Talk:D'ni (language)

From MYSTlore

Syntax and OOC history need work. I really just pretend that I know anything about D'ni.  ;) Talashar 19:28, 14 October 2006 (CDT)

Are there that many words deliberately similar to English and Hebrew? The examples I recall people giving are Yahvo - Yahweh and the (IMO rather doubtful) shorah - shalom, but it never seemed to me like a general trend... Talashar

Well, perhaps my wording is misleading. I was indeed referring to "Yahvo"/"Yahweh" for instance, but also, say, "Garrison"/"Gahreesen". Chucker 04:52, 1 November 2006 (CST)

I think another thing that has influenced this impression is that RAWA has referenced Hebrew to explain features of D'ni in the past. I especially remember this in an explanation of how to pronounce the apostrophe. Renoah 15:52, 4 November 2006 (CST)

The IPA on this page is kind of terrifyingly, um, not right. We're just missing the characters that would let us be accurate with it. We especially need things like the small caps I and the back a (the one that's upside-down), and the slurs for digraphs would be good to have. How do we go about using those things? I know wikipedia has a special IPA character set- can be get something like that? There are inaccuracies I'm dying to change. (Also, how do superscripts work? This diphthong situation sort of demands them.) Renoah 15:52, 4 November 2006 (CST)

^foo _bar produces: ^foo _bar. As for IPA, isn't that just a Unicode character set you can use anywhere? Or are you referring to the list of characters underneath Wikipedia's editing page, where you can easily copy and paste them? Chucker 16:38, 4 November 2006 (CST)

I've added a Wikipedia-like box to edit pages. Is this roughly what you had in mind, Renoah? :-) Chucker 17:32, 4 November 2006 (CST)

That thing you added is what I was looking for. :) Renoah 20:22, 4 November 2006 (CST)

Excellent! Chucker 20:52, 4 November 2006 (CST)

1. Why would ah be the upside down a? According to Wikipedia, that's actually closer to the D'ni u. (Accuracy note: I've seen that in other places, and my own mouth seems to bear it out)

2. I was going to ask whether there was any evidence that ay was a diphthong, but then I realized the possible parallel between e-ay, ah-I, and o-oy (not to mention i-ee). Is that what you had in mind?

3. Do we know what the precise quality of the second element of diphthongs in D'ni is? If we're using the same as General American English, shouldn't o be /oU/? (Did you manage to learn anything useful through Praat from the Bevin speech, Renoah?)

4. I changed my use of ai to ay in the vowel diagram to keep it consistent. (RAWA sometimes uses ai for the I diphthong, so this lessens confusion with that, too. Note vailee in the timekeeping article here.)

5. The capital letter i looks way too much like a lower-case L for my tastes. *blinks* Talashar 19:32, 4 November 2006 (CST)

1. Strike that, you're right, I'm clearly losing my mind. I think I was thinking of the low-back ɑ vs. low-front a's, and I couldn't find character for the back one.

2. Yes.

3. Just from slowing down and listening, the o's show signs of being diphthongs like English. The level of noise in the files made the spectrograms really, really tough to read, and I put the project on hold for a bit. I'm going to get back to it, though, I swear. ;) Just as soon as I find a way to filter that doesn't also mess up the spectrogram.

4. Did RAWA really use ai for I? I was so sure that was a fan invention (a logical one, but a confusing one!).

5. Sorry. It doesn't look like that in the editing window. I needed a small-caps i (ɪ), but I couldn't find it. I was taught that "real linguists"- or people who study languages other than English, I think- don't use j for diphthongs. I appeal to Ladefoged, God of Phonetics, on this one. Now that the character links are handy, I'll redo it with real IPA. :) Renoah 20:22, 4 November 2006 (CST)

Contents 1 D'ni Script 2 D'ni vs. Terahnee 3 Sound Description 4 D'wiktionary

[edit] D'ni Script

So I'm thinking about adding a tag for easy input of D'ni characters. However, there's several things I need to know (or we need to agree on) first:

