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[§k]

Here I offer a piece of my dialectal dwarvish.

Quoted from Urist Ginglikot:"I could do without all of those creatures and that tangled greenery."

Dwarvish: Berdannisan sartob imnir nomirmez mesmez artob nomir lertethomer.

Etymology:
Capitalized word is Proto-Dwarvish(the words that appear in in-game names).
Asterisk denotes reconstructed historical form.

berdan - go, from BERDAN(walk)
ni:  1st person affix, from *nis<*nirudos<NIR(one)+UDOS(man)
sa: verb ending, from SAVOT(stand)
n: subjunctive, from *an<ANRIZ(sky)

sartob: without, from *nasartob<NAS(un-)+ARTOB(combination)

imnir: all, every, from IM(ever-)+NIR(one)

nomir: the second one, the other, that, from *nobnir<NOB(two)+NIR(one)
mez: plural ending, from MEZ(three)

mes: creature, from MES(creature)

artob: and, from ARTOB(combination)

lertethomer: tangled greenery, from LERTETH(tangle)+OMER(greenness)

[VABritto]

The words Nòm (god), Mishar (deity) and Nabas (divine) are interesting because they don't make a lot of sense. English has also three seperate words for these concepts, but English has them simply because it is a bastardized language (it has multiple origins and many loan words). So in English you can say Kingly (Anglo-Saxon), Royal (French), Regal (Latin) and Monarchical (Greek) and they all mean the same thing. Dwarven doesn't seem to have that, so it is curious that all three are seperate unrelated words, specially Nòm and Mishar.

One explanation to Nòm and Mishar is that they have different connotations. In English we rarely if ever refer to G-d as a deity. We refer to Him as G-d (I don't write down the o's for religious reasons but you know what I mean). Deity we usually say in an academic context to talk about gods. It is impersonal. It could be that Mishar is their word for "foreign god" while Nòm is their word for "native god". Just a possible interpretation.

Also, a hypothesis on How Dwarves name their children: I noticed Dwarves choose a kid's name semi-randomly. There are certain words in the dictionary that I never saw used as a name, but the ones that do appear tend to have strange meanings nonetheless. Mosus means room. Solon means flag. Monom means PAPER. One possible reason for this is that dwarves follow a practice (that is actually found in some real life African tribes) of naming their kids by the first thing they see after it is born. So if the mother or father see a piece of paper, well now the kid's name is Monom. If they were unlucky to see an avalanche or the result of one the kid could be called Moldath. If they were close to a crypt they could name him Momuz. Gave birth in a corridor? Meet baby Minkot! It kind of explains why some names are so weird and out of place lol

[Lysabild]

Names aren't random, words in DF are assigned to symbols and dwarven names are tied to the symbols artifice and earth, hence room, paper and so on, things that are made. The wiki is totally on top of this already.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Name

Edit: And to expand on why it isn't that weird, Dwarves value craftsdwarfship and all these things are what skilled dwarves make. So it seems pretty natural to name them after things they consider worth creating too.

[VABritto]

Names aren't random, words in DF are assigned to symbols and dwarven names are tied to the symbols artifice and earth, hence room, paper and so on, things that are made. The wiki is totally on top of this already.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Name

It is why I said "semi-random". There are many words in Dwarven that I do not see as names so I assumed there were included words and excluded words. It seems I was right, which is nice. But it still is semi-random in the sense that it doesn't really make a lot of sense contextually (we can get why someone would be called Alexander initially, because it means Defender of the People). Even if names now seem random and just phonetic, they more often than not came from words with meaning and that together carry a reasonable sense. And when they don't it tends to have a rational behind it. Dwarves literally name their kids Paper and Room. I was trying to illustrate that even something so bizarre could have cultural significance

[VABritto]

Edit: And to expand on why it isn't that weird, Dwarves value craftsdwarfship and all these things are what skilled dwarves make. So it seems pretty natural to name them after things they consider worth creating too.

That is a possibility, but I wouldn't call it 'natural'. It is pretty strange to name someone Paper or Room. There are plenty of cultures, tribes and families that pride themselves for their technological and technical achievements, yet names like Rocket, Launchpad and Airport are still rare. Heck, the West is pretty proud of their scholars and libraries, yet Book, School and University are still strange and uncommon names to give a child. You get what I mean? It is possible, but it is weird for them to name a child like this simply because they love craftsdwarfship

[Lysabild]

I mean in the western world meanings mean incredibly little for names. No one percieves the meaning behind names, they're picked based on tradition or aesthetics.

I don't find it implausible that a culture that has such a focus on crafting, strange moods and greed to name people straight up after the things they create and value as a people.

[VABritto]

I mean in the western world meanings mean incredibly little for names. No one percieves the meaning behind names, they're picked based on tradition or aesthetics.

I don't find it implausible that a culture that has such a focus on crafting, strange moods and greed to name people straight up after the things they create and value as a people.

Like I said before, the West currently names things out of phonetics, but that is anomalous and most names in history carry meaning (including these same western names which, if taken back enough, tend to have reasonable explanations and when they don't there is a valid explanation to why). An example of such irrational names is something like Hippandros (literally Horse-Man, like... A werehorse), which is an example Aristotle gives. He explains that in Greece sons tend to be named after their father, with a part of the name going to the son and another part being new. So this irrationally named Hippandros might be the son of a man reasonably named Hippocrates (Horse Power, which can be a reference to the parent wanting the son to be as strong as a horse for example) who put forward the first half of the name when naming his son and inadvertently making an irrational name. Even in these cases things tend to make sense.

