Language of the Drakes

I was listening to an episode of Conlangery one day when they mentioned the phenomena of coarticulated consonants. That is, when two consonants are pronounced simultaneously to produce one phoneme.

It made me wonder what the extent of coarticulated consonants were, and it made me further wonder whether a species with a flexible tongue and a long muzzle would be able to produce more unique coarticulated consonants.

So I imagined how Dragons would speak. I started to imagine an ancient Dragon you might encounter in D&D that spoke a truly incomprehensible language and with a name longer than that of the entire party.

That led me to create Treic Rohh [treic rɔħ], probably the only non-anthropomorphic conlang I will ever create. I can’t even pronounce this conlang, which is usually something I try to achieve.

There weren’t enough keys for all the sounds, and I didn’t want to even attempt to create a diacritic system (although I guess that’s just because I’m a pleb). It did lead to some sounds (specifically the coarticulated consonants) to need three or four graphemes to be able to write. This caused short, one syllable words to be upwards of seven letters. For example, sschaung [ʂ͡çauŋ] is eight letters that represent four phonemes.

I decided that these Dragons, who would love more words over longer words, would use an analytical language. The only sentence I have translated so far is:

Sschaung hhau deidzhou [ʂ͡çauŋ ħau deid͡zˤʉ]

Which translates to, “The west wind blows.” Grammatically, it is closer to, “West does wind.”

Well, I’m going to post the phonology and romanization scheme I created for Drake. I hope you like digraphs, because you’ll love the trigraphs! The quadgraphs are just gross though.

 

Passive Voice

Hello, now we will deal with Passive Voice

This will not be a very large post, as the idea of the passive voice is fairly simple and is dealt as such in Léssat.

First, what is Passive Voice? It is the phenomena where we emphasize the object of the sentence instead of the subject (or vice versa in Ergative Absolutive alignment).

In English, this would be the difference between the normal “The bear ate the deer” and the passive “The deer was eaten by the bear.”

In Léssat, this is done by turning the normally Nominative (subject) word into a Genitive alignment by placing it after the verb.

Examples!

Normal Voice

The bear ate the deer.

“Lófa quon igopán píksa.”

/def-bear-(nom) obj def-deer-(acc) eat-pst.3s/

Passive Voice

The deer was eaten by the bear.

“Igopán píksa lófa.”

/def-deer-(acc) eat-pst.3s bear-(gen)/

So… yeah… that’s all there is to it. For now!

Edit to Léssat Prefixes

Hello, recently I made a change to the plural prefix and definite prefix for most of the words in Léssat.

Some of you may know that Léssat words that started with a consonant used to get the plural prefix “o-“, and the definite prefix “-(a)l-“. For example, the word “malé“  (animal) would become “omalé” (animals), “almalé” (the animal), and “olmalé” (the animals).

Now the words are “umalé” (animals), “imalé” (the animal), and “wilmalé” (the animals).

The prefixes for nouns starting with vowels will remain the same, and I have already made sure to edit posts where the changes were needed.

Phonology: 1

Alright, so an important aspect of most conlangs is the phonology. Here goes. If you are unfamiliar with IPA, I recommend this website, http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/ because it gives audio clips for each IPA letter.

IPA Letter
a a
ɛ e
i i
o o
u u
ʊ ou
p p
b b
t t
d d
k k
g g
m m
n n
ŋ ng
ɸ f
β v
θ th
ð dh
s s
z z
h h
ɾ r
j y
l l
w w

 

Some other important things to point out are:

  • “qu” is pronounced /kw/
  • double consonants are long and span two syllables
  • double vowels are long and are pronounced longer than their singular counterparts, eg. “aa” is pronounced /a:/
  • accented vowels are pronounced the same as long vowels and short vowels, but these accented vowels mark the stress of the word
  • if a word lacks accented vowels, then the word very likely has no stress which often happens for short grammatical words, eg. ik, bwaza, ga, quon, etc.

Basic Grammar of Léssat

Hello, thank you for looking at my Conlang, Léssat.

For Léssat, I have focused much more on the phonology than the grammar, which is unusual for me to say the least. However, I have not neglected the grammar, it is merely more straightforward that what I have done previously.

To start, the syntax of Léssat is SOV, with adverbs and adjectives following their verbs and nouns, respectively.

Object

Nouns do not decline and do not have gender. The object is denoted with the particle “quon” that precedes the object and follows the subject.

Adjectives

Adjectives similarly do not decline, and are merely nouns that follow other nouns. If the adjective follows the particle “ga”, then there is emphasis, either clarifying that the noun is an adjective, or putting emphasis on this fact. Explanations for the “quon” and “ga” particles are historical, and fall out of the range of Basic Grammar.

Example:

A manly deer.

“Gopán ámith.”

/deer man/

The motherly fish.

“Iŋusím ga nanát.”

/fish adj. mother/

Possessive

Possessive is formed by another particle, “ik”. The word order for a possessive noun phrase is: the possessed (and any adjectives), ik, the possessor (and any adjectives).

Example:

The bear’s deer.

“Gopán ik lófa.”

/deer pos. def.bear/

Verb Conjugation

Present Léssat
Infinitive -led
1s -wa
2s -ro
3s -sa
1p -nef
2p -nef
3p -sa / -ssa

 

Conjugation Léssat
Infinitive -led
Past 1s -wi
Past 2s -rsa
Past 3s –ksa
Past 1p -ŋi
Past 2p -na
Past 3p -t

The future tense is formed by using the auxiliary verb “bwas” with the main verb staying in its infinitive form. “Bwas” normally means “fall,” but denotes the future when used as an auxiliary verb.

Conjugation Léssat
Infinitive bwas
1s bwaza
2s bwazo
3s bwaza
1p bwazef
2p bwazef
3p bwassa

Nouns

So far, nouns have 3 prefix forms: definite article, plural when followed by a consonant, and plural when followed by a vowel.

 

plural+C u-
def. article +C -i-
plural+def+C wi-
plural+V s-
def. article +V -l-
plural+def+V sl-

An example of noun and verb usage so far:

The bears eat a deer.

“Slófa quon gopán píssa.”

/pl-def-bear obj deer eat-3s/

A bear ate the deer.

“Ófa quon igopán píksa.”

/bear obj def-deer eat-pst.3s/

Indirect Object

So the Indirect Object is dealt solely with word order.

The child gives a fish a flower.

(“The child gives a flower to the fish” is more in line with Léssat grammar.)

“Iwóf quon ellíg tyómisa ŋusím.”

/def-child obj flower give-3s fish/

So that’s Léssat’s basic grammar. With what I have so far, I can form basic sentences and express quite a bit of concepts.

Let’s have a wrap up using the biggest sentence that we can make so far.

The thin child’s manly deer will give a small flower to the motherly fish.

“Wigupán ámith ik iwóf dlítous quon ellíg énflu bwaza tyómilled ŋusím ga nanát.”

/pl-def-deer man pos. def-child thin obj. flower small fall.3s give-inf. fish adj. mother/