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)

In the case of the IPA, apparently ʧ was the standard before it was superceded by t͡ʃ, so I'd consider them to be semantically identical.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)

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)