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[Lysabild]

I tried about a million different ways to find a way to describe a plausible phonetic meaning of the diacritics and I honestly can't come up with something, except one kind of hacky approach. If you imagine that vowels in dwarven can simple be marked or unmarked, then you only have to come up with two variations, and suddenly the world is entirely open for a variety of examples, among the easiest simply having marked vowels represent long vowels.

The individual marking then doesn't mean anything, you can imagine dwarves are free to mark the vowels as they please and the ones we see in game are just the ones that ended up the most popular for the given word.

I'm curious if there's any other thoughts to this, it's easily the most obscure part of Dwarven to pin down.

[VABritto]

I tried about a million different ways to find a way to describe a plausible phonetic meaning of the diacritics and I honestly can't come up with something, except one kind of hacky approach. If you imagine that vowels in dwarven can simple be marked or unmarked, then you only have to come up with two variations, and suddenly the world is entirely open for a variety of examples, among the easiest simply having marked vowels represent long vowels.

The individual marking then doesn't mean anything, you can imagine dwarves are free to mark the vowels as they please and the ones we see in game are just the ones that ended up the most popular for the given word.

I'm curious if there's any other thoughts to this, it's easily the most obscure part of Dwarven to pin down.

It could carry combined meaning, thus explaining the variety.

We see five varieties per vowel: e, ê, é, è, ë.

I consider å to be ü. Thus this rule would apply to every single vowel. Vowels change according to length, pitch and loudness according to Wikipedia (I know nothing about this so if anyone can take the ball from me I'd be grateful lol). We could simply say that one vowel has a short length but a higher pitch. One has a longer length and a lower pitch. The other a longer length and high pitch. The other a shorter length and low pitch. The unmarked vowel would be neutral.

Again, I'm not studied in this so I can't say for sure if this makes sense, but I believe this principle can be transfered to other ideas and it be workable (the idea that there are a variety of factors that can change a vowel and those can be combined to express the five varients)

[Lysabild]

The problem with trying to encompass the variety is that some of them just happen way too little, it makes for an unsatisfying solution with some variations only appearing 13 times total.

If you combine all marked letters they actually resemble a common phoneme instead of a weird oddity.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i like to think of it like in vietnamese language, where many words sound the same to european ears, but to a vietnamese, they are completely different and can even have opposing meanings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language
it is explained in an example in the german version of that wikipedia-entry
with those six tones that change the word "Ma", one has six different meanings:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamesische_Sprache#/media/Datei:Six_tones_of_Vietnamese_language.png

a friend who studied religion and went to vietnam as a missionary explained, that it's tricky and one can easily end up greeting the villages' eldest woman as "hot young lady" instead of "venerable wise lady".

[Lysabild]

Tones have been suggested many times, but the issue is the same, they're just too rare. If the distribution was there, tone would have been the easiest solution by far.

[VABritto]

The problem with trying to encompass the variety is that some of them just happen way too little, it makes for an unsatisfying solution with some variations only appearing 13 times total.

If you combine all marked letters they actually resemble a common phoneme instead of a weird oddity.

The problem is that it collides with the phonetic principle we have been following so far in that everything has meaning. But I understand this is just a 'last resort' explanation given the lack of explainability of the current vocabulary.

I propose another hack but that might fix this problem: Make more words with vowel markers (and assume they already exist before making them). We only have a few thousand words in Dwarven. We could assume them to be more the exception than the norm regarding vowel periodicity and simply make more words with the vowel markers. It is definitely a hack, but at least we'd retain meaning for each marker. Does this make sense?

[Lysabild]

The difference between our solutions is that mine interprets and yours modifies.

I'm not taking away meaning from the diacritics, because none can be discerned anyway. There's a few words where the only difference is whether it's marked or not, but I couldn't find any words where the difference was between diacritics. If there is one or two I missed, they'd probably be explainable by context, just like right and write is.

Complicated tone and pitch/length systems would collapse, because they wouldn't actually contain any information being this sparse, and I think having to inject information to make it valid goes more against the spirit of sticking to the language file.

The people speaking the language would have no meaningful reason to maintain the systems and the casual speech would erode it very quickly.

So I think an orthographic explanation is both the most conservative and useful way to solve it. Vanilla words work, you have a way to say the words without bending your brain and it's pretty logical and common for vowels to be discerned by length.

edited a sentence for clarification

[VABritto]

The difference between our solutions is that mine interprets and yours modifies.

I'm not taking away meaning from the diacritics, because none can be discerned anyway. There's a few words where the only difference is whether it's marked or not, but I couldn't find any words where the difference was between diacritics. If there is one or two I missed, they'd probably be explainable by context, just like right and write is.

Complicated tone and pitch/length systems would collapse, because they wouldn't actually contain any information being this sparse, and I think having to inject information to make it valid goes more against the spirit of sticking to the language file.

The people speaking the language would have no meaningful reason to maintain the systems and the casual speech would erode it very quickly.

So I think an orthographic explanation is both the most conservative and useful way to solve it. Vanilla words work, you have a way to say the words without bending your brain and it's pretty logical and common for vowels to be discerned by length.

edited a sentence for clarification

Makes sense. Given that there is no basis for my proposal already in the files it would probably cause more problems than solve. You are right

[VABritto]

Another little pun phrase I made up while writing the K part of the dictionary:

Kesham var-udiz Keshan'osh, keshan-udiz Cabnul lok katthir-udiz Ùdosîm.

