An Introduction to Dragonspeak

[Anonymoose]

[S][h]ess fta[h]r a[h]!

Oh, my gods, lol. I almost hope to hear a dragon say this in the background someday.

Thanks for the info!

[Clawtooth]

Really good to hear that you took actual linguistic considerations in mind when creating the Dragonspeak language. So often - particularly in fantasy genre literature (and I count Video Games as works of literature but that's another can of worms I'll over another time), constructed languages adhere to no rules about the ways in which we use language and the ways language evolves, and in some cases can actually just end up being complex for complexity's sake rather than following generalisations we know about natural language (which often makes them feel disingenuous) Tolkien's languages are so well remembered because he was a linguist himself and took a great deal of care when creating his constructed languages in Middle Earth, for example. In particular I'm very interested in the roles of prosody and pragmatic implicature in Dragonspeak, as those are the least overt parts of language and are of particular academic interest to me .

I was also very interested to hear the part about Echo translation - what it sounds like the Echo does is Hydaelyn strips down the input from the collocuter into raw semantic/pragmatic meanings without the layer of structure (syntax/morphology/phonology/phonetics/prosody-ish sometimes) and then allows the person with the Echo to reconstitute it into their on language. It's certainly a very efficient method of translation that would be near perfect.

Another great language post Ferne I hope to see more soon.

P.S. on the message in Dragonspeak at the end ... I'm assuming that the []'s mean something other than phonetic transcription lol ... setting with a linguist's eyes as usual. The resemblence to the English "See forward 'demonstrative'" is uncanny.