![]() From that, I had to develop or invent everything. That was more or less everything I could glean from the game’s presentation of Dwarven. In Dwarf Fortress, mabdug (ale) is the same as mabdug (ales). In English, an S is added to make something plural: ale becomes ales. Similarly, singular nouns are not changed to make them plural. For example, the base form of the verb deb (eat) is the same as its “changed” form deb (eats). In language_DWARF and language_words, we can see that the forms of words are never changed to convey meaning. So, the sentence he eats is both analytic (it uses the helper word he) and synthetic (it changes the form of the verb). That pronoun tells us that one man is performing the action. ![]() A helper word is usually added too, in this case a pronoun (a word that takes the place of a noun) such as he. The form of the word was changed, in that an S was added. From that one word, we know that the action is happening now and only one actor is doing it. Eats means it is in the present and singular. For example, the verb eat can be changed to convey meaning. a little analytic and a little synthetic. This is the opposite of a synthetic language, which conveys meaning through changing the forms of words. The file language_DWARF also shows that Dwarven is mostly an analytic language, but first I should explain what that word means.Īnalytic means that the language conveys meaning through helper words and syntax. In Latin, articles and prepositions are often implied by context and syntax, so I supposed that Dwarven was like that too. Latin also does not have articles, and it has only sparse prepositions. The “the” before “ancient” is not in the Dwarven name, just as the “of” isn’t. We can also see that Dwarven does not have articles (“the” and “a” and “an”) or prepositions (words that express direction, position, etc.: of, between, beyond, beside, on, under, over, and so on). We can see some syntax (word order) too: adjectives precede nouns, and the noun being modified is placed at the end of the compound word. From this name we can tell that Dwarven is agglutinative (it has many compound words, which are larger words comprised of conjoined smaller words, e.g. I couldn’t be bothered to scroll down the list. The name was:Ībbeylashed the Ancient Angry Axe-Animal of Ale My only clue was the fortress names, so I used one of those as the basis of the whole language. There were no other kinds of words like prepositions, adverbs, or conjunctions, and there was no hint of grammar. Furthermore, language_DWARF contains only a few hundred adjectives, nouns, and verbs. For example, Dwarven didn’t have a word for dwarf! I hope that you will help invent words and amend the lexicon, as I really don’t want to create thousands of words alone. One very frustrating aspect of this endeavor was the limited lexicon (total vocabulary) of language_DWARF. ![]() I hope that Dwarven can become the secret code of all DF players, our little Esperanto! Also, I probably forgot some bits of grammar, so I am relying on you to notice my mistakes and gaps. This necessarily involves some linguistics mumbo-jumbo, but I will try to explain it or not rely on it so much so everyone understands. and eventually it was almost a whole language, and I post the result of my effort here. I wanted to make fortress names more interesting, so I decided to give the in-game dwarven language a little grammar.
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