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oui!

17 (60.7%)

aucun!

11 (39.3%)

Total Members Voted: 28

[Rokh]

I think I love you...

You were right, I tried opening the text file with OpenOffice with the "Western Europe (DOS/OS2-850/International)" character set, and everyhting seems right now. My bad

But what you uploaded will definetely be very useful. Thanks for your time


PD: Sounds funny, but I've realized EVERY SINGLE WORD ends in a consonant

PD2: The guy who's making Ultima Ratio Regum says he's done 16 fantasy languages by hand, and then asigned each one to a civ. Interesting, huh? I think I gonna Pm him.

[Baffler]

@Halfling
My intent was for people to vote, then come and argue their position, which I think you'll agree is a fairly reasonable expectation. I could have made it a bit more explicit that that was my expectation, but I agree it isn't a great metric: it was never intended to be. Also, that word list is really damn useful. I'll set up a link on the wiki if there isn't one already.

Edit: And there it is, I've put it under the languages page.

[Rokh]

Okay, so I won't have internet for the next few days, and then college starts, so maybe I won't come for some time. However, I'll keep working in the shadows.

Good luck!

[dwarfhoplite]

Hold your horses.

I would suggest to think about the motif of creating this language. Is it going to be another random trivial detail in the whirlpool of the simulation or is it supposed to serve the community as a forum, and possibly ingame language.
Personally I support the idea of it being a community language.

You have to be realistic. The language has to be fun, standardized and learnable. If you plan anyone to ever use the language you just have to forget about dialects and non-Latin alphabets and many overlaping honor systems alike. I read (admittedly not much) about the current suggestions and while they are fascinating, they are not accessible to the already small group of people who are even remotely interested in learning Dwarfish.

[Owlbread]

I put our work forward as a suggestion, dwarfhoplite, or at least as far as we got with it. I agree with you though that it should be a community language, it may even help publicise the game. Remember we talked about it being like Klingon? Where we could even have Dwarfish language sub-forums on the boards?

[Halfling]

Well, how should they be made more accessible?

If you ignore the honorifics - which you're free to do - then while the others have a lot of different endings and forms words will need to take, my proposition at least is a language with a lot less inflection to learn than Spanish or even English. Just a word order and written with a Latin alphabet, anything resembling it should be easier to learn than any natural language. (Honorifics and particles generally make a language simpler too, consider how difficult it is to form a polite question in English as opposed to just adding a few "empty word" particles to a normal sentence)

I'm not saying it's that good. It's actually pretty not well thought out, I just wanted to show you could do it that way. But what's your proposal for simplification?
I guess you would want compound words and genitives to work the same as in English, but that's impossible while conforming to how the language is in-game, because there's no marker for "of" in DF Dwarfish as you see it there.

[Owlbread]

Have you read our suggestion Halfling? I believe we have two registers, one formal and one informal, but it's a bit more complicated than that. I can't really explain it without going into a lot of depth, but it involves a combination of familiarity and formality to create different meanings. I think our genitives are similar to Russian, but they're prefixes rather than changes to the word endings.

I remember you were concerned that it would be difficult to recognise the real Dwarfish "words" within the text, but they're all intact. We didn't change any word endings or anything like that, they've just got little prefixes and suffixes added onto them.

[dwarfhoplite]

Yes I noticed. It was fun to see our efforts there, thank you.

[Halfling]

Have you read our suggestion Halfling? I believe we have two registers, one formal and one informal, but it's a bit more complicated than that. I can't really explain it without going into a lot of depth, but it involves a combination of familiarity and formality to create different meanings. Our genitives are similar to Russian.

I've browsed it. Absolutely no disrespect to your effort, but isn't that a lot more complex than just adding a few words to emphasize the defined meaning? Your words have a huge amount of declension and conjugation. It's more aesthetic but isn't it harder to learn like hoplite criticized?

