I think that this language should have full function in society. So that it can be used at any time

I find this helpful since if we wanna speak it like an actual langauge, it would make things suitable for those who wanna speak it like the fans for lotr's and the other types people likes to speak in.

I believe that the most important thing to do is to finish this language with ONLY the language and time period of skyrim in mind. Once we have that done, i believe we could and maybe should add Dov words for modern words and words from other fantasies. seems reasonable to me.

Personally, I'm a little reluctant to do something like this, though I agree that it would be easier and more convenient for people what want to talk about things other than Skyrim in Dovahzul. I'm thinking we should come up with a way to combine other words in Dovahzul that don't literally translate to things like "car" or "telephone", but still mean those things -- in the same way drem yol lok translates to "peace fire sky" literally, but is a means of greeting.

Aaliizah

I'm thinking we should come up with a way to combine other words in Dovahzul that don't literally translate to things like "car" or "telephone", but still mean those things -- in the same way drem yol lok translates to "peace fire sky" literally, but is a means of greeting.

I think you may have a great idea here. I have been thinking about this question for a little bit now, and the more I think about it the more I think it would be prudent to take an idea from Native American languages to help solve this issue. The Native Americans wouldn't just add a new word to their lexicon whenever they encountered something entirely new. What they would do is take words they already had and combine them in into a new word. The example I'm thinking of is from the Shawnee, I believe. To make a word for "computer" they combined their words for "thinking" and "steel." So literally it doesn't make sense, but if you think about it how would you describe a computer if you didn't have a concept for what a computer was, yet you knew the concept of steel? We could do similar things. For example, computer could be lorotsedwiin or dwiinselorot. Dwiinselorot would probably make more sense with it literally meaning "steel of thought." Just my thoughts on the subject.

My thinking exactly! That would be the most realistic solution, in my opinion.

(I didn't see if there's a presentation thread where I have to post before being active, so, if I'm just blind, tell me)

There was merely the same thing in Tibetan when the began to comunicate with Europeans in the 1920s (even if nowaday the simply say with a strong Tibetan accent the english word, like "motra" for "motor").

And I read somewhere (maybe on this website, I'm not sure) that Dovahzul was main inspired by Old English and actual old nordic languages, such as Old Finnish. Maybe we can also create Dovahzul equivalents for these language's word, and for modern words, we could just apply the method described by Julseonikaan.
And don't forget tht there are some words we think they are modern, but actually not, like the word "car". We immediatly think about our modern car with fuel, etc., but it was first just a wooden cart with a horseas motor and it's food as fuel.

I just thought about it: what if we just follow the same process than the one that has been used to create modern words, like telephone comes from τη ̃ λε "tele" (far) and φωνη ́ "phone" (sound) from greek. If we apply the same logic to Dovahzul, "telephone" would be guthonaht

Drakpa

And don't forget tht there are some words we think they are modern, but actually not, like the word "car". We immediatly think about our modern car with fuel, etc., but it was first just a wooden cart with a horseas motor and it's food as fuel.

I see what you mean, however there will be a lot of words that are strictly modern. But thinking about what you've said, in the case of a car, perhaps the word for carriage and cart and car are the same? I dunno, just a thought.

And don't forget that, quite often, words are connected with se, which can improve the fluidity of the word. Since lorotdwiin is rather awkward to pronounce due to the "td" being next to each other, it might be a better idea with many cases like this to use se (say lorotdwiin and lorotsedwiin out loud -- doesn't the latter flow better? It does for me, at least).

In regards to electricity, I think that qo would be an acceptable substitute, unless you'd like to be more specific than that.

Aaliizah

Drakpa

And don't forget tht there are some words we think they are modern, but actually not, like the word "car". We immediatly think about our modern car with fuel, etc., but it was first just a wooden cart with a horseas motor and it's food as fuel.

I see what you mean, however there will be a lot of words that are strictly modern. But thinking about what you've said, in the case of a car, perhaps the word for carriage and cart and car are the same? I dunno, just a thought.

Yes, of course, there still are a lot of modern words, but I just wanted to mention it because it may be then an easier way to find new words if there is their translation in anciant nordic language. And in the case of "car", "carriaeg" and "cart", maybe they had the same meaning before. I'll take a look on this.

Aaliizah

And don't forget that, quite often, words are connected with se, which can improve the fluidity of the word. Since lorotdwiin is rather awkward to pronounce due to the "td" being next to each other, it might be a better idea with many cases like this to use se (say lorotdwiin and lorotsedwiin out loud -- doesn't the latter flow better? It does for me, at least).

Personally, I don't see any difficulty to pronounce it, as you can hear:
​

Or maybe my pronounciation isn't correct.

Aaliizah

In regards to electricity, I think that qo would be an acceptable substitute, unless you'd like to be more specific than that.

Oh, yes, my mistake, I still have some difficulties to remember than thunder isn't lightning (as English isn't my native language).

If we determine Dovahzul as a full language, we should then think about how to name actual countries, like the USA, Germany, France, China, Japan... What I propose for this would be to take their name in each scandinavian language, and then think about a word which would have approximatively he same consonnance. For example, for France, this is named "Frankrig" in Danish, "Ranska" in Finnish and "Frankrike" in Swedish. What I'd propose, then, in Dovahzul would be "Franskrige" or "Franskrig" (I prefer the last one).
"USA" in Finnish is "Amerikan Yhdysvallat" ("USA" in Swedish, Norwish and Dansih). "Yhdysvallat" means "US" in Finnish. Then, I would translate USA in Dovahzul by "Amerikanen Gegeinaan Zensekosse", litterally meaning "American United States".

