Hi there. I wonder if a Dahan Language exists, or maybe we could try and make something good. (Any conlanger in the room?)
What's been stated is that there is a list of phonemes. And the only word that I think we know is "Dahan", which supposedly means "people", can give us a glimpse into phonotactics.
It wouldn't be a complex conlang with strange features. It would be a matter of seeing the languages of the type of islanders Dahan represent, and see if we can amalgamate these into some sort of coherent language.
What do you think? Cool idea, or too complex?
I'm not a conlanger, but I think it would be incredibly cool to see done.
Cool to see,
waaay too complex to be something I participate in. Making a full language is not something I'd want to tackle, I can barely handle naming characters in a story or coming up with a unique turn of phrase.
I'd love to first hear what was decided on the phonology.
Er, um. I'm afraid the phonology was specifically devised to not localize the Dahan to any specific part of the world, as I was trying to make "the type of islanders Dahan represent" as broad as reasonably possible. So such a project would end up being even more ambitious than it sounds. ^_^;
But I'm really happy that you're interested enough in them to float the idea!
Maybe we don't want a full language, and of course they're low-tech, which simplifies things, but yeah, too ambitious on some other aspects... Though having four people learn the language and play the game in Dahan would be awesome.
A small hint I take (which might as well not be the intention, but you gotta grab those things while you can), is that given the spirit names are full sentences or fragments, it implies some sort of agglutinative language. ;)
I'm not a conlanger, but I am a linguist and happy to help out anyway I can! Hurray for linguistics!
My guess is the Dahan language is filled with expletives, useful in sentences like "get these motha@#$!%'n invaders off my motha@#$!'n island!".
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
I've put my college linguistics classes to use constructing a language, and a short vocabulary in a couple others to label a map. For the more developed language, I went so far as to write a perl script to randomly generate words.
Speaking of that, we can always just take the Dahan phoneme inventory and stick it in vulgarlang.com!
(I know it sounds fishy, but it's an excellent conlang generator.)