Reference talk:Lexember 2019

Spelling

Since this is a reference page, would it be better to provide the same spellings as Cyan's original tweets? Talashar (talk) 02:17, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm not an authority on the matter but I expect it would be. As far as I'm aware, Cyan typically give spellings that are in accordance with the Old Transliteration Standard, though they have been known to deviate (e.g. Tomahna instead of Tomahnah). In this case, which spellings are deviating?

Pharap (talk) 23:34, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

They aren't drastically different. A couple examples are the use of ligatures (ʧ) rather than ties (t͡ʃ) for affricates in the IPA and the transcription of I as capital I rather than ai. But there are also occasional typos, and in 2019 /ɹ/ was erroneously used for D'ni r. --Talashar (talk) 02:06, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

While looking through my Myst image folder in the D'ni language section I stumbled upon a screenshot of the D'ni alphabet book in Myst IV and discovered that that book also transcribes I as I, so apparently that's something that does actually have some precedent beyond Lexember. Just thought I'd mentiond that while I thought of it. The same book also uses Th and th for T (/θ/) and d (/ð/).

Pharap (talk) 04:32, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

In the case of the IPA, apparently ʧ was the standard before it was superceded by t͡ʃ, so I'd consider them to be semantically identical. It may be worth including the former verbatim on this page just to record it as accurately as possible, but the dictionary entry should likely stick to the same standard to avoid confusion. I'm not sure if the use of 'I' over 'ai' was intentional or not, but I think the same principle should apply - verbatim here in the reference, but the standard form in the dictionary.

(Though I hasten to point out I'm merely advising doing that in the absence of any more official guidance. I'm still relatively new here.)

As for /ɹ/, was that definitely a mistake (i.e. did Cyan indicate it was a mistake) or is it possible that a different sound might be used in some words? I get the impression that D'ni is intended to be a 'phonetic language', but accents and allophones do happen. Also, from what I've read, slashes tend to be used for 'broad' transcription and square brackets used for 'narrow' transcription, which means the 'r' sound in English is frequently rendered as /r/ despite typically being an [ɹ] for most speakers.

(Also, there are canonically three ways of pronouncing "D'ni" presented in-game: Atrus's "dunny" (/dʌni/), Yeesha's "duh.nee" (/də'ni/), and Esher's "ducknee" (/dʌx.ni/), though I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Cyan said the latter was a quirk unique to Esher and joked that it was because his tongue had been bitten by a snake in Noloben. The source for that latter claim eludes me at the moment.)

Pharap (talk) 08:13, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

It's funny because Atrus could be argued to not be a native speaker, or at least fluent in speaking, Yeesha too but with a bit more fluency, and Esher has a speech impediment – so the loophole is that we don't really have a accurate, accent-neutral recording of spoken D'ni :) --Korovev (talk) 09:04, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Atrus was at least brought up speaking it, but both of his teachers were flawed too. Anna wasn't a native speaker, though she did spend many years in D'ni; Gehn was a native speaker, but he was so young when he left that his D'ni may not have been particularly competent. (Which in turn makes me wonder about the quality of the D'ni spoken on the Ages he 'ruled'.) The tragic thing is that we know some proper speakers are alive in Releeshahn, but none have ever been featured in-game.

That reference was quite interesting, not just because it seems to back up that 'bitten by a snake' idea, but also because of the mention of RAWA being one who did not like Catherine's original voice actress.

Edit: As it happens, the 'bitten by a snake' quip was from the same thread. I stumbled upon it while trying to reference something for another article. RAWA says:

Personally, I'm sticking with my theory that Esher had a bizarre speech impediment caused by being bitten by the snakes in Noloben too many times, and for some reason, it only seemed to manifest itself when he tried to pronounce "D'ni."

--Pharap (talk) 01:54, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

On the technical limitations side, I used the Archivist spelling because it's needed for the Parsed D'ni tag to work correctly. A simple link to the dictionary entry could be used, but without the tag I think the dictionary would not be able to pick up this page as a source for that entry. --Korovev (talk) 08:53, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

If it were at all desirable to do so, it ought to be possible to bypass the template and manually generate what the template would have generated, with some minor alterations to account for displaying the verbatim spellings. I did some research and I've more or less figured out how it works. Basically what the D'ni Tools module backing the {{Parsed D'ni}} template is doing for each word is generating both a normal wiki link to the Dictionary: entry and a Semantic Mediawiki subobject (named quote# where # begins at 0 and increases for each quoted subword, e.g. Reference:Lexember 2019#quote0) with a ContainsTerm property.

Of course, a much easier option would be to just do something like '''{{Parsed D'ni|blah|blah|blah}}''', "Actual Word", /IPA/, definition. The formatting of the lines is merely convention after all; they aren't being generated or used to feed the database (beyond the use of the {{Parsed D'ni}} template, that is).

--Pharap (talk) 01:54, 22 January 2024 (UTC)