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.)
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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.
For this reason, Dovah is typically considered an English “relex” rather than a conlang. Relex = Re-Lexicon.
Actually, it’s called Dovahzuul. Dovah is the species, dovahzuul is the language.
As much as people think having “Common” as a language is weird, it literally has historical roots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
People have been using a Common language for millenia. Today, the global lingua franca is obviously English. For about 1500 years, the lingua franca of medieval Europe was Latin. And for a while in the Mediterranean it was Sabir, where Lingua Franca the term came from, which was a weird simplified Mediterranean mix of languages (no verb conjugation, etc).
Other areas with multiple languages have had their own Lingua Francas. It’s a common thing to happen if you have big areas with multiple languages and lots of trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas
So it’s really not weird to have a Common tongue in games. It came from LotR which came from history since Tolkien was a huge language nerd and wrote a world for his language to exist.
The de facto lingua franca is English, except things like “de facto” or “lingua franca”.
the reason why everybody is compatible with english is because english is compatible with everything.
What does the Draconic one say?
o noble and mighty dragons, we beseekh* you, grant us safe passage through your territory.
we are but humble adventurers on a quest that may yet bring hope to our troubled realm…
It’s just a substitution cipher
https://www.dafont.com/dovahkiin.font?text=o+noble+and+mighty+dragons%2C+we+beseech+you%2C+grant+us+safe+passage+through+your+territory&psize=xs* originally beseech but Dovazhul doesn’t have a C equivalent; the font (below) reuses the K glyph
There is enough text, would be easy to decode with basic frequency analysis but searching among “cipher fonts” made it show up. I think even Google Lens (like @NoSpotOfGround@lemmy.world probably used) could identify it
Hello, Dragons! Can we enter the cave if we promise to remove our boots? Also, do you happen to have any cookies?
This leads me to the conclusion that chihuahuas can’t communicate with huskies.
They can, they only know two words though, both offensive.
![Language Barrier [OC]](https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/9bb226ae-7c76-474c-8acd-738dae6dff73.png){kind=link}