Dragonspeak grammar

The following information is quoted from Dragonspeak creator Fernehawles on the FFXIV forum.

Word order

The basic structure of a sentence is Verb - Object - Subject (as opposed to English which is Subject - Verb - Object). In other words, where in English we would say

“The wombat ate the Lalafell”

the dragons would say

“Ate Lalafell Wombat.”

This exhibits how important action is to the dragons as opposed to the initiator of that action. Who ate the Lalafell is (relatively) unimportant. Immediately recognizing that “eating” has occurred readies the dragon to decide on an appropriate action in response.

Speaking of sentence subjects, whereas English employs several types of pronouns, dragonspeak has only the following three:

Again, everything has been simplified down to focus on whether or not the action was initiated by the dragons or someone else (a distinction here being made between animate and inanimate things via the inclusion of [n] and [h]).

Adjectives and adverbs will almost always come after the word that they modify, again placing the importance on the action or the object of that action over the words that describe them. The sentence

[slowly ate] {the foolish Lalafell.}

would be constructed in dragonspeak as

[Ate slowly] {Lalafell foolish}

The one slight deviation from modifier order is when a possessive is used. Instead of after the noun, it will come before (as it does in English, but without an apostrophe s).

Thordan’s vengeance - Thor[n] sja[h]s

Possessive pronouns are no different from the pronouns listed above:

Verb conjugation

There is next to no conjugation of verbs in dragonspeak─another sign of extreme efficiency. Where in English we have different forms to indicate past or present tense, as well as a compound structure to communicate future tense, dragons use the same word for all three─the only difference being the inhaling of breath while saying the verb to indicate future.

For example, the base word for ‘eat’ in dragonspeak is ee[h]s:

Eat - ee[h]s Ate - ee[h]s Will Eat - [s]ee[h]s

The first two are spoken while breathing out, and pronounced like “east” minus the “t,” with the middle of the word heavily aspirated (like the slight soughing of an autumn wind through slowly decaying leaves, or the raspy sigh of an octogenarian’s last breath). The latter is spoken while breathing in─an action that, when performed by a dragon, creates a slight hissing sound that attaches itself to the front of the word. This is represented by [s] when transliterating.

Other verb forms such as present progressive and present perfect also fall under the past/present rules:

The key here is the words that accompany ee[h]s. “A” (pronounced like a quick ‘ah’) is the dragonspeak equivalent for “now/in the present.” Using this in conjunction with a verb emphasizes the progressive nature of the verb. “For[h]” is the dragonspeak equivalent for “not now,” and when used with a verb not in the future tense, it can emphasize the fact that something happened at a time not now, but not in the future. Again, as dragons treat past and present as interchangeable, these “forms” are rarely used, and when they are, it is done more so for emphasis rather than the need to make it clear that the dragon is talking about the past or the present as opposed to something else.

Negative sentences are created in a fairly simple manner—by adding an “n” to the front of a verb. This n is different from the life-indicating [n] in that it does not contain the nasal droning. It is a simple, short, hard “n” sound.

nee[h]s fou[n] a[n] - We don’t eat chicken.

One thing that I mentioned in the opening was about how individual words took on more ‘meanings’ through a process of consolidation. A major example of this is how a single word can be used as a noun, adjective, verb, and so forth.

For example, in English, we have

Corrupt (verb) - Corruption (noun) - Corrupted (adjective)

In dragonspeak, however, all of these words are consolidated into “te[n],” dragons being able to understand which meaning the word takes by determining its position in the sentence in relation to other words. Here is an example of how that works: