I wrote a Thing

That... is probably the maximum amount of analysis one can do with the corpus available. I vote 'yea.'

From reading that over, I would guess that <th> and <c> could also be /θ/ and /tʃ/, especially since the creators of Dorfish are most likely non-linguistically-aware English-speakers, and /θ/ and /tʃ/ are naturally sounds that a non-linguistically-aware English-speaker would put in a conlang.

Aren't the dwarves supposed to be racist Jewish stereotypes? Long beards? Evil usurers? Enemies to the "enlightened"? Czech czech czech. It doesn't help Tolkien was a super-catholic and injected some christian themes even if Jesus figures are not involved (unless Gandolf counts).

In that case, it's probably supposed to be Hebrewish~; the single consonants could represent fricatives or affricates intravocally, while <th> and <kh> may be more ejective. Also, it might explain the utter rarity of /f/ and /v/, which may be initial in loans or reduction of an earlier cluster.  The null initiall for the vowels and the geminates, in addition could be a glottal stop and plain plosives, respectively- but the first three minimal pairs aren't semantically related at all. The surplus of vowel-initial words is obviously from loss of /h/, /j/, and /?/.

The others, however, very much could be (with geminates signifying intensity) as in Hidor "howl, caw" -> Hiddor "lark, yeller", Hogon "drawl, slurr" -> Hoggon "spew, vomit", Hazin "watchful, watcher, watch" -> Hazzin "wary, livid, impatient, paranoid".

http://www.timesofisrael.com/are-tolkiens-dwarves-an-allegory-for-the-jews/

stop forever

ironically, in writing this, zontas turned into a comic stereotype jew himself

Thus sayeth the good book:

Tolkien vocally opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party prior to the Second World War, and was known to especially despise Nazi racist and anti-Semitic ideology. In 1938, the publishing house Rütten & Loening Verlag was preparing to release The Hobbit in Nazi Germany. To Tolkien's outrage, he was asked beforehand whether he was of Aryan origin. In a letter to his British publisher Stanley Unwin, he condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" as "wholly pernicious and unscientific". He added that he had many Jewish friends and was considering "letting a German translation go hang".[104] He provided two letters to Rütten & Loening and instructed Unwin to send whichever he preferred. The more tactful letter was sent and was lost during the later bombing of Germany. In the unsent letter, Tolkien makes the point that "Aryan" is a linguistic term, denoting speakers of Indo-Iranian languages. He continued,

But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the 18th century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient.

Moreover—dwarves are associated with metalsmithing and greed as far back as the Prose and Poetic Edda, which chronicle Icelandic myths from the 13th century and earlier. It is unreasonable to assume any other influences when such a clear, direct example exists in Tolkien's primary sources.

You can't believe everything you read on the internet, Zontas. Do your research before flinging around accusations. There have been many, many shoddy readings of old books over the years by people trying to sow conflict for their own gain. It is vital that you don't succumb to the first article you come across. (And if you do, let it at least be Wikipedia.)

Also where are dwarves depicted as being "evil usurers" or "enemies to the 'enlightened'"?

the single consonants could represent fricatives or affricates intravocally

Are you familiar with the expression "if my mother had wheels she'd be a wagon"?

Touché. But I stand by the "h" theory.

Why?

What reason do you have to believe that <th> is an ejective (there is no <kh> in the corpus), especially since <h> is practically never used to mark ejectives?

I meant, I believe the reason there are a lot of vowel-initial words is due to the loss of h.

Also, what the hell does that waggon expression mean?

quoting Zontas:

I meant, I believe the reason there are a lot of vowel-initial words is due to the loss of h.

Also, what the hell does that waggon expression mean?

Old saying which means close to the same thing as If it walks like a horse, looks like a horse, and sounds like a horse, it's probably a horse, not an undercover zebra. People oftentimes see exotic features in mundane situations which aren't actually there. This is exactly what you are doing.

I thought it meant, more specifically, "don't use one unproven thing as evidence for another".

...it actually means "it is useless to speculate about situations incompatible with the present circumstances," but it's all the same ballpark. Wiktionary has a rather bluntly-titled page devoted to the adage and similar, of which English has a number, for no readily discernible reason.

quoting Travis B.:

From reading that over, I would guess that <th> and <c> could also be /θ/ and /tʃ/, especially since the creators of Dorfish are most likely non-linguistically-aware English-speakers, and /θ/ and /tʃ/ are naturally sounds that a non-linguistically-aware English-speaker would put in a conlang.

This is the kind of logic I'm trying to avoid.  It's pretty obvious how the DF "languages" were put together (word generator set of roots, basic preset noun phrase forms based in English word order, not much else) if you look at them from an external perspective.  OTOH I'm happy to consider the possibility (indeed, probability) that transcriptions are flawed and/or by linguistically untrained native English speakers  

Something I forgot to look into was homonyms.  Initial results are interesting: they appear to exist, but some are so closely related they may have been misidentified as separate words.  Example: am, four different entries: open/yawn/speak/baby.  I'd say the first three have a clear semantic relation.

I'm also interested in the high proportion of vowel-initial words.  As Zontas suggests consonant loss is a good possibility (for example I suspect some sort of p > f > h > ∅ chain happened, which would explain the lack of /p/ and low frequency of /f/, but I wouldn't like to speculate on other lost consonants until I look into word structure more closely).

Still not sure how I'm going to extract a decent-sized corpus to study (what little) Dorfish grammar (there is). 

Edit:  As fuel for Zontas' paranoia, Dorfish does indeed include the word kikes.

As for /p/, it is the case that if any voiceless stop is going to be missing, it is /p/, so the lack of /p/ does not require a chain shift. This implies that the creator of Dorfish is not linguistically naive, as a linguistically-naive English-speaker would normally include /p/.

And the language could just have a lot of words starting with vowels (which is not unknown in natlangs), because if all these onset-less words were due to consonant loss, either there was an overabundance of a small set of consonants which were all or mostly elided, or a wide range of consonants were elided partially, which is unlikely, as consonants being elided is most likely going to be highly selective.

quoting Travis B.:

so the lack of /p/ does not require a chain shift...

...if all these onset-less words were due to consonant loss

On both of these points you're viewing what's been written a little too extreme and black-and-white, I think.  I suggest chain-shift as a possibility, and no one has claimed that all cases of word-initial vowels are down to consonant loss, just that that it could be a contribution to the skew.

i thought dwarfish had circumflexes and a-rings too

see eg http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/File:Announce.png