Thuum.org

A community for the dragon language of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Thuum.org

A community for the dragon language of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Revised Romanisation?

 1 

Vulduviing
March 4, 2021

This proposal is inspired by the Revised Romanisation of Korean, and the new romanisations of some Slavic languages.

This revised romanisation aims:

  1. To maintain a simple, consistent orthography
  2. To better appeal to non-Dovahzul speakers
  3. To relegate one Dovahzul character to one Latin character each, where possible
  • The vowel ah is romanised as â
  • The long vowels aa ii oo uu are romanised as á í ó ú.
    (NOTE: Acute accents are used because this site does not render macrons.)
  • The vowels ei ey ir ur are not affected by this romanisation, as their sounds cannot be easily compressed into a single letter.
  • In the event that vowels run together, they are separated with an apostrophe ('). (Nahagliiv - Nâ'aglív).
    The vowel combinations ae and au are an exemption. In particular, ae is meant to represent the /æ/ sound and theoretically should have a Dovahzul character relegated to it.
  • The new romanisation system will ignore the double-letter rule for plural words (dovâhe for dovahhe). Instead, a new rule will be formed that the letter will always go after â
  • Compound words using the preposition se will be separated by dashes. (Ahrolsedovah - Ârol-se-Dovâ). 

Under this new romanisation, Dovahzul is rendered Dovâzul and Thuum is rendered Thúm
Here is the first verse of the Song of the Dragonborn, rendered to demonstrate:

Dovâkín, Dovâkín, nál ok zin los vârín,

Wâ dein vokul mâfaerák âst vál

Ârk fin norok pál grán fod nust hon zindro zán

Dovâkín, fâ hin kogán mu drál 

by Vulduviing
March 4, 2021

This proposal is inspired by the Revised Romanisation of Korean, and the new romanisations of some Slavic languages.

This revised romanisation aims:

  1. To maintain a simple, consistent orthography
  2. To better appeal to non-Dovahzul speakers
  3. To relegate one Dovahzul character to one Latin character each, where possible
  • The vowel ah is romanised as â
  • The long vowels aa ii oo uu are romanised as á í ó ú.
    (NOTE: Acute accents are used because this site does not render macrons.)
  • The vowels ei ey ir ur are not affected by this romanisation, as their sounds cannot be easily compressed into a single letter.
  • In the event that vowels run together, they are separated with an apostrophe ('). (Nahagliiv - Nâ'aglív).
    The vowel combinations ae and au are an exemption. In particular, ae is meant to represent the /æ/ sound and theoretically should have a Dovahzul character relegated to it.
  • The new romanisation system will ignore the double-letter rule for plural words (dovâhe for dovahhe). Instead, a new rule will be formed that the letter will always go after â
  • Compound words using the preposition se will be separated by dashes. (Ahrolsedovah - Ârol-se-Dovâ). 

Under this new romanisation, Dovahzul is rendered Dovâzul and Thuum is rendered Thúm
Here is the first verse of the Song of the Dragonborn, rendered to demonstrate:

Dovâkín, Dovâkín, nál ok zin los vârín,

Wâ dein vokul mâfaerák âst vál

Ârk fin norok pál grán fod nust hon zindro zán

Dovâkín, fâ hin kogán mu drál 


SethVeeper
March 4, 2021

There's a mild difiiculty here, which I have encountered with the Dovahzul font file I use that approaches those extra runes in a similar manner:

The means of typing those accents isn't common knowledge. As such, it would work fairly well for handwritten text, but arguably makes it *less* accessible in a digital medium.

by SethVeeper
March 4, 2021

There's a mild difiiculty here, which I have encountered with the Dovahzul font file I use that approaches those extra runes in a similar manner:

The means of typing those accents isn't common knowledge. As such, it would work fairly well for handwritten text, but arguably makes it *less* accessible in a digital medium.


Vulduviing
March 4, 2021
SethVeeper

There's a mild difiiculty here, which I have encountered with the Dovahzul font file I use that approaches those extra runes in a similar manner:

The means of typing those accents isn't common knowledge. As such, it would work fairly well for handwritten text, but arguably makes it *less* accessible in a digital medium.

I could argue that you also cannot easily type diacritics in tonal languages like Vietnamese, which relegates up to 3 diacritics to one letter. I could also say how Russian romanisations have evolved to using š in place of sh, or x/h in place of kh. In fact, this reasoning is why I thought up an idea of a revised romanisation of Dovahzul. 

by Vulduviing
March 4, 2021
SethVeeper

There's a mild difiiculty here, which I have encountered with the Dovahzul font file I use that approaches those extra runes in a similar manner:

The means of typing those accents isn't common knowledge. As such, it would work fairly well for handwritten text, but arguably makes it *less* accessible in a digital medium.

I could argue that you also cannot easily type diacritics in tonal languages like Vietnamese, which relegates up to 3 diacritics to one letter. I could also say how Russian romanisations have evolved to using š in place of sh, or x/h in place of kh. In fact, this reasoning is why I thought up an idea of a revised romanisation of Dovahzul. 

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