I have the feeling that he's gone, Piz. I believe his last post was in October; i.e., half a year ago. I doubt you'll be hearing from him anytime soon.
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Egads..this is World of Warcraft meets Battlefield 1942 in a dark alley with way too much to drink and no discarded mattress nearby.
I have the feeling that he's gone, Piz. I believe his last post was in October; i.e., half a year ago. I doubt you'll be hearing from him anytime soon.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO this looks very implementable!
Okay, if Redstone1337 ain't coming back, I will add the Minecraftian words for Day and, just for the heck of it, Night. If Redstone1337 comes back and says he doesn't like it, I'm cool with that; he started the language, he can alter it. But until then, this will have to suffice:
Day = Ka
Night = Ko
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We probably have to edit those name since some of those letters and sounds are not included in Minecraftian. That's okay; Woden's Day became Wednsday, so alterations are definitely allowed. Well, due to my ADHD I can't focus on editing those eight words, so have fun with that linguistic trainwreck that will now live on the internet forever.
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I was also thinking about a minecraftian word for Month. How about Pars? It's Latin for fraction. There are other Latin words for fraction but none of them could be spelled in Minecraftian. As an added bonus, Pars is short, so we could put it at the end of a word symbolizing something in minecraft to make the name of a month. I know that's not how real months got their names, but we aren't talking about real months and I needed some sort of systematic way to determine the names of the months. Anyways, since we've already escaped the realm of real life, someone let me know what category of people/places/things we should name the months after. Once we've done that we just need to decide what day a New Year begins and we have ourselves a calendar! (And with any luck someone will make it into a mod alongside the language we are developing)
I'm not gone, I just have a job now. I graduated from college a year ago, and just now found work last month. Going from having nothing but time on my hands to a 40 hour work week is quite a shock. I barely have time for minecraft, let alone a minecraft conlang. Unfortunately, my muse gets lost pretty easy. conlanging is a lot like programming. It's fun to come up with new grammar and vocabulary. It's less fun trying to go through old notes and update them to accommodate new features, and it's positively grueling to write an explanation of the language that a non linguist can understand. Having said that, the interest that yall are showing is encouraging. I've been mulling over various aspects of the language in my head. I can't promise I can keep up with this thread.
I was thinking about a Minecraftian calendar when I found this post and realized there was no better place to ask the following questions:
Since the names of the seven days in a week come from the names of Germanic, Greek, and Roman deities, would the days of the Minecraftian week be named after Minecraftian deities?
I would assume that a Minecraftian week would be eight days long, a Minecraftian month four weeks long and a Minecraftian year 16 months long, since these numbers are close to our own and are each divisible by eight (with the exception of four, which is a factor of eight), which seems to be an underlying theme in Minecraft.
Also, what would the moths be named? Months get their names from many sources, from festivals to prefixes representing numbers to deities, so how could we determine that?
The game doesn't have much lore to work with though. If anything, you can probably base deities it on block themes.
sand - deity of desolation (keeper of ancient secrets)
rock - The world's keeper (central deity, shields the border between worlds, patron deity of shelters)
dirt - Harvest deity, and provider to the testificates
wood - wilderness deity, and central figure of the overworld. his/her reach extending into all but the most inhospitable terrain.
fire/water - twins of destructive forces
snow - ... can't think of a good theme for this one
red stone - deity of innovation and modernization
ore - deity of crafting and construction
mycelium - the eccentric
This is going to sound kind of stupid at first, but hear me out; What if snow was diety of trickery? Snow covers things, preventing you from telling what they really are, and can make the illusion of ground when there is none, as demonstrated by these two pictures of the same place but from different angles:
Also, according to Minecraft wiki, "If snow forms on top of a cactus, the cactus will still cause damage when stepped on or touched..." This means that what appears to be safe to tread on can actually be deadly to touch due to snow. However, since Minecraft already has dieties, and we need 16 things for the names of the months, we might need to abandon the material-diety thing for now. I actually made a numeral system for the Testificates based on eight, but this stupid forum won't let me post it. I've tried converting it to a JPEG but nothing happened, so if anyone knows how to post homemade images on this forum...
Also, there's still the problem of spelling the names of minecraftian dieties with the allowed letters. If anyone has an idea about how to spell "nɒtʃ" with the letters p, t, k, f, s, x, m, n, l, r, i, e, a, and o and nothing else (without using dipthongs and all the other stuff that is completely alien to me since I'm in middle school and, despite being in the Gifted program, don't speak fluent nerd) please post it.
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@starlinvf, though the game doesn't have much lore to work with, we can assume that, since Markus Persson's nickname is Notch and Notch is supposedly minecraft's version of god, the nicknames of people who work on minecraft are the names of minecraftian dieties, so there's no real reason for the creation of new dieties. Belive it or not, the sole reason I joined this discussion was becuase I wanted to make a minecraftian calendar. It sort of snowballed from there. I made a minecraftian numeral system based loosely on the one used by the Matoran in BIONICLE (I'm reffering to numerals used in Metru Nui, Mata Nui, Voya Nui, and Karda Nui in the era of the Toa Nuva, since I'm not sure if fanfiction has erased the original alphabet after Bara Magna, Aqua Magna, and Bota Magna were recombined by Makuta's gravitic blast) and now I'm thinking "We're working on a language, a calendar, and a numeral system for the Testififcates. Why not develope a culture? Oh right, because no one on the Minecraft Forums would want to help."
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It would be quite the time waster (in a good way) researching the language of the Testificates just to find out what that one guy said to you.
