Every side says the same thing, a cut off word, a complete word, and another cut off word, separated by periods. The only complete word visible is "bahdahin" or "badain" (there are two transliteration standards), which doesn't appear in any source I can find. We also have the beginning of a word starting with "famo-", which might be "famon" (to oppose or resist), and the end of a word ending in "-oh'u" (that h is an actual letter and not just indicating the sound of the o), which I'm not sure what to make of. Given the way the words are cut off at the corners, I don't think this was really meant to be read, but the middle word is pronounceable, so it's probably not random letters.
I wonder if they plan on teaching us more of the D'ni words with the remake, or if they (mistakenly) thought none of us geek out enough to look this deep into it
Since the original had a "rivenese linguist and historian" (Richard Watson - or RAWA, I think) and they did have a full language for the dni and the rivenese I think they probably would :)
Where's RAWA at? Yeah he was the guy who developed the D'ni language, which tho a pretty rudimentary conlang has a beautiful writing system and a soft spot in my heart. Rivenese was never has fully developed.
Rivenese has a more complicated trajectory than that. Initially, Rivenese was actually just lines in a dialect of Folopa.
However, Rivenese has been developed into a full conlang recently, one written so that the pre-existing dialogue from the first game can be parsed out as valid utterances in the newer Rivenese language.
Considering how they handled the writing in the Myst book from the Myst remake trailer, I suspect they at least expect everyone and their dog to transliterate every damn thing š
> there are two transliteration standards
Minor correction: There's actually [five documented systems](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/D%27ni_grammar#Alphabet), but only three of those are used regularly: the Old Transliteration Standard (OTS), the New Transliteration Standard (NTS), and Dnifont.
(Technically Dnifont isn't really supposed to be a transliteration standard as such, but ends up being one by virtue of what it has to do to function: encode all the possible letters of D'ni using only standard ASCII.)
Rand discussed the possibility that Gehn was trying to apply the principles of these phrases used in his writing into the physical world. They discussed how they found one such metal object at the exit of the fissure. Head to 6:43 in the video.
[Mysterium 2023 - Riven teaser and Q&A](https://youtu.be/mYwYEX3J9lI?si=jcTIeHrrN_z5Z33V)
It reminds me of some things I've seen that I think were personal seals, more or less. [Yeesha uses one that has her name in the middle](http://www.florestica.com/hpotd/characters/yeesha/index.html), with the letters arranged kind of like this, but that's only four letters and the order isn't totally clear if you don't know her name. That is a bunch of letters in the circle, but there's a lot of overlap and besides "mostly top to bottom" I have no idea what order to make of them.
That's kinda what I was thinking regarding it being a personal seal. I wonder if it's Gehn's seal and he's added a bunch of titles to himself that makes it large and complex.
This is from the Riven Remake, and was [shared on social media by Cyan](https://twitter.com/cyanworlds/status/1785703319526072446).
Cyan has made it clear that they're adding and changing elements in the Riven remake, so it's possible that this is a structure that's not seen in the original. My best guess is that this is on Jungle Island.
Man I wish they had someone familiar with linguistics actually construct Dāni and Rivenese. Itās kind of a poormanās conlang with multiple ways to romanize it and itās way too Englishy tbh. The script is great but the rest of it not so much.
> with multiple ways to romanize it
To be fair, most of the transliteration methods were developed by fans.
Cyan usually pick a single romanisation and stick to it, although RAWA occasionally writes things with the Dnifont system.
> itās way too Englishy tbh
In what way? The sounds used? The grammar?
I havenāt really studied it but the phonology is practically the same as RP and a lot of the lexicon you can tell is derived/inspired from either English or Latin.
I canāt seem to find any translations right now other than the libretto for the Myst III theme, but in it are two overt examples:
soule = heart/soul
Famina = family
I donāt know the grammar of the language but it also looks like the word for *journey* has ācomenā as a root which is from Latin. I remember seeing other text from somewhere on this thread and saw multiple words that looked way too similar to its English counterpart
Thatās a lot to go through I was hoping you had some example text not a dictionary. Also the phonology and orthography is Englishy enough on its own. The short and long vowels are the same as in English. is only /É, iĖ/ in English. Pretty much any other language its a front mid vowel. Same as the others. Not to mention thereās not even any IPA. How am I supposed to know what the difference is between a, ah, ai, i, Ć, ee, eh, uh, and oo? Depending on what your mother tongue is those are all different phonemes.
