I like modding in races, but using one of the pre-existing language files annoyed me, so I decided that the obvious solution was to waste 10 hours of my life writing a program that would generate an internally-consistent list of made-up words. Please consider that absolutely nobody will likely ever see or care about the state of my mods' language files except myself.
That's not the facepalm moment, by the way. That's just my attempt at bragging.
While the program could spit out phonemic pronunciations, I was too lazy to bother teaching it how to come up with spellings for the words. That would require thought and effort, you see.
This meant that, for each language file, I would have to transliterate every single hodgepodge of capital and lowercase letters into something actual humans could read and pronounce. For those of you who have better things to do than count how many words DF knows, that's more than 2500 words that I would have to manually write out.
"It's not like you have a choice," I told myself; "It's not like you could check to see if's there's a utility for that or, y'know, just shut up and use one of the pre-existing languages." So I got down to work.
1 and 1/5 language files, 3 mind-numbing hours and more than 3000 words later, I learned that there is a utility called DFLang that claimed to be able to take a list of at least 100 words from any real or made-up language and use them to generate a DF language file containing words that could belong to the source language.
I downloaded it and gave it a test run, hoping to Armok that, for the sake of my pride, it would prove to be another half-assed piece of amateurish crud that would crash if you looked at it funny and wouldn't work right even at the best of times.
To my absolute horror, it worked perfectly, cutting the amount of words I needed to transliterate for Language #2 from 2500 to 200, just as it would have done for Language #1 had I actually bothered to check the forums first before I put in any potentially-unnecessary work.
Is it okay to cry if the injury's self-inflicted?
EDIT: Phonetic. Phonemic. One flubbed letter, two distinct meanings. Urrrrgh.