Divine language

The Divine language is used to generate the names of Angels. It works just like any of the four major languages in the respect that it has its own translation of a set of English words, but unlike the other languages, it is generated individually for each world. Each world has only one divine language, meaning that all angels in all vaults in a given world will use the same language.

Orthography

Each divine language appears to draw on a pool of randomly-chosen consonant letters of the language for its words (up to 12 distinct consonants have been observed in one divine language), and they utilize all 6 vowel letters (including Y). Therefore, divine languages in general may draw on the entire ISO basic Latin alphabet:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters)

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

Unlike the other four predefined languages, no divine language has ever been observed to use letters with diacritics. Finally, the letter H has only been observed in the digraphs IH and UH, and (likely by random chance) the only letter yet to be observed in a divine language is S.

Phonetics and Phonotactics

Each word in divine languages is of the form C₁V₁(C₂V₂)C₃. (The parentheses mean that C₂V₂ is optional.)

Consonants: C and F

The choices for C_1,2 vs. C₃ appear to draw from different sub-pools of consonants, or at least have different probabilities for letter occurrence. Any of C₁, C₂, C₃ can also be zero consonants, but a word must have at least one non-zero consonant.

Vowels: V

All divine languages also appear to utilize the same vowel system, but with different frequencies for various diphthongs. The observed vowels are:

• monophthongs: a, e, o, u, ih, uh
• diphthongs: au, eo, eu, ey, ie, io, oa, oi, ou, oy, ua, ui

Worth noting is that the letter i has never been seen to occur outside of digraphs. In addition, it is possible that all diphthongs between A, E, I, O, U, and Y are allowed, and that they have just not yet been observed.

Trivia

• The randomly generated divine words are not necessarily unique; the same letter sequence may correspond to two completely different English words.
• The shortest possible divine words have two letters, like ac, while the longest possible words are 7 letters, like cihtihr.
• In the world raws, the divine language is referred to as GEN_DIVINE. By changing an entity's TRANSLATION token in raw/objects/entity_default.txt to GEN_DIVINE, it's possible to make newly-generated creatures of that type use the same names as angels.

V · T · E Languages
Races	Divine · Dwarven · Elvish · Goblin · Human · Kobold
Modding	language_words.txt · language_SYM.txt · Language token
Text Sets	text_book_instruction.txt · Text dwarf.txt · text_curse.txt · text_general.txt