And like I said, I do not think your explanation is impossible, but it definitely is improbable. Simply because the characteristics you stated exist in our world already with cultures priding themselves for the exact same things and not making their kids Room or Corridor or Paper or Ink. This level of randomness seems more probably tied to superstition of some kind. The main issue is that Dwarven naming convention is strange as hell so whatever hypothesis proposed will be of something uncommon, but yours is based on something that doesn't really happen and mine is based on something that actually does happen, albeit rarely.

Also, what do you think of my hypothesis regarding the words Nòm and Mishar?

[VABritto]

Finished doing the M, N and NG nouns. Self-corrected the entry for Keng (it means Steam, not Stream). If I got anything else wrong, please tell me! Strangely enough, almost all the words starting with Ng are bad or unpleasant things lol

13 out of 43 entries done.

You can check out all the entries already published at Dwarven Dictionary

[Lysabild]

Dwarves are spawned fully complete with their language when the world is created, so there's no room for names to have meaningful history.

The names are also formed such that every dwarf has 2 names, one of a single word and one of two words, and they have no connection to anything else and reference nothing but the dwarven guidelines. They don't get repeated or passed on.

And no culture in our world can really be compared to the dwarven obsession with crafting, we have no strange moods, and dwarves specifically have modifiers in the game to value crafting more than humans.

So I don't think an appeal to real names work, we've neither the history nor the environments in common.

We also just don't need it.

Like I'm not suggesting your idea doesn't work in general, I'm saying it explains something that I don't think needs an explanation, and that it doesn't reflect anything we see in game.

What we observe is that dwarves have a list of names, and that everyone gets a short and long name from that list. It's not dependent on where, when and who.

Maybe it's preference for the meaning, but we can check dwarves and see they don't have in their preferences anything the kids are named after.

Thus we're basically left with one of two descriptive explanations, that it's based on sound or that they're all just picked quickly from a list without much thought or ceremony.

You can still go with your idea, but it'll be an insertion that you have to imagine is taking place, with no support from the game in that imagination.



But to take on the historical claims aswell, crypt is a name used in ancient egypt.

As for room, considering the place words like house, city, castle, hill and so on play for most people living above ground, room being basically -everything- underground, it's really not much of a stretch.

Church/Monastery is attested, there's a turkish name meaning 'traditional marbled paper art' and so on, and so forth.

In the naming culture I know best, norse, names are incredibly focused on weapons, gods and animals. This is very different from many other cultures where there is a focus on beauty, peace, plants or other things.

So for a non-human created creature that has a fully formed language from the first day it exists to have a slightly different set of values and to do naming a bit differently is not only not a stretch, it's also just what we see.

[VABritto]

We also just don't need it.

Obviously, that goes without saying O.o I'm not trying to make a rule or anything. I'm just speculating about what these things could mean in a meta sense. That's basically how most people play Dwarf Fortress. They get random information that make no sense at all and try to figure out some sense from it and make a story out of it. I'm not trying to impose how that will work in your world. I'm just saying superstition seems more likely then simple taste. Likely. As in, it could be either way but your explanation seems stranger to me.

Your explanation of how rooms are basically houses can work, though Ink and Paper are still very very weird names for someone to have and doesn't make a lot of sense that a culture would all start naming their kids Ink because they like Ink that much. Could they though? Sure. Never said the contrary.

Yes, I know this is a game and I know that if you actually dig through the data you will find a large part of it all is pretty much random. But I like to make up reasons for things, like everyone else I ever saw playing DF does. I don't really understand what your problem is regarding that O.o (i.e. you stating that this doesn't need explanation and it not reflecting anything in the game).

With that in mind, what did you think of my Nòm/Mishar hypothesis?

[VABritto]

Finished doing the O nouns.

14 out of 43 entries done.

You can check out all the entries already published at Dwarven Dictionary

[Solitarian]

Superdorf, dare you suggest that our lord Toady did not have a perfect plan for the language while composing the words? Blasphemy!

Teehee. I wonder if he laughs at our attempts to make sense of it.

VABritto, your Nòm/Mishar idea seems reasonable enough to me. And of course we are assigning meaning to meaningless things! That's a basic description of this codification project.

[VABritto]

Superdorf, dare you suggest that our lord Toady did not have a perfect plan for the language while composing the words? Blasphemy!

Teehee. I wonder if he laughs at our attempts to make sense of it.

VABritto, your Nòm/Mishar idea seems reasonable enough to me. And of course we are assigning meaning to meaningless things! That's a basic description of this codification project.

Thanks! What about the Milol thing? I'm actually changing Etur Etar to Etur Milol in the Annals to reflect that reasoning lol Can I put in the Dictionary "first king of a lineage" and "Anointed One" as added possible meanings of Milol (besides Messiah lol)

[VABritto]

Decided to do all the marked vowel nouns in one go since they are so few. Found that Åm has two entries, one for Baby and another for Yawn. Can anyone check if this is accurate or if it is a typo in the dwarven wiki? Because this is the only word I know that has a duplicate like that in the same category.

34 out of 43 entries done.

You can check out all the entries already published at Dwarven Dictionary

[VABritto]

Finished all the R nouns. Can Rurast (guise) be used as a word for "form" or "shape"?

35 out of 43 entries done.

You can check out all the entries already published at Dwarven Dictionary