thank you to Froid, Felix Benner, EEVV, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the voice of dragons, Dovahzul.
it’s also called “Dragonic”, “Dragontongue”, “Dovah”, “Dovahtinvaak”, and “Dragon”,
but Dovahzul is the most common name.
Dovahzul is a fictional language featured in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
I don’t actually know who exactly made it because they aren’t credited for doing so.
my best guess is that Emil Pagliarulo, the writer of Skyrim, created the Romanized written
version of the language first, and then the phonology was made by the voice actors, under
the supervision of the lead voice director, Wes Gleason, and then the Cuneiform style
writing system was made by one of the art designers, and then approved by Pagliarulo,
because he’s also the game’s senior designer.
the phonology was probably also highly influenced, if not made outright, by John Kurlander, who
wrote the main theme of Skyrim, which is written entirely in Dovahzul.
much like Skyrim itself, Dovahzul has been modified and expanded by the Skyrim fanbase,
who have added a significant amount of vocabulary far beyond what was originally intended.
the fan expansion of Dovahzul is documented fairly well on the fansite Thu’um. in universe,
it’s spoken by dragons, and learning to speak it makes your yelling magical I think?
Skyrim is weird.
the consonants are:
this inventory doesn’t have much going for it.
the most interesting thing here is the voiceless labialized velar stop, which might not even
be how q is supposed to be pronounced.
it could just be /kw/, like qu in English, or it could be a uvular sound of some sort.
it’s kinda unclear.
speaking of unclear, the rhotic sound is pronounced in a wide variety of ways.
it could be an alveolar trill, an alveolar tap, or, in some cases, an alveolar approximant
like in English.
the only other notable things here are the glottal stop, which isn’t really phonemic,
and the dental fricative, which would be pretty interesting if it weren’t in English.
Dovahzul’s vowels are:
these vowels are from the best source I could find, Thu’um. however, other sources say
that the vowels are like this instead.
really it just depends on the individual speaker.
neither of these charts really capture the full complexity of how Dovahzul’s vowels
are pronounced.
like, uu can be pronounced like /u/, but it’s also pronounced like /uʔu/ and like /uʔʌ/
almost at random.
the thing is, I don’t think this was Pagliarulo’s original intention.
it was probably meant to be something like this,
but ended up getting unintentionally Anglicized by the voice actors.
anyway, the diphthongs are:
this is some pretty solid evidence that Dovahzul wasn’t based on any languages other than English.
those rhotacized vowels especially.
Dovahzul’s orthography is inspired by Cuneiform, with all the graphemes made out of simple
wedge shapes.
aesthetically, it’s real neat.
none of the graphemes look out of place.
functionally, however, it’s a real mess.
there’s some sounds that can be written multiple ways.
this might’ve been an attempt at a deep orthography, where different letters represented
different sounds at one point, but the sounds merged later, but if that’s the case, it
really should’ve been indicated with the Romanization system.
more importantly, there’s some stuff that works exactly the same as the Latin Alphabet
for actually no reason.
why is there a single letter for /ks/?
why are /ʃ/, /ŋ/, and /θ/ all written with digraphs that correspond one to one with the
way they’re written in English? it just feels like not a lot of thought went into it.
the Romanization system is just as bad, if not worse, since there’s no in universe
excuse for it to be unphonetic.
it really just makes me wonder what went wrong here.
Dovahzul’s grammar is almost exactly like English.
you can basically translate it word for word into English without doing anything else.
like, here’s the opening lines of Dragonborn, the main theme of Skyrim:
translated word for word, that says,
Dragonborn, Dragonborn, by his honorable oath, to keep evil forever at bay!
and the fierce foe when they hear triumph’s shout,
Dragonborn, for your blessing we pray!
to be entirely clear, all I did was look up what each word means individually.
I didn’t change anything else.
the phrase “to keep”?
that’s not the infinitive form of the verb “keep”, that’s literally a preposition
meaning “to” and then the verb “keep”. the phrase “at bay”? this ancient dragon
language just happens to have that same exact idiom, despite the obvious lack of a history
of fighting armies with boats that would be required for that idiom to develop in the
first place.
the words “his” and “triumph’s”?
yes, those are the genitive forms of the masculine third person pronoun and the word “triumph”,
but the word for “his” is completely separate from the word for “he”, and the word for
“triumph’s” is created with a highly regular suffix.
oh, and just as a cool bonus, the English translation just happens to rhyme.
not even the word order here is a result of a difference in grammar. “for your blessing
we pray” looks like it’s OSV, which would be really interesting, but really it’s only
phrased that way to make the rhyme work better, just like in English.
if this wasn’t supposed to rhyme, it would be “mu draal fah hin kogaan”, which, word
for word, translates to “we pray for your blessing”.
to be fair, it’s not all exactly the same as English.
verbs are a tad simpler, comparisons work differently, and there isn’t a distinction
between adjectives and adverbs.
yet, so much is transparently the same that it kinda doesn’t matter.
due to the obvious flaws with the phonology, orthography, and grammar, it seems like all
the attention went into making the vocabulary. and while the words do sound pretty cool,
you don’t really get a feel for dragon culture from them.
there’s a handful of things that are there to remind you that this language is spoken
by dragons, like how the word for “fly” is also the word for “go”, [bo | fly,
go] because there isn’t really a different way that dragons move, or how the word for
“me” also means “dragon”, [dovah | dragon, me] there isn’t that much else.
most words with multiple meanings don’t give much insight as to how dragons see the world.
like, “oh, cool, “ocean” and “sea” are the same word, so I guess they don’t
care much about types of bodies of water?” it just seems like there’s a whole lot of
missed opportunities here.
the main thing Dovahzul is used for in Skyrim is a game mechanic called shouts, where you
yell a three word Dovahzul phrase and it makes magic happen.
they’re really just sets of three seemingly random words that have something to do with
what the magic is.
like, there’s one that makes you breathe fire by yelling “yol toor shul”, which
actually just means “fire inferno sun”, a list of three hot things.
the shouts sorta have an almost poetic feel to them, where they’re not really about
directly stating what magic you want to happen, but just suggesting it by sheer force.
it would be really neat if the rest of Dovahzul worked like that, where you hint at what you’re
trying to say using a short list of words with no standard syntax, but it wasn’t meant to be.
all in all, I’d say that I don’t like Dovahzul as much as I like Klingon, making
it the seventh best artlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Interlingua.
hey gamers, remember this one?
I used to be an adventurer like you, but I took an arrow to the knee.
remember that one? from the highly relatable moment for gamers. it’s very, it was, they
all said that.
remember? all of the characters said that a lot, and remember that? it’s a very, it’s
a good meme.