play DF in fully native mode if you had a fully featured dwarven language.

This is provided the language has at least the following constraints, which make it similar to English since you can't change the grammar this way:
1. Adjectives can come before the noun that they describe
2. Nouns and adjectives are not inflected in the word, like English. Another word that comes before or after to change their role is possible --
Datan [subject marker word] [topic marker word] killed Urist [object marker word] is possible, but not I-nominal-topic killed Urist-accusative.
3. The language must be roughly equivalent in written length to English, letter for letter. It can be shorter but it shouldn't be a lot longer. This is because making the strings longer than original can cause segmentation faults, normally terminating the program.

Edit: also, word order should optimally be SVO for that in declarative clauses such as "x strikes y in the z". Custom verb conjugation however is supported in the raws for attack verbs.

[Owlbread]

I actually created a basic grammatical structure for a Dwarven language that allows you to string sentences together in the past, present and future tense, as well as different cases and positives and negatives. It's caveman stuff though, nothing fancy, based on Indo-European languages, namely Gaelic, Russian and German/English. It would be wiser to create something unique, but I can post it again if you like. I've already posted most of it in that Edification of a Dwarven Language thread (where we debated stuff like genders for about 10 pages). I usually showed case/tense through particles that would be stuck onto words.

[Baffler]

@lue,
From those two, I would prefer wikidot, if only because I like its formatting slightly better.

On the subject of "c," I have no real preference between options 1 and 2, but as I said before, I dislike the idea of changing existing words. Your idea on hill dwarves is interesting, and makes one wonder how Deep Dwarven dialects would sound. It's a bit early to talk about them though, since we know so little about them. This we are building now will be the standard "Fortress Dwarven" dialect, if nobody objects.

@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.

@Owlbread
If you want to put it up go ahead, but if not that's fine.

[Owlbread]

I'll see about putting up how far I got in a spoiler. Dwarfhoplite is the other man to speak to, he did a lot of work on the language.

This was his summary of what we came up with together:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I didn't formalize it because it is ton of work to go through the list of possible prepositions. I proposed the concept of it to be discussed.

To summarise what we have now:

Pronouns:
As it is, there is no gender to pronouns (masculine/feminine)
singular 1st person = koroz
singular 2nd person = daroz
singular 3rd person = beroz
plural 1st person =  koroztun
plural 2st person = daroztun
plural 3rd person = beroztun


Verbs:
Verbs conjugate in tense, person and in count, two last of which mean that it is not always necessary to use the subject pronoun.
To tell the person of the verb, the pronoun is used as a suffix. To emphasize the verb, the verb body is simply repeated.
we love = aval-koroztun
we love a lot = aval-aval-koroztun

To tell the tense of the verb we use prefixes.
As it is, there are the "general form" and the "continuous form".

present tense general: -unga    (I strike the earth = ungabodkoroz) note that the other "a" disappears.
present tense continuous: -un   (I'm striking the earth = unabodkoroz)

imperfect tense general: -ulga
imperfect tense continuous: -ul

perfect tense general: ?
perfect tense continuous: ?

pluperfect tense general: ?
pluperfect tense continuous: ?

future tense general: -urga
future tense continuous: -ur
 

Adjectives
Adjectives are placed at the end of the word that the adjective is describing.
To emphasize the adjective, it is repeated (much like verbs).
In plural words the plural suffix "-tun" is placed after the adjective.
The "-il" suffix is used to make adjectives from nouns (blood = nazush) (bloody= nazush-il)

bloody dagger= urist-nazush-il
very bloody dagger= urist-nazush-il-nazush-il
bloody daggers= urist-nazush-il-tun

Grammatical cases
This is probably the biggest difference from English. I'm just copying Owlbread here.
The "case ending" as they're often called could actually be "case prefixes" in Dwarfish, so you could have:

nominative: *none*
accusative: -ak
dative: -am
genitive: - az
vocative: -af
instrumental: -ag

I also recommend using the dative for the indirect object i.e. "I give the book to you", "book" is the direct object and takes the accusative and "you" take the dative because you are the indirect object. That's what they do in German anyway, and I think it really frees up the sentence structure.


Examples

Accusative:
They love bloody daggers: beroztun avalberoztun akuristnazushiltun

Dative:
They sing a song to them: beroztun osalberoztun akosal amberoztun

Genitive:
The book of lies: thikut azostun

Vocative:
Urist!: Afurist

Instrumental:
Geshud walks with Monom: berdangeshud agmonom

I can try to dig up more, I made a list of possible prepositions but it was enormous. I'll give you a few examples of some insults you can create with that structure:

"Ulorkroz akmabdug azdrosh" - "I drank your ale"
"Urzatkroz akertun azdrosh" - "I will stab your eyes"
"Urdebuthgurtun akunol azdrosh" - "Demons will eat your soul"
"Urarrosnomtun akdrosh mol(?) dum azmamgoz" - "May the gods throw you into the mouth of a dragon"
"Zurgastdrosh aktig aglibash azmonom" - "Cleave a shite with a paper axe".
"Undrosh ererfath azreked azanglinem" - "You are a corpulent, red-faced sack of butter"

Those are actually written in the informal register rather than the formal register.