Comments on the Pictorial Dictionary?

korovev · **Posted:** Sun Mar 12, 2017 10:38 am

pradnureetee, “rock-[currencies]”
tishmah, “friend”
atinor, “beauty”
gahrkahl, “storm”
nahdahn, “mushroom”
elemahr, “spore”
veren, “pacify”
shokrotahn, “dirtmover (bulldozer)”
tome, “homesick”

And the note about -et/-ets.

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2633

Thanks.

KathAveara · **Posted:** Sun Mar 12, 2017 6:46 pm

Regarding tsogal, it looks like it should be a participle of a verb tsog, which could mean "to shine" (thus "sunny" is "shining"). To relate this to tsoid, we'd have two suffices, -(o)g and -id, and a base tso, all of unknown meaning. The base tso is certainly unrelated to the genitive preposition.

larryf58 · **Posted:** Mon Mar 13, 2017 5:43 pm

I'll repost the list of new words that I've introduced in the Pictorial Dictionary up to this point, since Korovev was working from my illustrations and there are some differences between what I could illustrate and what the words can mean. For example, when Rawa gave me the word veren, his first choice of meaning was "mollify", but that was not something I could illustrate. I went with the synonym "pacify" with his approval.

Åtinor: Beauty.
Delin: Mist, Misty.
Elemahr: Spore.
Gahrkahl: Storm.
Nahdahn: Mushroom.
Shokrotahn: Bulldozer (lit. "dirtmover")
Tomeh: Homesick. ("out of place")
Tsogahl: Sunny, bright.
Veren: Mollify, pacify.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

KathAveara wrote:

Regarding tsogal, it looks like it should be a participle of a verb tsog, which could mean "to shine" (thus "sunny" is "shining"). To relate this to tsoid, we'd have two suffices, -(o)g and -id, and a base tso, all of unknown meaning. The base tso is certainly unrelated to the genitive preposition.

There is a verb netso 'produce, make' that may contain this same element tso. The difference between this and bahrel 'make' may be that netso involves making similar things over and over. If this is conveyed in part by tso then perhaps this explains the application to types of light, since these are in a sense "propagation" of the same thing continuously.

The idea of "produce" can also be used in English to describe the characteristic result of an action, as in a phrase like mishtahtahv b'netso rebishtah 'construction to produce the tunnel'. If this was a common-place idiom, it may have ultimately worn down to mishtahtahv tso rebishtah 'construction of the tunnel'.

Shorah

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Regarding delin 'misty; mist' this looks like it could contain the past-participial ending -in, and suggests that this suffix can form words with both adjectival and also noun meanings.

Other adjectival uses of words that may end in this suffix are: oshahnin 'lost'; melin 'outer'; riltahgahmin 'unknown'; and bahvahnin (meaning something like 'hidden'). Other nouns that may end in this suffix are: boogin 'creature'; and terelin 'contact'.

Some of these seem clearly deverbal in origin (though technically only tahgahm 'know' is attested in use as a verb); so this raises the possibility that del is a verb stem. Perhaps as a verb it means something like 'to dim' or 'to obscure'.

Another possible etymology for delin would be a relation to the name Todelmer. The first and third elements in this seem to be to 'place' and mer 'watch'; so that the middle element ought to refer to the 'sky' in general or to something astronomical, like 'star' or 'galaxy'.

Shorah

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Tweek wrote:

Do you happen to have OTS versions of the newer words? (I'm an old gassy excretion when it comes to language and still use the old standard).

As an old wind-bag myself when it comes to “new” linguistic standards, I feel an urge to point out that a better designation than OTS might be ATS (for ‘Authentic Transcription System’).

A few years after the self-proclaimed NTS (‘New Transliteration Standard’) was devised by fans, the game Revelation was published and we learned that what had come to be called "OTS" was in fact the system that Atrus used to teach the D’ni alphabet to Yeesha.

The significance of this fact has (I feel) been largely overlooked. In terms of Yeesha learning D’ni it may be a minor point, since Anna had learned to speak the language from native speakers and Atrus from her, we could suppose that the system of transcription was largely a mnemonic device for learning to write D’ni, and may or may not have facilitated learning to pronounce it.

But there is a secondary question that I don’t know if anyone has considered: How did Dr. Watson decipher the D’ni script? Given that Cyan has published images and charts seemingly based on this system of transcription provided by Atrus to Yeesha, it seems one likely possibility is that this document (or something similar provided by Anna to Atrus) survived and was found by the DRC.

