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[Nagidal]

With upcoming books, pergament, and paper, discussion about libraries burning like the one in Alexandria, I remembered that my sumerology professor once explained that while many classical libraries have met their catastrophic destinies in city fires, legendary city fires in the Ancient Near East are a god-sent gift for todays scholars. The fires helped to preserve many clay tablets and even whole libraries for thousands of years to come.

Could we occasionally have cultures in the world of Dwarf Fortress, which would use cuneiform scripts on clay tablets? Like in Mesopotamia, there are places with an abundance of clay and information to be recorded. Clay tablets are super-easy to craft and can be permanently preserved on demand by burning them.

Having studied languages of the ancient near east, most of which have used cuneiform writing, I'd love to see this in DF as well.

[Dirst]

A masterfully engraved +1 for this idea.

[Batgirl1]

YES so much to this!  Even if it's only some non-Dwarf civilization that has it, there should at least be a nod to it.

[Vattic]

Toady answered a question about clay tablets, cuneiform, and similar in a DFTalk episode.

Let me re-explain. I have some email questions! From people! Who probably enjoy the game ... I have one here from Elijah. He says: 'Could Tarn spend some time talking about the possibility of implementing different languages and written works. Is there any possibility of old languages, and what about books made of sheets, metal, paper, papyrus or even clay tablets.

We're into that stuff and it reminds me of the Steles, the big pillars that the Syrian kings wrong all their conquests on and so on, and the translations of those were some of the inspirations for some of the world generation tortures after the towns were taken over, like stretching out skins and sticking them on walls and stuff. We like that kind of thing – not the tortures, personally, for ourselves, but the written languages – so we're all for it, especially when we get to the treasure hunter section where we've mentioned old books and things like that that we'd like to throw in there. It'd be cool to find one of those old libraries they had, I think they had an ancient library with these cuneiform tablets, they looked like little triangles pressed in different configurations on this clay tablet ... to find a library of one of those things would be really cool. The issues that come up – there's a couple of them – one is displaying the language written out. It would be cool to use different symbols for it, and it would be a time to go add some tiles. These are the kinds of tiles that we can actually draw without total failure, doing it ourselves, so it might be possible to extend some language tiles or ... I don't know if that would involve Unicode in any way since we have better font support now. It's not clear to me exactly how we'd go about doing it but we're definitely ... even if it's just adding some symbols like the graphics for creatures currently, you could just add some more symbols, then it would be cool to actually display the words that are written in the books or on the tablets or whatever, and see them there, and then be able to translate them. It might be difficult to ask the player to do that manually, but they could do it based on their characters skill, and translate pieces of the tablet and then reveal them as you translate them. The other issue is if you're having the game randomly generate a language, which is something that we've avoided up to this point, even though you can throw something together, especially with as little structure as our languages have now – we don't really have any grammar for them or anything, it's just here's a word, here's how you write it – the only reason we haven't done that is because we're afraid of getting too many words that are real life words. So for our dwarf language we didn't want the word for 'mine' to be randomly generated as 'pepsi', and have the word for 'dwarf' just be some swear word because of what it comes up with ... so if your name is 'Dwarf Mine' your name would be like 'Poop Pepsi' or something. it's just not what we imagined for the dwarf language.