Help I've fallen down the Dwarf Fortress rabbithole
(and during finals week no less)
(don't worry I've finished finals)
Playing DF's got me back on some thoughts that've been bouncing around in my head for a while regarding procedural language generation. Like, that feels like something DF would do, right? But, how on earth would you go about it?
Some scattered thoughts on how you might do this:
- It'd be important to design the system with as much flexibility as possible, and to be very conscious about assumptions w/r/t language that come from the languages one speaks
- One of the first things that you'd need to do is figure out what sounds are present in a language, both vowels and consonants (and can't forget sounds like glottal stops and click consonants)
- Word (or more likely morpheme) generation could work off a base layer of taking a list of concepts/parts of speech/etc, generating a word (or morpheme) for each concept using the sound list, and then modifying those further to fill out the rest of the language base (e.g. creating a word for and then using it to make another word for <concept (adjective)>, or perhaps making a new word entirely
- The above would need to consider things like whether a language is synthetic (modifying words to indicate their relationships in a sentence, e.g. the "-d" past-tense suffix) or analytic (adding extra words/using word order to convey that info, e.g. "X verbs Y" being distinct from "Y verbs X"), or somewhere in between
- You'd also need to generate phonetic rules for how sounds can be arranged (e.g. the strict CV [with the exception of CVn] syllable structure of Japanese or the prohibition of word-initial "pt" in English)
- probably lots of other steps that are needed
- With DF's procedural history and stuff, you could then model things like sound shifts, languages splitting off from a common base, languages interacting & taking loanwords, etc
- Loanwords could work by taking <culture's> language's word for , modifying it to fit the new language's structure, and then assigning it to <concept (culture)> - e.g. Spanish's "sombrero", meaning , becoming <hat (Mexico)> in English
- Could also have loanwords come from a language not having a word for <concept (specific adjectives)> and encountering a language that does
- Yes, cultures should be able to have more than one language, but DF's civilization/culture system needs a massive rework for that kind of thing