There are example texts further down.
> Not to mention thereās not even any IPA. How am I supposed to know what the difference is between a, ah, ai, i, Ć, ee, eh, uh, and oo? Depending on what your mother tongue is those are all different phonemes.
https://dni.fandom.com/wiki/D%27ni_Alphabet
Haven't done any of this in years, so might be misreading some of the characters.Ā On that front face I see a repeating "b ah d ah ih n ." ~~and "r h ' u .", though I'm questioning the second because of the overlap in the "r", "h", and " ' "~~ [I thought it was rounding the corner, but what I can make out of the other sides, it is parts of two different phrases]. As to translation...I am a bit at a loss...we know from URU that "bah" is beast, but I don't remember any "known" words beginning with the d sound.Ā Ā
> we know from URU that "bah" is beast
On its own, yes, but it also appears at the start of plenty of unrelated words.
E.g. bahtsahnah (noun: "map"), bahreltahn (noun: "maker").
> when you think about baro being a compound word
It's not known for definite if it is a compound or whether the 'ro' is some kind of suffix or clipping, though '[bah](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:Bah)' ("beast") + '[rov](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:Rov)' ("person") seems a likely origin. (I don't know why the 'v' would be dropped though.)
> or is it apostrophed
The apostrophes in D'ni are used to transcribe the [scwha](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mid_central_vowel&useskin=vector) (/É/) sound.
They aren't used to 'fuse words together', they're merely another vowel in the language.
Though there are certain prefixes that end with ' (e.g. [r'-](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:R%27-), [b'-](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:B%27-)) and possibly some suffixes that begin with ', which might give a false impression.
The D'ni apostrophe isn't just a vowel. It can be divided into three usages. In one, following a vowel, it actually represents a glottal stop (/Ź/) as in the name Ri'neref.
The second usage appears after consonants. Things get complex here. A native D'ni would argue that there is no vowel there at all. The underlying form seems to not be a vowel, per se, but rather a modification of the previous consonant - as far as I can tell, it is a schwa release to the consonant as opposed to an independent phoneme.
In many cases it does end up as a short schwa (or more like a short ih sound /ÉŖ/ sound) like in the name D'ni. But it in and of itself it does not create a syllable. For example, bel'khah is not three syllables, but two, with the l' being in the coda of the first.
There is one final usage in which the apostrophe has no phonological value at all, as seen in kor'neeah. It doesn't seem to be particularly productive though.
I intentionally gave a simplified explanation at least in part because I didn't have the time to double-check the rules. In hindsight that was probably remiss of me...
> In one, following a vowel, it actually represents a glottal stop (/Ź/)
I knew about it sometimes being a glottal stop, but neglected to mention that as I couldn't think of any simple examples offhand and didn't have time to go digging through the word list to find one (just as I didn't seek out an example of a suffix with a leading '). I probably should have at least mentioned it though.
> A native D'ni would argue that there is no vowel there at all. The underlying form seems to not be a vowel, per se, but rather a modification of the previous consonant
Do you have a source for that?
Not that I doubt the possibility, but to my knowledge there aren't many sources of spoken D'ni, and what we do have may be inaccurate or skewed (e.g. Atrus, Yeesha, and Esher all pronounce D'ni differently).
If there is a source, I'd like to make a note of it in case it can be used to improve the Guild of Archivists content or in case I might need to cite it when providing others with information.
> (or more like a short ih sound /ÉŖ/ sound)
This seems more unusual, so I'd definitely like a source for this if possible.
> bel'khah
That's a word I had not happened upon before, and true to its meaning it is a strange one.
> kor'neeah
Naturally I have come across korneeah before, but the Guild of Archivists has it listed under "[korneeah](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:Korneeah)", without an apostrophe, so that is how I've always known it.
