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[yinyang107]

This must be rectified.

[Derakon]

Do they have a word for "person"? It's entirely possible they simply use that instead.

[Carcer]

They still should have a word to refer to themselves collectivly as a people, especially with other sentient biengs around.

[Derakon]

Yeah, they're "people", the humans are humans, the elves are elves, and so on. Humans aren't people.

[Carcer]

Sorry, I was unclear. When I said people, I ment as a collective group of biengs.

[Footkerchief]

This is one of the shortcomings of the current language system: names of creatures, items, materials, etc. in the raws aren't available as vocabulary for speaking races.  I suspect this is due to the inherent messiness of the implementation -- each creature would need a word in each language, which means that a cow's raw entry has to contain references to all of the speaking races.  This makes things annoying to mod.

Depending on where Toady goes with the Language Arc, we'll probably see language communities (civs) being able to create their own names for such things as they encounter them.

[cparax]

Honestly, for the speaking races themselves I'd leave it as it is. If absolutely necessary maybe add a referent for 'being' (any speaking race); if half of humanity's endonyms in our history basically suggested they were the only actual humans out there, it's difficult to concieve of a concept of 'person' and 'dwarf' divorced for dwarves.

Unless I'm seriously mistaken, saying 'human' as one talks of any other animal is really recent, maybe the scientific revolution or earlier (and IIRC many modern languages lack a non-cladistic distinction, with the Sinographic 人 referring as easily to 'the human species' as 'that guy over there' in any but the most formal contexts). Not appropriate in the setting.

[Footkerchief]

Honestly, for the speaking races themselves I'd leave it as it is. If absolutely necessary maybe add a referent for 'being' (any speaking race); if half of humanity's endonyms in our history basically suggested they were the only actual humans out there, it's difficult to concieve of a concept of 'person' and 'dwarf' divorced for dwarves.

Unless I'm seriously mistaken, saying 'human' as one talks of any other animal is really recent, maybe the scientific revolution or earlier (and IIRC many modern languages lack a non-cladistic distinction, with the Sinographic 人 referring as easily to 'the human species' as 'that guy over there' in any but the most formal contexts). Not appropriate in the setting.

This might be a valid flavor decision for some races, but focusing on self-reference ignores the larger issue that dwarves would have their own words for "elf," "bear," "maple tree," etc.  That's the difficult part from an implementation standpoint.

[cparax]

You're saying that the game can't use vocabulary for game objects whether or not language_XXX contains them? Each of them have a word for 'bear' (and 'crown' and other game objects); I don't know how the game relates to the raws exactly, though, so I don't know where the limitation comes in.

[Footkerchief]

You're saying that the game can't use vocabulary for game objects whether or not language_XXX contains them? Each of them have a word for 'bear' (and 'crown' and other game objects); I don't know how the game relates to the raws exactly, though, so I don't know where the limitation comes in.

Oops, they do have "bear."  Yes, if language_xxx contains the word, they can use it, but that usage lacks a semantic link to the actual creature/item/material.  Adding those semantic links means either a) putting a list of creatures/materials/items in each language file, or b) putting a list of languages in each creature/item/material.  Doing either would severely de-modularize the raws -- it's a structural problem, the kind that a database handles with a many-to-many table.

[cparax]

Yes, if language_xxx contains the word, they can use it, but that usage lacks a semantic link to the actual creature/item/material.

It seems like language_SYM (the spheres) adds a touch of semantic relevance without turning it into a big messy many-to-many deal; you'd really just need a category for living creatures, game-active items, and sapients to accomplish something similar.

But then again, I just play Fortress mode - is language used in adventure mode, or is the main use random generation of names? (New SYM categories would help there, too - with ANIMAL you could make an entire civilization with names like Hollywood Amerinds.) I'm definitely seeing the problem with semantically-linked animals, races, or items, but I'm not understanding the necessity of that semantic link.

Most of the language is pretty arbitrary right now, but it accomplishes what it aspires to - gives appropriately foreign-sounding names to alien races. The one thing I'd really like to see is more variable grammars; you should be able to have languages that sound either extremely analytic (like Chinese, or to some extent English) or extremely agglutinative (like Magyar or Finnish). That's the giant flaw right now - every language scans like German with a completely different vocabulary.

[Footkerchief]

Yeah, language is just used for naming right now, and the semantic link isn't as important for that.  I'm more looking to the future in which language will play a larger role in actual communication and description:

# Core97, IMPROVED PHRASE STORAGE, (Future): The current system of storing names is not very extendable, so it needs to be altered to support later changes.
# Core98, BASIC GRAMMAR, (Future): The abstract phrases can be realized by each of the in-game languages in vastly different ways, and a framework for this needs to be realized in the raw files. Requires Core97.
# Core99, WRITING, (Future): Existing objects (such as wall engravings and blades) need to be able to support writing in any of the in-game languages, and there can be associated skills/professions for this. Requires Core98.
# Core100, NEW LANGUAGE ITEMS, (Future): Parchment, vellum and their buddies then books, songs, poems... all for your entertainment (and horror, if there are random poems). Requires Core99.

[cparax]

I do have to express the same reservations you did in a different context - I don't think inserting language into a game largely governed by procedural generation would work well at all. The current form is basically sophisticated Mad Libs, and the aspired-to form is a simpler, fanciful version of Babelfish - and one's a party game and the other an enormous, uncompletable sink of resources for a reason. Getting the word pairs to correspond reasonably with English grammar (and for that matter any translation's) requires enough effort as is.

It'd be a lot simpler to just ignore semantics and do something like what random summary generators or ELIZA glossolalia scripts do - pick words at random by alternating length out of the month of history before last and stick them into a thick list of cliched or bewildering stock phrases. It'd be a serviceable way of producing paragraphs or stanzas more or less the way the game produces sentence fragments now without the kind of Herculean effort sophisticated semantic linkage would take, and the reward wouldn't be that much less.

[Footkerchief]

I do have to express the same reservations you did in a different context - I don't think inserting language into a game largely governed by procedural generation would work well at all. The current form is basically sophisticated Mad Libs, and the aspired-to form is a simpler, fanciful version of Babelfish - and one's a party game and the other an enormous, uncompletable sink of resources for a reason. Getting the word pairs to correspond reasonably with English grammar (and for that matter any translation's) requires enough effort as is.

Babelfish has the much harder task of processing input.  DF wouldn't have to do that (unless you did something really ambitious like allow players to type their adventurer's speech).  It would only have to do natural language generation, which has been widely explored for decades.  There are even some open-source libraries that Toady could pull off the shelf for use in DF, so it wouldn't have to be a major resource sink.

[DennyTom]

My native language is czech. I believe we also do not have separate word for "human". We use same word for "human" and "man" (and another one for "humans" and "men"). However we have phrase for "human race".

Therefore I can see no problem with dwarves having no word for "dwarf".