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[Dirst]

Note there's actually 17 consonants (sh, th, and ng counted as one each, and h doesn't count since it never occurs except in sh and th)

I noticed that after I posted, and weirdly st is also a letter, so there are 18.  In trying to group the consonants, I found two "holes" that I filled with values that would sound distinct to dwarves but happen not to be in their language.  Presumably other consonants would be confusingly similar to them (p sounds like b to dwarven ears, j sounds like g, and so on).

Vowels in "Loam Order"
î i ì ï ú û u ù ö ó ô o ò å á â a à ä é ê e è ë í

Consonant spokes, listed from "center" outwards
st t d b
sh z s c
th f v (β)
ng n m (ṃ)
k g l r

(β) is the b-like v common among Spanish-speakers.  (ṃ) is an unvoiced m sound (as in a brief mmmm sound to indicate one is paying attention).

As you might have guessed, the last spoke is basically "didn't fit anywhere else." k and g are legitimately related, while l and r do sound similar to some non-native English speakers.

c doesn't seem to belong in the language, because it's the only letter whose sound really depends on neighboring letters.  However, the value that "belongs" there (think of an "s" with the lips closed) doesn't exist in any real-world language because it wouldn't do anything more than puff your cheeks.  So, c can have that spot.

More on your other points when I get some time to think.

[Dirst]

Very rough draft of the "procedural" rune shapes in the same order as the previous post.  Similar vowels look similar, but that's because they're supposed to.



"Urist" in those runes:

[Loam]

I take st as just a consonant cluster (notably the only intra-syllabic consonant cluster Dwarvish permits). Also, I use c for a voiceless palatal stop (like the k in "keel"), rather than the English either-k-or-s-depending-on-context.

Looking at the data, I've noticed that c, f, and v (incidentally, the three least-common sounds in Dwarvish) cannot appear in a word-final position. I wonder if we can't use that to our advantage...

Okay, here's a suggestion - it's not pretty but it's functional:
t d k g
s z c* (gh)
b* v/f* th sh
n m ng (mg)
r (rh) l (lh)
*c is a voiceless velar fricative; b is [β]; v and f are variants of the same sound.

The order is: base sound / voiced or "strong" form / velarized / velar voiced or "strong" form
First row is stops, and the system works great.
Second is fricatives, and it's not bad (we're missing the voiced velar stop)
Third is more fricatives: a [v] is "stronger" than a [β], and so goes in the voiced slot. th and sh are "backed", not exactly velarized.
Fourth is nasals, works alright - m is, of course, not a voiced n though.
Fifth is liquids - perhaps all l should be [ɫ]. rh and lh are pure fictions.

[Dirst]

I think I like your consonant clusters better, though we probably want to separate v and f as a special case.

Fortunately the runes don't care what sounds they represent, so it wouldn't be hard to re-assign them.

[CaptainMcClellan]

I like Dirst's vowel runes, but think his consonant notation is confusing and easily misunderstood in practice. Though I think Loam and Dirst both have developed well the consonants. Out of a quick curiosity, if "st" is in the dwarven alphabet as a distinct phoneme, is "ts" also?

To Loam's question of case, while we're on the subject of "subjects" and "objects", any development on prepositions yet? ( Sorry to answer a question with a question, but I don't have answers other than I think we might have come to a consensus that object comes last in the sentence, or at least after subject. In prior experimentation we made some arguments for VOS, but that might only be for imperatives, which so far we have as a verb state only. )

Edit:

I think I like your consonant clusters better, though we probably want to separate v and f as a special case.

Fortunately the runes don't care what sounds they represent, so it wouldn't be hard to re-assign them.

Agreed.

[Dirst]

Iirc Old English marked objects by putting a short "objectifying" word in front of it, but modern languages seem fine just using position.

Things would be much simpler if we had prepositions, then at worst we could make up a pseudo proposition (roughly meaning "upon") for direct objects.  If we are actually in touch with Toady, a good suggestion for propositions would be stand-alone single vowels.  Any combination between a preposition and another word would require a mandatory dash.

[Dirst]

I like Dirst's vowel runes, but think his consonant notation is confusing and easily misunderstood in practice. Though I think Loam and Dirst both have developed well the consonants. Out of a quick curiosity, if "st" is in the dwarven alphabet as a distinct phoneme, is "ts" also?