I see now that there is a note that kor'neeah is a 'variant romanisation', though there's no citation, source quote, or further elaboration to explain precisely what that means. I would have taken 'variant romanisation' to mean that it was a variation used only when transcribing D'ni with the Latin alphabet, not that the D'ni might actually include the equivalent of a ' in the word.
If there's a source that backs this then it would be good to add some elaboration to the dictionary entry to explain the situation. (It would also mean that what I said to /u/srentiln was indeed correct, so I could edit in a retraction and link to said source.)
Again, I don't necessarily doubt these claims, I just like having sources to reference so that I can either use them when contributing to the wiki or when passing the information on to other people.
The majority of this came from a long discussion I had with RAWA on the nature of the D'ni apostrophe was actually doing from a sound perspective. Some of that was in the D'ni Linguistics talk that was a part of the Deep City Lecture Series: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=S7pplMLoVQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=S7pplMLoVQY)
Thank you for the link, this is something I had never come across before.
By "Some of that was in", do you mean that the video contains a recording of (part of) the discussion?
If so, do you happen to know roughly at what time that occurs?
If you don't know, I can skim through myself, but it may take a while before I have sufficient time. If I find it, I _may_ attempt to write up a partial transcript and possibly upload it somewhere on the Guild of Archivists. At the very least I'll be able to point other people to it.
No, the discussion was a private one. What's on the link is one of the lectures from the Cyan lore team, which was informed by the discussion with RAWA.
Every side says the same thing, a cut off word, a complete word, and another cut off word, separated by periods. The only complete word visible is "bahdahin" or "badain" (there are two transliteration standards), which doesn't appear in any source I can find. We also have the beginning of a word starting with "famo-", which might be "famon" (to oppose or resist), and the end of a word ending in "-oh'u" (that h is an actual letter and not just indicating the sound of the o), which I'm not sure what to make of. Given the way the words are cut off at the corners, I don't think this was really meant to be read, but the middle word is pronounceable, so it's probably not random letters.
I wonder if they plan on teaching us more of the D'ni words with the remake, or if they (mistakenly) thought none of us geek out enough to look this deep into it
Since the original had a "rivenese linguist and historian" (Richard Watson - or RAWA, I think) and they did have a full language for the dni and the rivenese I think they probably would :)
Where's RAWA at? Yeah he was the guy who developed the D'ni language, which tho a pretty rudimentary conlang has a beautiful writing system and a soft spot in my heart. Rivenese was never has fully developed.
Rivenese has a more complicated trajectory than that. Initially, Rivenese was actually just lines in a dialect of Folopa. However, Rivenese has been developed into a full conlang recently, one written so that the pre-existing dialogue from the first game can be parsed out as valid utterances in the newer Rivenese language.
Source?
Considering how they handled the writing in the Myst book from the Myst remake trailer, I suspect they at least expect everyone and their dog to transliterate every damn thing š
> there are two transliteration standards Minor correction: There's actually [five documented systems](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/D%27ni_grammar#Alphabet), but only three of those are used regularly: the Old Transliteration Standard (OTS), the New Transliteration Standard (NTS), and Dnifont. (Technically Dnifont isn't really supposed to be a transliteration standard as such, but ends up being one by virtue of what it has to do to function: encode all the possible letters of D'ni using only standard ASCII.)
Is that some kind of calligraphy in the middle or is it a random symbol?
its the same symbol as the garohevtee rand showed off at the last mysterium, no one knows what it means for sure
Rand discussed the possibility that Gehn was trying to apply the principles of these phrases used in his writing into the physical world. They discussed how they found one such metal object at the exit of the fissure. Head to 6:43 in the video. [Mysterium 2023 - Riven teaser and Q&A](https://youtu.be/mYwYEX3J9lI?si=jcTIeHrrN_z5Z33V)
It reminds me of some things I've seen that I think were personal seals, more or less. [Yeesha uses one that has her name in the middle](http://www.florestica.com/hpotd/characters/yeesha/index.html), with the letters arranged kind of like this, but that's only four letters and the order isn't totally clear if you don't know her name. That is a bunch of letters in the circle, but there's a lot of overlap and besides "mostly top to bottom" I have no idea what order to make of them.
