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« on: September 26, 2011, 04:00:52 am »
Well i searched the forum but find nothing. I had a request regarding Dwarvish language recently - some guy wanted to make or translate the song into Dwarvish, something like that. I've got somewhat interested, naturally, being a linguistic student myself.
Well of course what made Toady One seems pretty fine and suits the goal - giving the name in Dwarvish - well. It seems to be pretty simple -no plural forms of nouns... no past tense..no prepositions...no inclinations. No auxilliary verbs.The reason why there's no prepositions, past tense and stuff - because there's no need in them, obviously. Though, it still could be enough to speak dwarvish, at least to be understood. It seems to be similar to Mandarin language, perhaps (I never studied it myself).
There seem to be no verb "be". But ok. we dont need the verb "be" to communicate. There's no "do" also, but this one can be substituted by the verb "act". I thought about using the auxilliary verb "to drink" instead of "to be" but it's bullshit of course lol.
Another problem would be the absense of predicate. Actually I believe there IS predicate in Dwarvish. Just...just Toady didn't need it. I mean, I could imply there's REALLY no predicate in Dwarvish, like, to say "Urist MacDwarf killed a goblin" (predicate = killed) we would need to change the sentence into "Urist MacDwarf the Goblinslayer". But it's totally crazy. Dwarves may be crazy, but not THAT crazy.
I need to know the grammar rules about using the predicate because it's somewhat important to understanding the text. Though, I guess the right and the main grammar rule would be "Write in English, but omit all the stuff and leave the words (stems) alone." There's also no modal verbs and no pronouns but it's not vitally important for communication. The language would be exceptionally simple, but it would be able to exist.
So, "You killed the goblin!" would become "Urist MacDwarf kill goblin". How do I distinguish it from imperative mood? Like, "You, kill the goblin!" Well it would be somewhat hard to achive but still possible, for example - the absense of exclamation mark. Or to use some special verb for imperative mood, like "go" (though, I think there's no verb "go" in Dwarvish as well). And, how would I distuinguish the names of dwarves from actual words? Urist could mean "the Dwarf named Urist" or it could mean "a dagger" instead.
Anyway, I dont want to add anything at all, just to find out the most obvious way how the Dwarvish language would look like.
I wonder if anyone tried to investigate the issue already? Maybe there're some ideas that I missed?