This would be some fun. And, like Klingon, this language may be expanded and learned throughout the world.It would be quite the time waster (in a good way) researching the language of the Testificates just to find out what that one guy said to you.
This would be some fun. And, like Klingon, this language may be expanded and learned throughout the world.
@Deonyi, considering that the Standard Galactic Alphabet is used in enchanting tables, it is probably a suitable Minecraftian alphabet. However, if we were to develope our own Minecraftian alphabet, might I suggest basing it loosely on the Matoran alphabet used in BIONICLE? At the moment, I am about to go to Boys & Girls Club, and until I figure out how to post homemade images on this forum I won't be able to help anyways. The others, however, would probably be willing (and able) to help you develope an alphabet.
It's so awesome that everyone has taken an interest in this! If any of you have other ideas that fit, feel free to add them. I've been seriously toying with redoing the phonetactics. I think it makes more sense to drop the weakening consonants at the end of syllables, and instead make them voiced in voiced environments (i.e. in V_V or V_/l/ or V_N etc). additionally, I feel like dropping the no adjacent vowels rule and the consequent interfixes [k] and [p]. I also realized that all languages that I'm aware of with small phoneme inventories distinguish vowel lenght and sometimes even consonant gemination. We already have gemination, and analyzing long vowels as pairs of identical vowels makes sense.
Also, no more reduplicating whole words for plurals and continuous aspect, just reduplicate the first syllable (minus the coda if any). Thus, [tokko] "dog" becomes [todokko] "dogs".
Adding lore is a must if we want the language to have a soul as it were. Tolkien disliked Esperanto because it had no associated legends, and its worth noting that Quenya and Sindarin predate the elves that speak those languages. Tolkien grew his legendarium around the languages to give them mroe life. Thus, Quenya words like "Eru" and "anor" carry a lot of weight and majesty because they have a history to back them up.
@PakMan66, complicated and good go hand in hand in this situation. We are talking about creating an entire LANGUAGE. From scratch! Do you think they made German overnight? How about Hindi? Latin? Chinese? Real languages took over a thousand years to develope, in many cases thousands if you don't count the archaiac forms as part of the languages. All languages are complicated. Make it simple and it's not realistic. Now, I'm not saying I understand what they're saying, I'm only in Seventh grade, albeit in Gifted placement. But logically the complexity of this makes sense. I hope you can see where I'm coming from.
I figured out how to homemade images! Here's the numeric system I made. I's based on eight (for those of you who don't sknow what that means, if a number exeeds eight in value in this system it has two digits, the first being one. Once it hits 64 (8 groups of 8) it would have three digits, and so on.
Day = Ka
Night = Ko
Notchka
Jebka
Kappischeka
Junkboyka
Bombboyka
Minecraftchickka
Carnalizerka
Xlsonka
We probably have to edit those name since some of those letters and sounds are not included in Minecraftian. That's okay; Woden's Day became Wednsday, so alterations are definitely allowed. Well, due to my ADHD I can't focus on editing those eight words, so have fun with that linguistic trainwreck that will now live on the internet forever.
The game doesn't have much lore to work with though. If anything, you can probably base deities it on block themes.
sand - deity of desolation (keeper of ancient secrets)
rock - The world's keeper (central deity, shields the border between worlds, patron deity of shelters)
dirt - Harvest deity, and provider to the testificates
wood - wilderness deity, and central figure of the overworld. his/her reach extending into all but the most inhospitable terrain.
fire/water - twins of destructive forces
snow - ... can't think of a good theme for this one
red stone - deity of innovation and modernization
ore - deity of crafting and construction
mycelium - the eccentric
Here are some of my suggestions:
Dirt: Sish (x)
It kinda sounds like a spade digging through it.
Magma Cube: nedanrai aka. Nether Cube
Also, according to Minecraft wiki, "If snow forms on top of a cactus, the cactus will still cause damage when stepped on or touched..." This means that what appears to be safe to tread on can actually be deadly to touch due to snow. However, since Minecraft already has dieties, and we need 16 things for the names of the months, we might need to abandon the material-diety thing for now. I actually made a numeral system for the Testificates based on eight, but this stupid forum won't let me post it. I've tried converting it to a JPEG but nothing happened, so if anyone knows how to post homemade images on this forum...
Also, there's still the problem of spelling the names of minecraftian dieties with the allowed letters. If anyone has an idea about how to spell "nɒtʃ" with the letters p, t, k, f, s, x, m, n, l, r, i, e, a, and o and nothing else (without using dipthongs and all the other stuff that is completely alien to me since I'm in middle school and, despite being in the Gifted program, don't speak fluent nerd) please post it.
This would be some fun. And, like Klingon, this language may be expanded and learned throughout the world.It would be quite the time waster (in a good way) researching the language of the Testificates just to find out what that one guy said to you.
This would be some fun. And, like Klingon, this language may be expanded and learned throughout the world.
Also, no more reduplicating whole words for plurals and continuous aspect, just reduplicate the first syllable (minus the coda if any). Thus, [tokko] "dog" becomes [todokko] "dogs".
Adding lore is a must if we want the language to have a soul as it were. Tolkien disliked Esperanto because it had no associated legends, and its worth noting that Quenya and Sindarin predate the elves that speak those languages. Tolkien grew his legendarium around the languages to give them mroe life. Thus, Quenya words like "Eru" and "anor" carry a lot of weight and majesty because they have a history to back them up.
or -1 me with your mind. One of them is less frustrating.