The fantasy trope that everyone of a given species shares the same language always seemed a bit funny to me.

Co-author credit on this comic to my daughter, who came up with the concept. (She makes a lot of comics about dragons, but she’s too young to share them publicly.)

  • brsrklf
    55·
    2 days ago

    Skyrim’s Dovah is a very special kind of fantasy linguistics because it has the exact same grammatical construction as English and every word has the same number of syllables as its direct English translation.

    Oh, also if two words in English rhyme, there’s a decent chance their respective Dovah translations do too.

    Why? Because thanks to those completely absurd facts the Dragonborn song “works” in both English and Dovah as a word-to-word translation.

    • Iunnrais@piefed.socialEnglish
      39·
      2 days ago

      For this reason, Dovah is typically considered an English “relex” rather than a conlang. Relex = Re-Lexicon.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        14 hours ago

        Really? I don’t think it’s even possible to fully relex English letter by letter without making something very unpronounceable because it is nowhere near phonetic.

        As per a Reddit comment, it’s really a conlang, just leaning quite a bit on English and other Germanic languages despite the apparent attempts to make it look all foreign:

        Eh, Dovahzul isn’t just a relex of English. Yes, it’s isolating and has a Germanic phonology, but its grammar works fairly differently if I understand correctly. Verbs don’t inflect for person or number and the language also supports zero copula. The language has no continuous and verbs with no accompanying auxiliary can be interpreted either present or past, as opposed to the present+future | preterite distinction of Germanic. You can also just use the participle inflection with no auxiliary to express the perfect aspect.

        Nouns also can take suffixes indicating the possessor, articles are usually omitted and a distinct article exists to mark formality, and adjective order relative to the noun it modifies, as long as it is next to the noun, is arbitrary.

        And this is just the canon stuff. Check out thuum.com if you’re interested. I agree that Dovahzul could have perhaps been better done, but it is by no means a direct 1 to 1 relex of English. Sure, it isn’t super complicated and in some ways kind of resembles a relexified creole à la Afrikaans, but it isn’t devoid of creativity.

        That said, this is a really interesting project and I like the Tibeto-Burman aesthetic, although typically monosyllabic morphemes with complex clusters is a pretty Germanic trait if you ask me

        There’s an entire dictionary and the Dragonborn song does in fact use these translations and the specific grammar. Yes, the vocabulary is such that the same pairs of words tend to rhyme as those in English, but that’s a phonetic mapping, and the number of syllables isn’t correlated as strongly as between other Germanic languages.

        As for the runes, this comic uses simply English written in the Dovazhul runic script, possible because the near-1:1 mapping between the 26 letters and 34 runes (in fact, the only word changed is beseech → “BESEEKH” because of the lack of a “C” rune (probably not a concious choice by the comic’s author, this font does c→K automatically); no runes that map to digraphs are used, for example your → “YOUR” rather than “YO[UR]”. This can be considered a relex or simply a substitution cipher. If Dovazhul text actually quoted English words, they would probably not use the substitution, they’d leave it as-is or rewrite phonetically like Russian does.