• Which D'ni font / which transliteration standard do we use? Jehon's regular, Jehon's LM, Cyan's?
• Since their latest website redesign, Cyan has stopped offering their font. You can only find it mirrored, and I'm not sure how legally kosher that is.
• Someone will want to check if we can redistribute the appropriate font here, or whether we'll have to remote-link.
• Any other gotchas? Will something like

<d'ni>Some D'ni</d'ni> do the trick? Chucker 19:13, 4 November 2006 (CST)

I think we should use Cyan's font. As for transliteration, I don't know. I suggest OTS with ay rather than ai, as I mentioned above, and unnecessary h's after vowels removed. But that's just my preference...are there any other suggestions? Talashar 19:32, 4 November 2006 (CST)

FWIW, I finally found a mirror of Cyan's fonts (as well as all three of Jehon's, and some other thing), through [1], namely here. Chucker 19:44, 4 November 2006 (CST)

Okay, so I created the d'ni tag, as described above. .Shorah^[?] (I wouldn't be surprised if I got even that simple thing wrong ;-) — but hey, it loks nice.) This tag will only work with Cyan's font, not with Jehon's. I could modify it to fall back on Jehon's font, but I couldn't get Jehon's font to work in any of my browsers (though it works fine in text editors), so I wouldn't be able to test that, so it's somewhat moot. I'm going to whip up a brief explanation page at MYSTlore:D'ni text input, but someone else will likely have to step in and improve it. Chucker 20:05, 4 November 2006 (CST)

Personally, I'd rather we just stuck to Cyan's font anyway, and kept things as simple as possible. The tag is spiffy- is there a way to specify an increase of the font size automatically when we use the tag? For some reason Cyan's Dnifont looks really crummy at small sizes.Renoah 20:22, 4 November 2006 (CST)

I've increased it from 13px to 16px. Better? More? Less? :-) Chucker 20:38, 4 November 2006 (CST)

Definitely better. Maybe more? When I'm just typing in Word or something, size 14 seems to be the magic number where the letters stop looking all pixelly and gross. (Is the technical term for that "not anti-aliased"?) Renoah 22:04, 4 November 2006 (CST)

Aliasing is when it's "all pixelly gross"; anti-aliasing is a technique to smoothen it to work against that. Compare aliased: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Diamond_without_anti-aliasing.png and anti-aliased: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Anti-aliased_diamond.png — the second has a slight blur, but arguably looks "nicer".

I've bumped the font size up to 14pt (19px), as you suggested. I've also added 5 pixels of horizontal padding per side as I saw you had some problems with that, so adding spaces should not be needed any more either. HTH, Chucker 07:23, 5 November 2006 (CST)

Looks like that size changed helped a lot (on my screen at least). Thanks Chucker :) Renoah 13:35, 5 November 2006 (CST)

Great, you're welcome :-) Chucker 13:40, 5 November 2006 (CST)

[edit] D'ni vs. Terahnee

The article is currently treating the two languages as essentially identical. Keeping in mind the usual fuzziness about dialect and language distinctions, I am profoundly uncomfortable with classing the two as one language. The few Terahnee words we have are clearly distinct from D'ni, and even though they are mutually intelligible, I think the relationship is closer to that of Danish/Swedish/Norwegian rather than Boston/Dallas English.

Yes, that sounds about right. I.e., it's a family of languages, not just a bunch of dialects.

I wonder what the rest of y'all think about splitting the two- this will involve serious revisions of the first section especially, which makes some pretty strong claims about the relationship between the two language. (Incidentally, the longer I study D'ni, the less I think it has remained changeless for 10,000 years. Also, let's not forget the fact that in BoD learning to decipher the old linking books was a major plot point, so clearly *something* has changed.) Renoah 20:21, 13 November 2006 (CST)

Generally, I'm all for this, but 1) I think it'd be appropriate for Talashar to chime in, 2) I'm too ignorant of the specifics to participate in this vote, and 3) one aspect to consider is also how much we really know about the "other" languages (the Ronay's, the Terahnee's, and the old D'ni one) — if there's virtually nothing to write about them, it may be difficult to create a separate, well-written article. Chucker 20:29, 13 November 2006 (CST)

Hmm...you may be right about appropriate classification, as both D'ni and Terahnee had the proverbial army and navy. The Book of D'ni constantly refers to it as the same language, though.

