An introduction to Dwarvish and Davek (synthesized)

[thoroughlyS]

The various editions of D&D put a great amount of effort into presenting inspirational notes about various races, cultures, and practices, but usually in brief snippets scattered through multiple sources. This is by design—none of the designers wants to dedicate an entire book to the minutiae of gnomish nursery rhymes, and few players would want to buy it. Even those players and DMs who are interested in such matters are most certainly keen enough to work something out for themselves. From what I've seen, they'll usually make something up whole-cloth, or take entire practices from a real-world culture and fit it into D&D. I have decided to do something a little different for the language of dwarves. For the construction of this alphabet, I've tried to compile as much information on Dwarvish as has been presented throughout D&D's history, and synthesize it into a unified idea. Note: letters will be referenced in ⟨angle brackets⟩, while phonemes (the sounds a letter represent) will be represented in /slashes/.

As a starting point, I took the "Dwarvish script" presented in the 5E Player's Handbook. This is Davek, first introduced in the 4E Player's Handbook (although this reprint leaves out the numerals).

Spoiler: DAVEK 0.1

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Somewhat disappointing, as it is just a one-to-one substitution for the English alphabet. We find the solution to this in v3.5:

The Dwarven alphabet has two forms: High Dwarven and Low Dwarven. High Dwarven has twenty-seven characters and was the first Dwarven alphabet.
...
Low Dwarven eliminates six characters and is the daily alphabet of the dwarf people, taught to all dwarf schoolchildren as part of their earliest education. High Dwarven requires further study and is typically no longer taught outside specialized professions. Aside from the specialized characters, the two forms are the same.

So, Davek has twenty-one commonly used letters, and six which are only seen in High Davek. Right now, we have twenty-six letters to play around with, but which ones deserve to be included in Low Davek? For the answer, we turn to Dragon Magazine 278 p.45. It includes a small selection of English words translated into Dwarvish. After running those words through a letter frequency calculator, it is revealed that the letters ⟨c⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨q⟩, and ⟨x⟩ never appear in the Dwarvish sample. Relegating these to High Davek leaves us with twenty-two still in Low Davek. A good start, but this is where things get interesting.

Spoiler: DAVEK 0.2

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We're still only dealing with English letters at this point, which severely limits the ways we can make this language feel unique. Davek is frequently described as a runic alphabet, so drawing some inspiration from the real world might be the way to go. Elder Fuþark has some similarities to High Davek in terms of count and style. Drawing from that, we get three new phonemes to mark /θ/, /æ/, and /ŋ/. Elder Fuþark also lacks the letters ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, and ⟨x⟩, which can be eliminated altogether. But now we have twenty-five letters for consideration in Low Davek. Here too, we can look at historical language.

Spoiler: DAVEK 0.3

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Elder Fuþark became Younger Fuþark, and started using single runes to represent multiple phonemes. Firstly, I decided to keep all the vowels in Low Davek. Secondly, ⟨j⟩ and ⟨ŋ⟩ were dropped from the alphabet, so they go to High Davek. Lastly, we have to examine a couple of paired letters. In Younger Fuþark, there were single runes to represent /b/&/p/, /d/&/t/, /f/&/v/, /g/&/k/, and /w/&/j/. Some people who practice linguistics might recognize something interesting about the first four pairs. They are all made of one voiced and one unvoiced phoneme. Since we've decided ⟨p⟩ (which represents an unvoiced phoneme) was in High Davek, we can move ⟨f⟩, ⟨k⟩, and ⟨t⟩ (all unvoiced) to High Davek as well! This leaves us with twenty letters in Low Davek, and six in High Davek.

Spoiler: DAVEK 0.4

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So now we just need to add one letter to Low Davek and we're golden!

...

But what to add? Well, I found a fun idea after re-examining a source. Races of Stone p.25-27 lists dozens of Dwarvish names (or parts of names, to be specific). Feeding those into the letter frequency calculator, we get a really interesting bit of data. The letters ⟨c⟩ and ⟨p⟩ suddenly appear in the language. Well, at least in the names. So that means we can add back in the letter ⟨c⟩. But to Low Davek? When ⟨k⟩ itself is in High Davek? What sense does that make? Heck, ⟨k⟩ is in the name of the language. Looking closer at where ⟨c⟩ appears in the names, a pattern emerges. It is only found at the ends of names. So what if it was a specialty character, like ⟨ſ⟩ was in English? If a ⟨k⟩ appears at the end of a name in High Davek, it becomes a ⟨c⟩. And there you have it! A full twenty-one unique letters in Low Davek, and six special case characters in High Davek.

