Dingir being an obvious and old one. Isn't Shurruppak there too?
Spelt with one 'r' -- but, yes, it was a Sumerian city.
I think Saarpuhii predates GURPS? Not sure. Anyway, it's Old High Vilani, which had slightly different rules...
Yeah, I included rules for dealing with what happened to the 'h' between OHV and SV in those Sound Change files I made up years ago. But didn't you and I come up with that explanation in the first place? I know I've ranted about interloping 'h's and gliding vowels polluting our
Surasishiishe Lamaska here before, and in the end I had decided that the 'h' was a fossilized remainder of some some earlier sound (an aspirated 't', maybe?) from Archaic Vilani, or maybe a holdover from ceremonial Dirmani terminology. Or at least that's the explanation for what's going on inside the Sound Change files, as I recall.
(for example, "Bilani" in OHV is spelt "Vilani". And they've got the letter 'o')
I don't recall that 'v'=>'b' is specifically a transformation between OHV to SV, although I suppose I could go and dig up the old Sound Change files to discover that I'm contradicting myself right now (all this stuff is now several years back, after all). I know that my interpretation of the 'v/b' issue has traditionally been a more a matter of outsider cultural (mis)interpretation, based on the fact -- well, an arbitrary fact that I made up years ago -- that the Vilani phoneme in question was classically pronounced as a voiced bilabial affricate, with a tendency in the lower ranks (and foreigners) to be pronounced as the much easier voiced bilabial fricative. A really kludgy speaker of Vilani -- like a simpleton, or your basic Solomani mook -- would usually resort to a bilabial stop. At any rate, this allows for a range of interpretation when transliterating from
Ruuraak to Latin script, and that range just happens to be from 'v' to 'b'.
As a side note -- you may remember I once pointed out somewhere that Standard Vilani/Bilanidin contains no labiodental phonemes (Anglic 'f' and 'v'), which likely means that Vilani traditionalists regard that pronunciation scheme as extremely rude. In fact, I believe a native speaker of Vilani could go his entire life without ever having to show anyone his teeth. I even invented a word once, which I can't find now (but was based on 'teeth-language' as a compound word), that was derogatory Vilani slang for Anglic. But here's another one:
Kishasishiishe ('bite-language') which is arguably even more derogatory, and thus better.
Seems like a mouthful for a basic slang term, but I bet we could plug that into the compound word OHV=>SV Sound Changer and it would produce something more realistic.
"aipgia" and "ad" make me suspect that this phrase is colloquial, originating in Core sector, since those look like Sylean words.
Well, my main problem with that phrase is that it doesn't look like it has any linguistic structure at all, agglutinative or otherwise -- it just looks like 'blahblahblahzork ALIENESE!' to me. But that may just be my Indo-European bias doing the thinking for me; maybe a Turk would see it differently.