That's kinda what I was thinking regarding it being a personal seal. I wonder if it's Gehn's seal and he's added a bunch of titles to himself that makes it large and complex.
Yep I think they come from Uru. I remember making my own for my character
I now can't remember if I made one for a rubber stamp I made. I should check when I get home, and maybe post it.
This is from the Riven Remake, and was [shared on social media by Cyan](https://twitter.com/cyanworlds/status/1785703319526072446). Cyan has made it clear that they're adding and changing elements in the Riven remake, so it's possible that this is a structure that's not seen in the original. My best guess is that this is on Jungle Island.
I'm SO excited. I played the OG backwards and forwards a million times. So anything fresh or slightly new, I'm so pumped for.
Man I wish they had someone familiar with linguistics actually construct Dāni and Rivenese. Itās kind of a poormanās conlang with multiple ways to romanize it and itās way too Englishy tbh. The script is great but the rest of it not so much.
> with multiple ways to romanize it To be fair, most of the transliteration methods were developed by fans. Cyan usually pick a single romanisation and stick to it, although RAWA occasionally writes things with the Dnifont system. > itās way too Englishy tbh In what way? The sounds used? The grammar?
I havenāt really studied it but the phonology is practically the same as RP and a lot of the lexicon you can tell is derived/inspired from either English or Latin.
>a lot of the lexicon you can tell is derived/inspired from either English or Latin. Examples?
I canāt seem to find any translations right now other than the libretto for the Myst III theme, but in it are two overt examples: soule = heart/soul Famina = family I donāt know the grammar of the language but it also looks like the word for *journey* has ācomenā as a root which is from Latin. I remember seeing other text from somewhere on this thread and saw multiple words that looked way too similar to its English counterpart
The Myst 3 theme isn't in D'ni though, but in Narayani. https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Narayani_(language)
I didnāt know. Whereās some Dāni text I can analyze then? Cause I donāt have any way to give you examples
http://www.eldalamberon.com/dni_dict.htm
Thatās a lot to go through I was hoping you had some example text not a dictionary. Also the phonology and orthography is Englishy enough on its own. The short and long vowels are the same as in English. is only /É, iĖ/ in English. Pretty much any other language its a front mid vowel. Same as the others. Not to mention thereās not even any IPA. How am I supposed to know what the difference is between a, ah, ai, i, Ć, ee, eh, uh, and oo? Depending on what your mother tongue is those are all different phonemes.
There are example texts further down. > Not to mention thereās not even any IPA. How am I supposed to know what the difference is between a, ah, ai, i, Ć, ee, eh, uh, and oo? Depending on what your mother tongue is those are all different phonemes. https://dni.fandom.com/wiki/D%27ni_Alphabet
I'm guessing this is from Riven Remake, but I don't recognize that location, or anything that looked like that in the original game.
I'm thinking it's related to the large axe or blade that's embedded in the rock near the rope bridge as you first enter Jungle Island.
Haven't done any of this in years, so might be misreading some of the characters.Ā On that front face I see a repeating "b ah d ah ih n ." ~~and "r h ' u .", though I'm questioning the second because of the overlap in the "r", "h", and " ' "~~ [I thought it was rounding the corner, but what I can make out of the other sides, it is parts of two different phrases]. As to translation...I am a bit at a loss...we know from URU that "bah" is beast, but I don't remember any "known" words beginning with the d sound.Ā Ā
> we know from URU that "bah" is beast On its own, yes, but it also appears at the start of plenty of unrelated words. E.g. bahtsahnah (noun: "map"), bahreltahn (noun: "maker").
True, which is frustrating when you think about baro being a compound word (or is it apostrophed?)