Shall we start to translate other countries' name?

 

Personally, I don't see any difficulty to pronounce it, as you can hear:
​

Or maybe my pronounciation isn't correct.

Your pronunciation seems to be right on to me. It's just that lorotdwiin sounds like two distinct words to my ear and when I add the "se" to the middle it seems to become one word. That's not saying it's necessarily wrong, it's just how I hear the word.

I also looked into the origins of the word "car," and it there seems to be consensus that the word came from the Celtic word that "sounded like karra to Julius Caesar," and then became the Latin word "carra." The debate starts here as to how the word developed. Some claim that "car" came straight from "carra," and others say it then became "carriage," then "cart," then "car."

Either way, I don't think we should try to make a word for "car," but instead make a word for "automobile." The origin seems to come from the Greek word "autos" meaning "self" and the Latin word "mobilis" meaning "movable." Makes sense, right? An automobile is self-moving, and that would have been revolutionary!

The first link is to a page about the origins of "car" and the second is a concise explanation of the origins of "automobile."

If we use those origins for the word automobile, our word would be "meyerbo," literally meaning, "self move." I would have said "meyerbovon" so that it would literally be "self moving" but there seems to be a discussion going on here about the suffix -von and its issues. We may have to wait until that gets resolved to finish the word for "automobile" Another issue could be that the words "fly," "flow," and "move" are all the same verb, and might cause issues when making a word for "airplane."

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Julseonikaan

Your pronunciation seems to be right on to me. It's just that lorotdwiin sounds like two distinct words to my ear and when I add the "se" to the middle it seems to become one word. That's not saying it's necessarily wrong, it's just how I hear the word.

Oh, yes, I see. As I'm ot yet used to Dovahzul, I didn't think about that.

Julseonikaan

I also looked into the origins of the word "car," and it there seems to be consensus that the word came from the Celtic word that "sounded like karra to Julius Caesar," and then became the Latin word "carra." The debate starts here as to how the word developed. Some claim that "car" came straight from "carra," and others say it then became "carriage," then "cart," then "car."

Either way, I don't think we should try to make a word for "car," but instead make a word for "automobile." The origin seems to come from the Greek word "autos" meaning "self" and the Latin word "mobilis" meaning "movable." Makes sense, right? An automobile is self-moving, and that would have been revolutionary!

The first link is to a page about the origins of "car" and the second is a concise explanation of the origins of "automobile."

If we use those origins for the word automobile, our word would be "meyerbo," literally meaning, "self move." I would have said "meyerbovon" so that it would literally be "self moving" but there seems to be a discussion going on here about the suffix -von and its issues. We may have to wait until that gets resolved to finish the word for "automobile" Another issue could be that the words "fly," "flow," and "move" are all the same verb, and might cause issues when making a word for "airplane."

Anyone have thoughts on this?

Well, in French, we also have he word "car" (but it means "bus"), itself coming from "autocar", which might comes from "auto" and "carriole" ("carriage"). In Norwish, carriage is translated as "vogn", and in Swedish as "vagn". If we want to have an equivalent of car as wel as automobile, we could use "meyarvaagn" as "car" and, as you proposed, and "meyerbotaas" as you proposed (I just modified the suffix as it seems to actually be the right one).
And that's a nice idea to take the word from greek.
If we want to distinct "fly" and "move", why not adding "sky" in the word? Like, "meyerloksebotaas" (litterally "self flying"). Inconvenient is, it's quite a long word. Maybe we could create a compression and replace "meyer" by "me" (I checked, this word doesn't yet exist) and then, we could have "meloksebotaas".

 

Well, in French, we also have he word "car" (but it means "bus"), itself coming from "autocar", which might comes from "auto" and "carriole" ("carriage"). In Norwish, carriage is translated as "vogn", and in Swedish as "vagn". If we want to have an equivalent of car as wel as automobile, we could use "meyarvaagn" as "car" and, as you proposed, and "meyerbotaas" as you proposed (I just modified the suffix as it seems to actually be the right one).
And that's a nice idea to take the word from greek.
If we want to distinct "fly" and "move", why not adding "sky" in the word? Like, "meyerloksebotaas" (litterally "self flying"). Inconvenient is, it's quite a long word. Maybe we could create a compression and replace "meyer" by "me" (I checked, this word doesn't yet exist) and then, we could have "meloksebotaas".

Well that sounds pretty interesting. Let's keep thinking about these words and maybe an even more convenient, shorter word will present itself to us.

One last thing I wanted to bring up is that we're getting pretty far off from the original subject of this thread. Do we want to start a new thread with the specific goal of creating modern words for the Dovahzul language? I find that throwing my ideas out there with other people helps me work out the details. I mean, lately it's just been Aaliizah, Drakpa, and myself, and I guess we could just PM each other to keep creating the words, but I think we should make it a thread so everyone  can come by and throw their two cents in.

What does everyone think about the idea of the new thread?

I'm up for this new thread! (I'll do it right after this reply, since the quesion of this one seems to be answered) And maybe a moderator/an admin could move those messages to the new one?