zompist bboard

Um, wut?

Anguipes wrote:Send help

God can't help you now.

(but seriously, what is Dorfish, explain? I saw a reference to Khuzdul)

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).

why is everyone talking about borv veeste all of a sudden

Frequentizer!

You're doing the gods' work. Praise Armok!

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/.

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!! ?

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.

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/.

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

An grammar, expanding considerably, with much made up shit, on game-Dorfish

I dig it.