And yes, I'm well prepared for a barrage of "Hey uly, how's the translation coming?"

Still better than a symphony.

i think the word you are looking for is small.

but better pm drought.

Small is what I used just now but that's not good enough. THERE MUST BE SOME OTHER WAY.

population should be low. group and community should be small. deal with it.

Instead of listing out a bunch of words....do you seriously not have access to a thesaurus? Or is the use of a thesaurus a lost art amongst today's youth?

if you want to be fancy you can think of a single word rather than two. for example, hamlet instead of small community. but then you're just showing off.

do you want one word? also depends what you mean by community. hamlet is a fixed-location. so it wouldn't be like an online community or something. unless you're trying to be clever somehow. like some people think is cool.

THERE MUST BE SOME OTHER WAY.

Small or little of course are the obvious ones.

Meager is nice -- it definitely has somewhat more extreme/weak feelt han just small, but it does mean what you want. (For example, to call somebody's salary meager would usually be taken as an insult; not so with small).

Other quite extreme words include scant and paltry (paltry would be very dramatic sounding, so you'd only want to use it if you were going for literary sounding or something).

As an avid writer, my best companions are a *real* dictionary, and a big old fat thesaurus. Don't care how smart you are, how complete your knowledge of language is, there are times when poking through lists will bring forth a better thought.

I agree about the value of thesaurii, though finding a really good one is hard. The really rare, perfect words are most often omitted as too high-fallutin', and those are often exactly the words you're looking for.

Still, very useful books.

*thesauri. Man, I must need a new dictionary, too.

So ulytau.... how's the translation coming?

semky's words are all making fun of the size. you really need to provide us with more information in order to choose the best words. and i would suggest online rather than print lookups for definitions/usage. online is more comprehensive, and usually more idiomatic. particularly if you have some ancient tome. besides, the top results online will typically be the most used. and you want words people understand if this thing will be released widely.

dwindle. dimish, fritter, etc...

ooops diminish ... etc...

Yes, as bolshoi suggests, dumb it down as much as possible.

Anyway, though, I completely disagree that "meager" is making fun of the size. It's a fairly strong word, but can be used perfectly seriously.

He wants adjectives, Dharmaton.

you can just convert. dwindling, diminished... not sure about fritter though. dharm is too fancy for me with that.

but since we don't know context, go with small for group/community and low for population. if you stick in these words with more specific definitions you could make a serious error in usage, and that risk far outweighs any supposed poetic advantage.

"sparse" population?

"dwindled group," bolshoi? I think not.

Anyway I continue to defend meager as strong but general.

The translation isn't coming well, semck, krellin completely destroyed my self-esteem and whatnot, still trying to cope with the sarcasm.

I actually consulted some thesauri (although only online ones as it's 2 AM) but the results were unsatisfactory. Compared to the dozens of adjectives that can be used to describe something numerous or big in all kinds of fashion, most of their opposites all have the undertones of defficiency from the way I read them, even the suggested meager. I don't need any poetic words but writing (paraphrasing) "he comes from a small community dwelling high on the plateaus" doesn't feel right. If the word unnumerous existed, I would go for it.

Yeah, sparse population is good. It reers more to the land/country than to the group of people, in some sense. In other words, it kind of have a density overtone. (Sparsely populated would mean, not so much that absolute numbers were small, but that there was a lot of empty land between people).

In my view anyway.

go with hamlet if you want poetry

Actually, the sentence you posted ("He comes from a small...") sounds pretty great. As Bolshoi suggested, using hamlet or village instead would also work. I agree that in that context, meager would not work.

Sparse population was something I thought of but it seems to convey more the meaning of "not densely populated".