What I mean about genitives is this: Your proposal lists "thikut azostun" as the proper way to say "the book of lies". This is obviously incorrect or a different language, because when I start my Dwarf Fortress, and in the embark screen put in "the book of lies", it reads so:

[Owlbread]

We took the cheeky liberty of adding new features to the language that are not in the game currently. It is difficult to build a language around the structure that is already in the game because there isn't really a structure, it's a placeholder until Toady gets around to working on languages (which may be a long while away).

There is a lot of declension and conjugation, but that actually means you don't have to use as many words, as in Slavic tongues. For instance, a sentence with 6 words can be cut down to 3. I found languages like that easier to learn for some reason, I am not sure if you would find that. There is, however, virtually no verb conjugation. It's a different kind of thing, really. Maybe if you try to learn some of it to speak to us you could give us your impression? Perhaps I shall try to learn yours more and come back to you on it.

[Halfling]

It resembles Russian, so it would not be hard for me to learn. But that's not how you properly evaluate complexity

>We took the liberty of adding new features to the language that are not in the game currently. It is difficult to build a language around the structure that is already in the game because there isn't really a structure

I disagree with your assessment. There obviously is a structure since statements like "The Book of Lies" are possible. The translation, however, does not include these features in a similar way to some Indo-European languages. Summarizing therefore that you can't work with it comes from an extremely limited perspective. In many East Asian languages you have a very similar setup where you have neither plurals nor declension in the word. (But I will agree with you that is probably not Toady's final intention, but it's what's there now)

For example if you here make the simple rules that:
- marking plurality for a noun or adjective is optional (whether it be that many book or book-s is how you optionally mark it)
- the basic genitive clause is x y (this needs to be voiced somehow - glottal stop, tone, changes in last phoneme of first word etc)
- the basic compounds are xy (and you allow them to be either adjective-noun or noun-noun)
then this is completely grammatical and coherent:



The requirements for this are that 1) you work with what is already there and 2) you forget the hidden presupposition that Dwarfish is a European language.


Learning my proposal might be a waste of time as I'm rethinking the features already. The complex compounds need to go, they're very hard to learn.

[Owlbread]

Indeed, our suggestion was far too Indo-European. I have no knowledge of non Indo-European languages, so I am rather out of my depth in that respect. I explained that though through the fact that we didn't have any scholars of East-Asian languages or Semitic ones to help us (though Finnish is Uralic). If you can continue to help us and the rest through that though with your knowledge that would be fantastic.

Part of me is inordinately pleased that our Dwarfish resembles Russian, I'm not sure why.

[dwarfhoplite]

I'm not a linguist. I know nothing about on how to assess complexity. But I think I see your point.
European style language would be more accessible because I-E languages are much more familiar to most. Even if they were theoretically more complicated. I would still try not to make Dwarfish too similar to major European languages.
I see nothing wrong with familiarity with I-E unless it's too close, because that would be boring.

The alphabet should in my opinion be stripped down to that of English because otherwise most won't be able to write it.

When it comes to dialects: let the dialect be every speaker's accent.

Uralic languages rely on extensive use of cases, which is not the way to go in my opinion. It would make Dwarfish step out of Europe though.

[Halfling]

I think there's also a brand issue, namely that if you base it on any Chinese or Japanese, it will not be acceptable to the majority. So the best way would be to consider that this is possible since there are languages that work this way, but then to spin it your own way.

For a coolness factor maybe Dwarfish could also consider drawing from Scandinavian languages as much as possible, due to the origin of the mythos...?

So if in Swedish you would say "under bergets rot" ([under] [mountain]['s] [root], then in Dwarfish you could borrow the general idea but implement the constraints that exist in game, for "arôl onol odur" [under] [root] [of mountain], opposed to "arôl onolodur" which would be [under] [mountain(ous][root].

Maybe that would make people interested in learning it? Just throwing it out there.
Especially since there's a Finnish speaker.

[dwarfhoplite]

Something similar to European but distinctly different is something we start to agree on, is it?

I don't understand what exactly appeals to you about Swedish.
I don't understand what is the "general idea", and I know Swedish. A different word order?

I'll return tomorrow I think.