Fantasy world where the dwarven language is largely non-verbal. It consists of making tapping noises on a series of different materials all dwarves of a community wear on their person and occasional low throat tones that are sub-audible to most other fantasy peoples. This communication system reduces the amount of times that dwarves need to open their mouths while working and limits the amount of particulate matter and natural gases they inhale (it can also be used to communicate through lengths of solid material in cases such as cave-ins). They have a totally separate dialect for feasts which is vocal and more typical, as feasts involve singing and loud banter. The feast dialect is what most people consider dwarven language, because it's all they're ever exposed to since outsiders are largely banned from mines and workshops.
Originally produced for my own use, this is growing out of control, and I thought it might be nice to share.
Final Outcome:
Details under the cut:
Step 1: Create a .txt file containing every dwarven word I could find on the wiki. [1 2]
Assumption 1: Any dwarven writing system would be in place before the use of Trade tongue.
I followed a few rules while inputting these values:
I did not use the letter ‘y’ -> I substituted ‘i’ for each ‘y’. Reason: ‘y’ was present only in names, not in any of the dwarven words provided on the wiki.
I (tried to) input each word only once. This is important later.
I did not include any names (from the second source) or words/phrases (from the first) that were not dwarven. For instance, I did not include Lace Harding in the list, because her name isn’t very dwarven, in sound, etymology, or spelling convention.
Czibor became Shibor because the ‘ch’ phoneme only exists in his name. That’s bad language.
I did not include hyphens or apostrophes. I’m going to call their use a ‘romanization’ artifact. (Not including them made my code easier, and they don’t show up often after all.)
Step 2: Write a MATLAB script to count the total instances of each character (letter), and then calculate the overall frequency of each letter over the whole data set. (#_of_instances_of_letter/total_letters). [[I am not that skilled, so I ended up just googling it and being very happy someone else had figured out the code already!]]
This generated two items:
A frequency list, with numerical values
A bar graph
The bar graph:
Conclusions from graph:
‘A’ is, unsurprisingly, the most frequent letter
It should, thus, be easy to write
‘J’ is almost completely unused
It will likely be more difficult to write
‘Q’, ‘X’, and ‘Y’ do not exist
‘Z’ is surprisingly rare
Temptations from graph:
Combine ‘B’ and ‘P’
Drop ‘Z’ for a ‘TS’ combination
Combine ‘C’ and ‘K’
Combine ‘J’ and ‘G’
Step 3: Compare graph with raw data (word list) and see if any of the temptations are plausible.
Conclusions:
‘Branka’ sounds stupid with a ‘P’ sound
‘B’ and ‘P’ will not combine
‘C’ is only used as a hard consonant.
Will be combined with ‘K’
‘G’ is never used soft
‘J’ stays
Will be more complex, likely
‘Z’ is used in ‘Orzammar’
‘Z’ stays
Step 4: Create list of canon examples of characters in dwarven writing (Trade tongue, specifically). [3 4 5 6] From the data collected above, I require 25 distinct characters (’th’ ‘sh’ and ‘.’ all require characters, in addition to the 22 above). [To be clear: I have chosen not to use capital/miniscule writing, for the sake of ease, and that old runic scripts didn’t seem to be the biggest fans of capitals.]
Assumption 2: The game is absolutely NOT inclined to present anything that might be made into a workable language. The symbols used, however, can be used into the new construction.
Step 4: Assign letters to the characters, based on frequency of letters vs simplicity of characters. (And somewhat on frequency of characters in example text.)
I'm teaching myself the dwarven written language of the Hobbit and the lord of rings. The written language is amazing. They are all geometric and just beautiful. I love the written language probably more then the spoken language.
//if I spent half the time on university stuff that I spent on learning and translating khuzdul-english (and vice versa) tonight, i had been done with university 3 years ago
