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.