Spoiler: DAVEK 0.5

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Now, back to the script. 24 letters have been left unchanged, and we aren't using two anymore so we can repurpose their runes for some of the new phonemes. I opted to use the rune ⟨q⟩ as /æ/, since it was super simple and would be faster to use for a vowel. I also give ⟨x⟩ to /θ/, because it is in Low Davek. That just leaves /ŋ/. Since 5E doesn't use the numerals from 4E, I repurposed the symbol for ⟨2⟩. And for anyone complaining that you can't use the same symbol for a letter and a number, let me introduce you to ⟨ȝ⟩. All that was left to do, was scramble the order up so it didn't look so English. I borrowed a page from Fuþark, and put the name of the alphabet at the front.

Low Davek


High Davek

That takes care of the alphabet. But some runes and a dictionary does not a language make. Dragon Magazine 278 p.45 also had a paragraph defining the punctuation in Davek. Roughly, full statements were separated by ⟨//⟩ except in the case of single statements which were left unmarked. Brief pauses were indicated by ⟨=⟩. Questions were marked with ⟨X⟩ to represent a choice of directions. And exclamations were marked with ⟨°⟩ which was significant because of the difficulty in carving that shape. Proper nouns were marked with an underline beneath the first rune, and the subject of a sentence was indicated by following it with an ⟨a⟩, which had no meaning on its own.

The only issue I have with these is the time it would take for some of them. Why use ⟨//⟩ to separate statements if you're not using ⟨/⟩ for anything? Ditto, for ⟨=⟩ and ⟨-⟩. I feel like ⟨X⟩ is a little much for simple questions, but presents an opportunity to make Dwarvish have something unique about it. What if ⟨V⟩ was used for yes/no questions, ⟨Y⟩ was used for dilemmas (a decision between two options), and ⟨X⟩ was used for open-ended questions? This makes Davek feel like a unique script again, instead of just a substitution cipher.

[Xuc Xac]

Somewhat disappointing, as it is just a one-to-one substitution for the English alphabet.

I really hate that. I love artificial scripts and languages. Seeing a script has the same 26 letters as English is a sure sign that the creators don't know what they're doing.

And for anyone complaining that you can't use the same symbol for a letter and a number, let me introduce you to ȝ.

A1s0, zer0 and 0ne. In some fonts and handwriting, they are identical. Not to mention Roman numerals.

What if V was used for yes/no questions, Y was used for dilemmas (a decision between two options), and X was used for open-ended questions? This makes Davek feel like a unique script again, instead of just a substitution cypher.

You could also use them for questions with inclusive and exclusive "or".

"Do you want to continue or turn back?" is a question with only two options to choose if you're in a tunnel without branches.

"Do you want some coffee or tea?" also has two options but you don't have to choose either of them: you could choose "coffee", "tea", or "neither".

Some languages have different words or grammatical constructions for those questions.

[thoroughlyS]

I really hate that. I love artificial scripts and languages. Seeing a script has the same 26 letters as English is a sure sign that the creators don't know what they're doing.

I would agree with you if I were analyzing the script in a vacuum, but in the context of a game it is understandable. Creating a decent writing system is probably more trouble than it's worth considering how readily DMs and players are to borrow one or make something up themselves (to say nothing of an entire language).

You could also use them for questions with inclusive and exclusive "or".

"Do you want to continue or turn back?" is a question with only two options to choose if you're in a tunnel without branches.

"Do you want some coffee or tea?" also has two options but you don't have to choose either of them: you could choose "coffee", "tea", or "neither".

Yeah, that's kind of what I was going for. I feel like both of those would be written with the "Y" punctuation.

[johnbragg]

A1s0, zer0 and 0ne. In some fonts and handwriting, they are identical. Not to mention Roman numerals.

Off topic, but I would wish for a specialty font that puts the NATO radio code for the letter or number underneath the character. Use it for long alphanumeric strings that have no semantic content. I hate entering s7wmOu8621 when the code on the bottom of the router is really s7wm08621. (Yes, zero-with-a-slash.)