Dwarven has a limited number of digraphs (two-letter combinations) that can occupy a slot that usually has a single consonant in it: ng sh st & th.  It's pretty obvious that ng sh & th represent distinct sounds. A letter for st would be odd but not impossible (English uses x for a ks sound).  If it is just a pairing of normal consonants then st is the only such pairing allowed within a syllable.  We've all seen this combination... in Urist.

So no, an st letter doesn't imply a ts letter, any more than x implies an sk letter in English.

Edit: Also trying to come up with something better for consonant runes.  First idea was to stick to horizontal and vertical lines (do differentiate from the angled vowels) but that ended up looking like defective LED displays.

[Dirst]

Let's see if this one works better.  By omitting three of the potential consonants, we can make it look a bit less formulaic.



My impression is that a dwarf reciting the alphabet would only include the base and hybrid vowels, not every single accent/variation as a distinct letter.  I imagine it would sound something like this (subject to revising the consonants again):

ít îd i ik ìg ï ús ûz u uc ö óv ôf o oth òsh å án ân a ang ä ér e el ë

Edit: Don't try to replace a file on Photobucket with another of the same name.  Odd things happen.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yes. I like this rune system, it looks nice.

[Miuramir]

Let's see if this one works better.  By omitting three of the potential consonants, we can make it look a bit less formulaic.

My initial impression is that these seem a bit on the "fiddly" side, on two counts: as an epic incised font I'm uncertain how well some of those corners would work when carved in stone; and I'm suspecting that scribes actually using this to write with for everyday use would very quickly simplify or adjust for better flow. 

In short, it looks like a font designed by and for use on a computer, not by and for scribes working with chisel or turkey-quill pens.  (It's been a while, but I think that with dip pens in particular, some of these forms have too many "pen up / pen down" required.  In some senses, the square forms look almost constructed as more like brush forms, which tend to have a lot more short crossing strokes than quill users; but made far more rigid than you would actually be able to draw efficiently with a brush.)

[Dirst]

Let's see if this one works better.  By omitting three of the potential consonants, we can make it look a bit less formulaic.

My initial impression is that these seem a bit on the "fiddly" side, on two counts: as an epic incised font I'm uncertain how well some of those corners would work when carved in stone; and I'm suspecting that scribes actually using this to write with for everyday use would very quickly simplify or adjust for better flow. 

In short, it looks like a font designed by and for use on a computer, not by and for scribes working with chisel or turkey-quill pens.  (It's been a while, but I think that with dip pens in particular, some of these forms have too many "pen up / pen down" required.  In some senses, the square forms look almost constructed as more like brush forms, which tend to have a lot more short crossing strokes than quill users; but made far more rigid than you would actually be able to draw efficiently with a brush.)

Thanks for the feedback.  In case there was any doubt, this was composed on a computer

The vowels are all zero or one pen lifts, or two to four lines with a chisel.  They are considerably less fiddly than anything the Mayans or Egyptians carved into stone, but the DF time period should allow for some drift toward efficient forms.  Look at some of the convoluted Phoenecian runes that eventually became Latin letters, and these damnable consonants can probably serve as a basis for something that can be used in routine writing.

[Miuramir]

The vowels are all zero or one pen lifts, or two to four lines with a chisel.  They are considerably less fiddly than anything the Mayans or Egyptians carved into stone, but the DF time period should allow for some drift toward efficient forms.  Look at some of the convoluted Phoenecian runes that eventually became Latin letters, and these damnable consonants can probably serve as a basis for something that can be used in routine writing.

Agreed on the Egyptians, etc.; but my thought is that by the time you get to "letters", as opposed to "hieroglyphs", you've had a few hundred if not thousand years of efficiency improvements.  My thought is that in DF's vaguely-medieval setting, you've already passed through the Egyptian > Phoenician > Aramaic or Greek equivalent transitions, at least.  To a *very* rough approximation, one path (Aramaic > Hebrew and Arabic, etc.) progressed with a more "drawn" look (brushes, shaped quills), whereas the other (Greek > Latin, etc.) progressed with a more "incised" look (stylus on clay or wax).  Then you had yet another aggressive evolution pass with medieval scribal styles, etc. 

The evolution from the Egyptian djed to Phonecian samekh to modern S is intriguing, for example; if you squint, you can sort of see how modern S incorporates the three horizontal and one vertical strokes into a single stroke... three roughly horizontal bits looped for speed, with some implied vertical movement from the diagonal. 