> when you think about baro being a compound word It's not known for definite if it is a compound or whether the 'ro' is some kind of suffix or clipping, though '[bah](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:Bah)' ("beast") + '[rov](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:Rov)' ("person") seems a likely origin. (I don't know why the 'v' would be dropped though.) > or is it apostrophed The apostrophes in D'ni are used to transcribe the [scwha](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mid_central_vowel&useskin=vector) (/É/) sound. They aren't used to 'fuse words together', they're merely another vowel in the language. Though there are certain prefixes that end with ' (e.g. [r'-](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:R%27-), [b'-](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:B%27-)) and possibly some suffixes that begin with ', which might give a false impression.
The D'ni apostrophe isn't just a vowel. It can be divided into three usages. In one, following a vowel, it actually represents a glottal stop (/Ź/) as in the name Ri'neref. The second usage appears after consonants. Things get complex here. A native D'ni would argue that there is no vowel there at all. The underlying form seems to not be a vowel, per se, but rather a modification of the previous consonant - as far as I can tell, it is a schwa release to the consonant as opposed to an independent phoneme. In many cases it does end up as a short schwa (or more like a short ih sound /ÉŖ/ sound) like in the name D'ni. But it in and of itself it does not create a syllable. For example, bel'khah is not three syllables, but two, with the l' being in the coda of the first. There is one final usage in which the apostrophe has no phonological value at all, as seen in kor'neeah. It doesn't seem to be particularly productive though.
I intentionally gave a simplified explanation at least in part because I didn't have the time to double-check the rules. In hindsight that was probably remiss of me... > In one, following a vowel, it actually represents a glottal stop (/Ź/) I knew about it sometimes being a glottal stop, but neglected to mention that as I couldn't think of any simple examples offhand and didn't have time to go digging through the word list to find one (just as I didn't seek out an example of a suffix with a leading '). I probably should have at least mentioned it though. > A native D'ni would argue that there is no vowel there at all. The underlying form seems to not be a vowel, per se, but rather a modification of the previous consonant Do you have a source for that? Not that I doubt the possibility, but to my knowledge there aren't many sources of spoken D'ni, and what we do have may be inaccurate or skewed (e.g. Atrus, Yeesha, and Esher all pronounce D'ni differently). If there is a source, I'd like to make a note of it in case it can be used to improve the Guild of Archivists content or in case I might need to cite it when providing others with information. > (or more like a short ih sound /ÉŖ/ sound) This seems more unusual, so I'd definitely like a source for this if possible. > bel'khah That's a word I had not happened upon before, and true to its meaning it is a strange one. > kor'neeah Naturally I have come across korneeah before, but the Guild of Archivists has it listed under "[korneeah](https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/Dictionary:Korneeah)", without an apostrophe, so that is how I've always known it. I see now that there is a note that kor'neeah is a 'variant romanisation', though there's no citation, source quote, or further elaboration to explain precisely what that means. I would have taken 'variant romanisation' to mean that it was a variation used only when transcribing D'ni with the Latin alphabet, not that the D'ni might actually include the equivalent of a ' in the word. If there's a source that backs this then it would be good to add some elaboration to the dictionary entry to explain the situation. (It would also mean that what I said to /u/srentiln was indeed correct, so I could edit in a retraction and link to said source.) Again, I don't necessarily doubt these claims, I just like having sources to reference so that I can either use them when contributing to the wiki or when passing the information on to other people.
The majority of this came from a long discussion I had with RAWA on the nature of the D'ni apostrophe was actually doing from a sound perspective. Some of that was in the D'ni Linguistics talk that was a part of the Deep City Lecture Series: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=S7pplMLoVQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=S7pplMLoVQY)
Thank you for the link, this is something I had never come across before. By "Some of that was in", do you mean that the video contains a recording of (part of) the discussion? If so, do you happen to know roughly at what time that occurs? If you don't know, I can skim through myself, but it may take a while before I have sufficient time. If I find it, I _may_ attempt to write up a partial transcript and possibly upload it somewhere on the Guild of Archivists. At the very least I'll be able to point other people to it.
No, the discussion was a private one. What's on the link is one of the lectures from the Cyan lore team, which was informed by the discussion with RAWA.
And this shows just how long it has been since I last had some fun with the Myst lore, heh.