Anyway, I don't think we know enough to make a completely separate article for the speech of Terahnee. Talashar 21:25, 13 November 2006 (CST)

I'm looking at BoD (pp. 162-65 paperback), and it's referring to "translations" (as opposed to transliterations) of the old texts, as well as "structural inversions" on the sentence level (i.e. differences in syntax). On the other hand, the book says (p. 200) that Hadre speaks "clear yet heavily accented D'ni". The story is written from the perspective on non-linguists to a non-linguist audience, though, so I would think we'd have to take that into account. (Remember that awful scene in the Disney Atlantis movie when the "linguist" and the Atlantean native move from the Atlantean language to French to English perfectly in, like, 30 seconds? Our information is better than that, but I think we have to take the perceptions of Atrus and co. into account on this one.)

Personally, I think we could find enough information about the Terahnee language to make a short article. It might be important, actually, since some of the words we use frequently ('relyimah' and 'bahro', for example) are Terahnee and not D'ni words. But at the very least, I think we need to make the distinction in the article itself, to avoid confusion, because it's pretty clear from BoD that a) the language has changed over time, and b) Terahnee and D'ni are not identical languages.Renoah 23:45, 13 November 2006 (CST)

If relyimah was a strictly Terahnee word, why would the DRC use it rather than the proper D'ni term for the secret police?

The DRC's usage of D'ni terms is frequently slightly inaccurate, and occasionally just completely wrong. Their "language" is a mixture of English, D'ni, and whatever-they-feel-like-using-today. "Why would the DRC use it" has answers such as "out of convenience", "out of not knowing any better" or "out of preference", but certainly not "out of accuracy". They could be accurate, but they could just as well (and perhaps more likely) be completely wrong. Chucker 07:07, 14 November 2006 (CST)

It seems to me that the article already says what you suggest, but you can make it clearer if you want. I'd be fine with a separate Terahnee article, I'm just not sure how much there would be to say in it. Talashar 07:02, 14 November 2006 (CST)

Since you're okay with the split, it sounds to me like it'd be best for Renoah to just attempt it; perhaps once we see a basic framework of what she has in mind, things will be clearer? Chucker 07:07, 14 November 2006 (CST)

I made a new Terahnee article, but my brain is seriously disorganzied today, so it's kind of a messy collection of information. Also, it occured to me that about half of what I was thinking of as Terahnee information was actually related to the older language shared by D'ni and Terahnee, which has another script and the syntax and stylistic differences and so forth. My information at this point is mostly comparative; I don't know whether it's best to keep things in separate articles or in a section of the D'ni or Terahnee articles or what. Renoah 12:40, 14 November 2006 (CST)

FWIW, I categorized the two under "Languages" and "Ronay-esque languages (if you can come up for a better name for the latter, please go ahead; my other ideas seemed even worse :-) — perhaps "Ronay and related languages"). I realize this may be a little redundant at this point, what with us knowing virtually nothing about non-Ronay-esque languages (such as the Rivenese's). But maybe, one day…

Maybe "Ronay language family"? Renoah 20:03, 14 November 2006 (CST)

Better. Chucker 20:04, 14 November 2006 (CST)

I don't know how to change the category name. :( Can you do it, Chucker? 21:46, 25 November 2006 (CST)

Sure. Chucker 21:52, 25 November 2006 (CST)

[edit] Sound Description

The English equivalents bit seems out of place. Maybe it should be moved to a different article? In which case (IMO) "catch in the throat" would be more helpful than "glottal stop".

By the way, if ay is analyzed as a diphthong, then it's awfully tempting to work the vowel chart into a symmetric 3x3 grid... *eyes it* Talashar 07:41, 26 November 2006 (CST)

But -- but, but ... (pleading whimper) a glottal stop is what it's called ... Cactus Wren 10:46, 26 November 2006 (CST)

[edit] D'wiktionary

How far fetched would be to start the project of a d'ni wiktionary in this wiki? Koena 00:38, 12 November 2007 (CST)

Not far-fetched at all, actually: that is in fact on my list of things to do, since it has been requested multiple times. No ETA though. Chucker 00:55, 12 November 2007 (CST)