I've not had a lot of time to play with these, but as a starter I think that the sequence that goes (horizontal-stroke, inverse-L), (horizontal-stroke, inverse-L, vertical-crosstick), (horizontal-stroke, inverse-L, shorter-horizontal-stroke) would progress toward something closer to (horizontal-stroke, inverse-L, horizontal-crosstick) instead.  This also avoids the slightly awkward main horizontal stroke being just a hair higher than the first two to give sufficient visual distinctiveness.  (I'm thinking that Dwarven scribes would probably have a trio of horizontal construction lines, given these forms; so you'd need a pretty solid reason for having things that almost but don't quite line up.) 

Of course, you get weird diversions in real life; IMO blackletter is far less readable than Carolingian miniscule, despite being a later evolutionary development.  One might argue that this was the result of writing becoming more dominated by "mystical" rather than "practical" works, but that gets out into the weeds of fairly obtuse scholarship / extrapolation where I'm not really qualified to even comment. 

[Urist_McDagger]

Just throwing out an idea I got: Since dwarves are very industrial and like chemistry, and have been doing both since the beginning of time, wouldn't it make sense for them to incorporate chemical states into their language? Past-Present-Future could be replaced with Solid-Liquid-Gas, because the future is solid and can't be changed, the present is liquid and runs freely, the future is a mist that no one can see through.

Also, they should probably have associated minerals with attributes and use these to describe things; if Iron has the 'dwarven' attribute for example, then opening the flood gates to let magma pour unto the unsuspecting elves would be a very 'iron' thing to do.

Edit: Minerals could be their primary colouring system as well.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Just throwing out an idea I got: Since dwarves are very industrial and like chemistry, and have been doing both since the beginning of time, wouldn't it make sense for them to incorporate chemical states into their language? Past-Present-Future could be replaced with Solid-Liquid-Gas, because the future is solid and can't be changed, the present is liquid and runs freely, the future is a mist that no one can see through.

Also, they should probably have associated minerals with attributes and use these to describe things; if Iron has the 'dwarven' attribute for example, then opening the flood gates to let magma pour unto the unsuspecting elves would be a very 'iron' thing to do.

Edit: Minerals could be their primary colouring system as well.

Functionally speaking, I only see this being a factor in a few instances. We've also kicked around this idea twice. The only thing that I think Dwarves would observe in three states is water and alcohol and even if we could get away with Ice being "past-water", water being " present-water", and steam being "future-water", which may well make sense from the point-of-view of a medieval (al)chemist, could we really get away with calling boiled alcohol "future-booze"? ( Admittedly the poetic connotations are nice, what with the past being solid and immutable, the present being liquid and ever flowing by, and the future being ephemeral... ) Even so, the effective functionality of a system isn't really that much, ie this all would exist in mental abstraction, whereas the word tenses would still be past, present, future.

Maybe. One thing I want to say is that Timber is not Elven in the Dwarven mindset. At best, it's a part of collective creation myth. ( ie Elves are carved from Timber, Dwarves from stone, Humans from clay, etc. ) However, Dwarves value Timber and it is an important part of Dwarven industry and has its own place and attributes in the Dwarven mentality, to the point where a Dwarven month is named for it!

I see this as being probable, as this exists in real-world languages. ( e.g. cinnabar, amethyst, lapis, amber) And it makes sense that even Dwarven abstract colour names would be derived from minerals or other natural resources. ( For example, timber=brown, herb=green, magma=orange.) In that vein, since modern language progression begins by distinguishing light from dark and even the game mechanics and Dwarven biology do this, the first two Dwarven colours should be "Depth" and "Sky", and as development goes, these could be renamed. ( In my opinion to Slade and Opal, or perhaps Obsidian and Opal as the stand-ins for black and white. Especially strengthened, in my opinion, by the fact that Obsidian and Opal are calender months. )

[CaptainMcClellan]

Iirc Old English marked objects by putting a short "objectifying" word in front of it, but modern languages seem fine just using position.

Things would be much simpler if we had prepositions, then at worst we could make up a pseudo proposition (roughly meaning "upon") for direct objects.  If we are actually in touch with Toady, a good suggestion for propositions would be stand-alone single vowels.  Any combination between a preposition and another word would require a mandatory dash.

Basically he told me what he's probably told everyone else: "We haven't decided anything, I'd like to try myself, and anything that is made would have to be taken as a suggestion." :/ That said, he probably wouldn't be opposed to the system yoy suggest.