God help me what am I doing with my life

Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Post Reply
User avatar
Anguipes
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 129
Joined: Wed May 28, 2003 6:11 pm
Location: Assiah of Yesod
Contact:

God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Anguipes »

"It is quite certain, in particular, that I have always been insane." ~ Aleister Crowley

"Save us all from arrogant men/And all the causes they're for/I won't be righteous again/I'm not that sure any more." ~ Shades of Grey, Billy Joel

User avatar
KathTheDragon
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 2139
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 4:48 am
Location: Brittania

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by KathTheDragon »

Um, wut?

Bristel
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1258
Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 3:07 pm
Location: Miracle, Inc. Headquarters
Contact:

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Bristel »

Anguipes wrote:Send help
God can't help you now.

(but seriously, what is Dorfish, explain? I saw a reference to Khuzdul)
[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīquā cupiditāte illectus hoc agō
Yo te pongo en tu lugar...
Taisc mach Daró

User avatar
faiuwle
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 512
Joined: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:26 am
Location: MA north shore

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by faiuwle »

I'm guessing it's Dwarf Fortress dorfs, with reference to the language RAWs that come with Dwarf Fortress for producing procedurally generated names for things in the game (which IIRC are just a list of words with glosses).
It's (broadly) [faɪ.ˈjuw.lɛ]
#define FEMALE

ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

Quis vult in terra stare,
Cum possit volitare?

User avatar
Nortaneous
Sumerul
Sumerul
Posts: 4544
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:52 am
Location: the Imperial Corridor

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Nortaneous »

why is everyone talking about borv veeste all of a sudden
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

User avatar
Pole, the
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1606
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2012 9:50 am

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Pole, the »

Frequentizer!
The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

User avatar
Haplogy
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 325
Joined: Sat Mar 03, 2012 10:14 am
Location: Dutchland

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Haplogy »

You're doing the gods' work. Praise Armok!
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. So study hard and be evil!

CatDoom
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 739
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:12 am

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by CatDoom »

It's been a while since I've struck earth with the dorfs, but as I recall compounding is highly productive in their language, at least in place names. Because of this, geminate consonants may be considerably more common across morpheme boundaries than within them. I would posit that geminates probably are phonetically distinguished, and that morphemes containing intervocalic geminates probably arose from lexicalized compounds.

Furthermore, the lack of verbal morphology in the corpus isn't necessarily surprising, since it consists almost entirely of proper nouns, and an absence of articles and morphological number marking are features well attested in the languages of our world.

Edit: Also, it seems curious to me that <th> should be permitted as a coda consonant when <c> is not, assuming that they are, in fact, both aspirated stops. I would posit that, since the author of the transliteration is an English speaker, <th> may, in fact, represent /θ/, and possibly also /ð/, in which case we could posit the more general rule that, of the fricatives, only coronals can appear as syllable codas.

Since this requires us to set aside the comparison with Khuzdul and your "cross-multiverse memetic interference" hypothesis, it does leave the pronunciation of <c> and <r> ambiguous. While the latter could be any rhotic likely to be recognized as such by an English speaker, we can make some educated guesses at the former. Symmetry would seem to suggest that <c> is /x/, which has the added benefit of not violating our rule about coda fricatives. Another possibility, based on the orthographic conventions of many non-English langauges, would be an affricate, most likely /ts/ or /tʃ/. Considering the tendency of /s/ to pattern relatively freely in clusters with stops in a number of languages, /ts/ seems to me like the most likely candidate, as a compliment to the cluster /st/.

User avatar
Anguipes
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 129
Joined: Wed May 28, 2003 6:11 pm
Location: Assiah of Yesod
Contact:

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Anguipes »

CatDoom wrote:Edit: Also, it seems curious to me that <th> should be permitted as a coda consonant when <c> is not, assuming that they are, in fact, both aspirated stops. I would posit that, since the author of the transliteration is an English speaker, <th> may, in fact, represent /θ/, and possibly also /ð/, in which case we could posit the more general rule that, of the fricatives, only coronals can appear as syllable codas.

Since this requires us to set aside the comparison with Khuzdul and your "cross-multiverse memetic interference" hypothesis, it does leave the pronunciation of <c> and <r> ambiguous. While the latter could be any rhotic likely to be recognized as such by an English speaker, we can make some educated guesses at the former. Symmetry would seem to suggest that <c> is /x/, which has the added benefit of not violating our rule about coda fricatives. Another possibility, based on the orthographic conventions of many non-English langauges, would be an affricate, most likely /ts/ or /tʃ/. Considering the tendency of /s/ to pattern relatively freely in clusters with stops in a number of languages, /ts/ seems to me like the most likely candidate, as a compliment to the cluster /st/.
Good stuff. A weak counterargument would be the presence of <ts> in the corpus, but that only occurs twice.

Worth pursuing, for the glory of Armok and/or !!SCIENCE!! ?
"It is quite certain, in particular, that I have always been insane." ~ Aleister Crowley

"Save us all from arrogant men/And all the causes they're for/I won't be righteous again/I'm not that sure any more." ~ Shades of Grey, Billy Joel

User avatar
Haplogy
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 325
Joined: Sat Mar 03, 2012 10:14 am
Location: Dutchland

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Haplogy »

Anguipes wrote:Worth pursuing, for the glory of Armok and/or !!SCIENCE!! ?
Definitely. I'm too lazy to do it myself, but I'd love seeing more of this.
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. So study hard and be evil!

User avatar
Nortaneous
Sumerul
Sumerul
Posts: 4544
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:52 am
Location: the Imperial Corridor

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Nortaneous »

I was going to do an in-depth, complicated analysis of se Borvysch c but nah it'd be a stretch to call it anything but /x/.
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

User avatar
Anguipes
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 129
Joined: Wed May 28, 2003 6:11 pm
Location: Assiah of Yesod
Contact:

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Anguipes »

Redraft of the original investigation, revised for new sources, betterness and lesswrongness.

An grammar, expanding considerably, with much made up shit, on game-Dorfish
"It is quite certain, in particular, that I have always been insane." ~ Aleister Crowley

"Save us all from arrogant men/And all the causes they're for/I won't be righteous again/I'm not that sure any more." ~ Shades of Grey, Billy Joel

Vardelm
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 329
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 2:37 pm
Contact:

Re: God help me what am I doing with my life

Post by Vardelm »

I dig it.
Tibetan Dwarvish - My own ergative "dwarf-lang"

Quasi-Khuzdul - An expansion of J.R.R. Tolkien's Dwarvish language from The Lord of the Rings

Post Reply