Shorah

KathAveara · **Posted:** Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:52 am

Frankly, OTS has been the most successful out of anything, due to the ease of reading and writing, and (with a few adjustments to simplify and generally improve the system) still my preferred method.

korovev · **Posted:** Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:58 am

On the contrary, I need to convert OTS in NTS to read anything more than a few words without getting an eyebleed.

Talashar · **Joined:** Sun Dec 08, 2013 12:24 pm **Posts:** 91

Khreestrefah wrote:

But there is a secondary question that I don’t know if anyone has considered: How did Dr. Watson decipher the D’ni script? Given that Cyan has published images and charts seemingly based on this system of transcription provided by Atrus to Yeesha, it seems one likely possibility is that this document (or something similar provided by Anna to Atrus) survived and was found by the DRC.

Near the end of the Book of D'ni, Catherine writes "But you who have found my histories should know this last thing, for I have written these things only so that they might be known to future seekers, whether they be of D'ni or human origin". This suggests that Catherine wrote her histories in both D'ni and English, which would provide Dr. Watson with a superb Rosetta Stone for learning D'ni. It's possible that the OTS derives from the system of transliteration Catherine used for D'ni names in the English text.

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2633

korovev wrote:

On the contrary, I need to convert OTS in NTS to read anything more than a few words without getting an eyebleed.

I'm the opposite can't make head nor tails of NTS.

korovev · **Posted:** Mon Mar 27, 2017 7:25 pm

Ahih! lahuriheh lahntahr lahssih soorihnehn,
yehehnih oonohohtihmeh veh rahahmahr ahldahron!

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

Tweek wrote:

korovev wrote:

On the contrary, I need to convert OTS in NTS to read anything more than a few words without getting an eyebleed.

I'm the opposite can't make head nor tails of NTS.

I suppose that these opposite linguistic experiences arise from different intuitions developed when first learning to read the Latin alphabet. In Italian for instance, the vocalic system is relatively simple. The vowels spelled e and o each have two closely related pronunciations, but otherwise the there is a more or less one-to-one correspondence between pure vowel and Latin vowel-symbol, and the diphthongs are essentially just combinations of the simple vowels. In English on the other hand the vocalic system is much more complex: the vowels in diphthongs don’t necessarily correspond to any pure vowel, and there are more pure vowels than can be readily accomodated by the Latin vowel-symbols (roughly 9 to 14 depending on the dialect); so that a system of “digraphs” has developed, where two vowel-symbols together are used to represent a long pure vowel or a diphthong, with a correspondence that is many-to-one rather than one-to-one.

Given such variant modes of deploying the “same” set of symbols (and these two systems only represent a small range among human orthographic systems in general), it is not all that surprising that we each have a different internalized facility at learning and using a system of transcription that differs from the one by which we first learned to read. So I don’t mean to denigrate NTS, only to recognize that is is a secondary system of representing D’ni in Latin-derived symbols that is mainly useful for some European-language speakers to learn D’ni without having to first learn the “rules” of English spelling.

But this just leads us back to the historical linguistic question of how do we know how D’ni is pronounced, except insofar as various English-speaking “witnesses” have told us that certain English spellings are a reasonable approximation of the sounds they understand the D’ni script to represent. And here I agree with Talashar that Catherine’s writings seem to have played a crucial role. But we know that she did not speak English when she met Atrus, so she presumably learned the language from him and/or Anna; and if she wrote in English she had to learn how to do this in much the same way as any of us did. So perhaps there was some tabulation of D’ni to English spellings, similar to the table Atrus used to teach D’ni to Yeesha, but which Catherine used in “reverse” to learn to spell English from Atrus or Anna.

Shorah

korovev · **Posted:** Mon Mar 27, 2017 11:44 pm

I wonder if Atrus (or Gehn) managed to salvage imager recordings of, say, public speeches; the DRC might have found and restored some of those. Since the games are games IC, the actual transcription used by Atrus could be different.

Khreestrefah · **Joined:** Tue Apr 06, 2010 5:01 pm **Posts:** 163

That is an interesting possibility. But if we seriously privilege the evidence of what happened in Uru Live over what seemed to happen in Riven or Revelation, then that seems to argue against this theory; since in Riven there are indeed reasonably understandable imager recordings; but in Uru there is a recording in the D'ni language that is too distorted to be useful as phonological evidence.

I am also unsure how useful such recordings would be, even if not distorted. We only "know" what the recordings in Riven say to the extent that we understand the language from its written evidence. It seems like there would have to be some sort of "key" to deciphering the written records for real progress in reading them to have proceeded.

Shorah

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