Curiosity is like a flame, it burns the fool and nourishes the wise.

I omitted the subject in the second and third phrases because it is implied to be the same as in the first phrase.

[Solitarian]

I think you could improve the pun by incorporating the word for "tail" (kesh). Kesh, keshan, kesham... there's comedic gold in there somewhere!

Also, I think that should be Ùdosîm, as Dosîm means wisdom. With Ù it marks a person who performs the act of wisdom (whatever that is). It needs something to mark it as a person, as it otherwise means that flames nourish wisdom. It needs to refer to a person so it can be a metaphor for cooking (which is what I think you meant, yes?).

[VABritto]

I think you could improve the pun by incorporating the word for "tail" (kesh). Kesh, keshan, kesham... there's comedic gold in there somewhere!

Also, I think that should be Ùdosîm, as Dosîm means wisdom. With Ù it marks a person who performs the act of wisdom (whatever that is). It needs something to mark it as a person, as it otherwise means that flames nourish wisdom. It needs to refer to a person so it can be a metaphor for cooking (which is what I think you meant, yes?).

Yes, it is a metaphor for cooking lol and you are right, Ùdosîm makes it clearer (without it one can't distinguish wisdom from wise man) and that is an important distinction, as you dully pointed out. I edited it in my original post

And yes! I will think up a pun with Kesh, Keshan and Kesham if I can lol think it through too and let's see who makes it first and who makes it best!

[VABritto]

Keshamkun keshan-geth kesh

The curious cat burned [its] tail.

Basically a metaphor for someone that ends up sloppy because of being distracted by something out of curiosity. Imagine a cat next to a fire turning around because it heard a strange noise and inadvertently burnt its tail because it wasn't paying attention to the fire beside it. Basically a phrase that teaches a dwarf to pay attention to what they are doing and not get caught up in gossip or other distractions.

A workaround regarding long: It could be seen as standard procedure that when one is speaking of the body part of a certain subject (in this case, the cat), being said subject the subject of the phrase you can omit the possessive marker and assume the body part is that of the subject. In Portuguese we have something similar in which in formal Portuguese you don't say "my" when talking about a body part, but just "the". "I put the hand up" = I put my hand up

[Solitarian]

I don't see how a cat would fail to notice its tail burning (although Dwarf Fortress is known for bizarre outcomes). I think that phrase would have the same meaning as "curiosity killed the cat". This means that if you are overly curious, you might unknowingly put yourself in a life-threatening situation, i.e. you should be cautious.

Your circumvention of -long makes sense. I think Keshamkun keshan-geth Kesh-long Kun is fun to say because of the consonance, but I recognize it could be simpler. German has the same feature; you can say raise "the" hand instead of raise "your" hand. Your sentence could also mean "The curious cat burned tails", which could mean the cat was burning other cats tails for the sake of mischief. But I think the meaning is clear enough without the clarification.

Perhaps it could be "Keshamkun hav-udiz Keshankesh". The curious cat has a burned tail, i.e. the cat once was overly curious and put itself in danger, causing its tail to be burned. Maybe it could be a reference to dwarves swatting cats with burning objects or something. Although, there is already a Dwarven word for "burn" (though it isn't alliterative here).

[VABritto]

I don't see how a cat would fail to notice its tail burning (although Dwarf Fortress is known for bizarre outcomes). I think that phrase would have the same meaning as "curiosity killed the cat". This means that if you are overly curious, you might unknowingly put yourself in a life-threatening situation, i.e. you should be cautious.

Your circumvention of -long makes sense. I think Kashamkun keshan-geth Kesh-long Kun is fun to say because of the consonance, but I recognize it could be simpler. German has the same feature; you can say raise "the" hand instead of raise "your" hand. Your sentence could also mean "The curious cat burned tails", which could mean the cat was burning other cats tails for the sake of mischief. But I think the meaning is clear enough without the clarification.

Perhaps it could be "Keshamkun hav-udiz Keshankesh". The curious cat has a burned tail, i.e. the cat once was overly curious and put itself in danger, causing its tail to be burned. Maybe it could be a reference to Dwarves swatting cats with burning objects or something.

The idea is not that it won't notice its tail burning, but that it could burn its tail accidently while moving if it isnt paying attention. The same way a person can burn their finger by mistake if they touch something hot while distracted. They will feel the pain. But it still happens lol So imagine a cat near a fire. It is resting near the fire. It hears something strange on the opposite direction and turns towards it without paying attention to where its tail is and it gets burned. Surely when it feels the fire it will jump, but it still got burned even if for a second lol

Regarding the possible interpretation of burning other cat's tails: that needs context to clarify. Because saying Kesh-longKun can also mean "the tails of the cats". The "many" plural marker could be used here if you really want to bring it home that this cat is burning other cats' tails, but like I said I think context pretty much dictates that well enough.

And yes, I  can imagine a lot of dwarven sayings taking full use of the flexibility of their noun-verb transformations so as to make nice sounding alliterations and rhymes when making poetry and talking poetically.

[VABritto]

Finished K nouns for the dictionary:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173289.msg8005094#msg8005094

We now have everything from A to C (C in the dictionary going after K for consistency). 9 of 42 entries (from A to Å)