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oui!

17 (60.7%)

aucun!

11 (39.3%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Couchmonster]

Like in Boston Legal I expect dwarfs to always start with their name!
Danny Crane!
Urist McUrist!

[Baffler]

Apologies for my disappearance, I had some computer trouble.

@lue
I was just going to leave the poll up until a new one came along. Or at least until a couple days pass with nobody voting on it.

As far as etymology goes, I see languages as having been given to all the different races by their creator(s), since they all just kinda drop in from nowhere (evidenced by the "First of their kind" thing they get.) They have a fully developed culture and language at the beginning of time, so that would best be explained in-game as them being created that way. The other way you could approach the question is to say that the races are the descendants of older groups that either no longer exist or aren't recognizable as precursors to modern races. There are pretty big differences between the different languages so I it can safely be assumed that their root languages were geographically isolated or at least came from different sources. That still doesn't solve the question of the "original" but I'll move on before I write an essay on Dwarven anthropology.

All that said, etymology is a good way to go about expanding the dictionary no matter how we decide to approach it elsewhere. Some words should definitely be completely new to give it some variety and just generally fill it out, but more esoteric words or terminology ought to be combinations along the stripe of Halfling's biology terms. That's basically what they are IRL but with latin/greek roots. It's a moot point, but if any language in DF is the language of science it's Dwarven. It would be nice to see humans borrowing terms for chemistry and engineering from Dwarven. Elves would probably have a slip in biology, but I'm getting ahead of myself again.

[Halfling]

That's basically what they are IRL but with latin/greek roots.

That's a really strange way to put it. In many languages, that's exactly what and how they are. In English you prefer to use foreign roots a lot rather than native ones - I don't know all the world's languages but isn't this more an exception than the rule?

Although these days a lot of vocabulary is also borrowed directly from English into many languages, because native development can't keep up with science and technology, the international language of which is English. That's a different phenomenon and one that doesn't apply to discussion of a dwarven language, I think.

[Loam]

For my word tovon, "dwarf," I began from the modern Dwarvish word döbar, which means "to create." I traced this to an Old Dwarvish root dvor-, meaning "to make" or "to do," and by several transformations (dvor --> dovor --> dovon --> tovon, or so) I came up with a word essentially meaning "the Created Ones," a name the Dwarves adopted out of humility before their Creator.

But generally, unless there is an obvious derivation in meaning, when I need make a new word I just use DF Lang to make a new wordlist and use words from that. That is, however, the lazy way of doing things.

[Baffler]

I see how... odd and rambly that post is written looking back at it. My point was that words are often drawn from another older language, but no older language exists in DF to draw on, so words would either just be entirely fabricated, based on changes to existing words, or drawing from another existing race's language. The races' languages are pretty different though so it is safe to assume borrowing of this sort happens very rarely, if at all. I seem to have missed the point of the discussion anyway.

[Owlbread]

Maybe in worldgen, languages could be procedurally generated, and as time goes on they change depending on the cultures/civilisations that the language is spoken by/exposed to. That way you would get ancient dialects of the same language, or even different languages like latin, vulgar latin and then french.

[Button]

Maybe in worldgen, languages could be procedurally generated, and as time goes on they change depending on the cultures/civilisations that the language is spoken by/exposed to. That way you would get ancient dialects of the same language, or even different languages like latin, vulgar latin and then french.

 

A not Dwarf Fortress-related version of this challenge is accepted.

[Rokh]

Made a Wikidot account, still getting into it. Gonna create a page for my proposition too, which will be quite empty at the beggining.

[Baffler]

Bad news. My internet connection will be... intermittent for the next few days because of hardware upgrades and my service provider's general unhelpfulness, so I will probably disappear for awhile. In the meantime and in an effort to get discussion going again, what do people think about verbs? How should they be conjugated? How should tense be noted? How should new words be created? I will close the poll on word order sometime tomorrow if I get a chance, or as soon as possible after that, and put up a new one.

Cheers!

[Rokh]

BTW, has anybody managed to get any wordlist out of the raws?

[Halfling]

@Rokh, The list of Dwarvish words is in language_DWARF.txt.

@Baffler, about verbs, there's 3 proposals on the wiki detailing ideas on them and a 4th being written with also a section on them.

About your plan, I think if you do all by polls (that are tight to the point of being random - 1 vote deciding the word order? come on) rather than by design goals, it will end up like a face where one random person picked the eyes, another the nose, a third the mouth, and nobody will love it. Even democratic government doesn't work like that. Couldn't it rather be that who cares about it enough to argue can post their opinion and then it's decided on judgment? Works well, and would be twice more appropriate here, where you're trying to create one singular product where the parts of it should work well together.

If there's going to be a vote then it should definitely not be on each and every one of those things. Rather on what people want from the language in more general terms, which the mechanics can then work towards. Sorry to tell you your business, just voicing an opinion.

[Owlbread]

I think there should be a fairly basic form of established Dwarfish that goes through procedural generation in worldgen to establish dialects. These dialects then change from civilisation to civilisation, eventually forming new languages/language varieties if they're left for long enough/isolated enough.

[Halfling]

I think there should be a fairly basic form of established Dwarfish that goes through procedural generation in worldgen to establish dialects. These dialects then change from civilisation to civilisation, eventually forming new languages/language varieties if they're left for long enough/isolated enough.

You first need a language file for every civilization (just let all dwarf civs be separate copy entities which maximally create one civ). Then you could do something like this very easily with any scripting language:

Code: [Select]

For [every year of history],
   Corrupt 1 word procedurally according to preset rules
For [every year of peaceful contact with at least one civ],
   For [every civ in peaceful contact],
      with prob: (other civ pop)/(own civ pop + other civ pop)
         overwrite 1 word of same translation with a corrupt version of other civ word
      with prob: (other civ pop)˛/100(own civ pop + other civ pop)˛
         overwrite words of 1 symbol of same translation with other civ words
provided you could extract all the needed data from history, which is tricky. DF knows all the data needed at every point since it knows who is an enemy of whom, how many people are alive at any point, and what their allegiance is.

[Rokh]

Halfling, thank you. By the way, I think pretty much the same way as you. Given into account how complex this can become, using only polls looks a bit inadequate. But I'm sure Baffler didn't mean we should only use polls.

PD: Another little thing, am I the only one whose computer doesn't recognize some characters in the wordlist?

[Halfling]

Your computer probably does, but it's probably not your operating system default, unless you're using something obsolete. The encoding seems to be neither Western ISO nor Unicode, not even Windows, but rather MS-DOS CP 850. You can select this when opening the file in LibreOffice as DOS/OS2-850. Under Firefox it's "Western (IBM-850)".

To save everyone's time, here's viewable in UTF-8 instead.
http://pastebin.com/uRbfweAM

Also, the words are NOT completely alphabetically sorted by default. Here's a list of words with the file header and tokens removed, and just the complete word list with translation in alphabetical order:
http://pastebin.com/QhSAEhQc

Now it's also easy to see there are currently 2173 words.