Proto-Draconic Sigils

Proto-Draconic is getting something of a revision.

For starters, the ancient Draconic language has, basically, four sigils (each of these sigils can appear point-down or point-up; they are shown alternating because I can).

Each sigil, then, represents a series of consonants (and vowels, but we'll get to that later).  The consonants can be voiced or unvoiced, and they can be a stop, fricative, or liquid.  Furthermore, each symbol can represent two vowels, one front, one back.  Thus, in the following order: unvoiced stop, voiced stop, unvoiced fricative, voiced fricative, liquid, front vowel, back vowel:

Labial:
P - same as English
B - same as English
F - sounds similar to English, but blow through your lips -- no teeth involved. (Dragons teeth don't play nice).
V - sounds similar to English, but blow through your lips -- no teeth involved.
W - same as English, but never round your lips (so it's much less distinct-sounding).
I - as in machine
Ú - as in the sound you make when you get punched in the stomach.



Dental:
T - Somewhat softer than English, almost a 'th' sound, made with the tip of the tongue against the teeth.
D - Somewhat softer than English, almost a 'dh' sound, made with the tip of the tongue against the teeth.
TH - As in English think.
DH - As in English this.
L - Sounds like English, but made against the teeth.
É - As in "Weigh"
O - as in the sound you make when you get punched in the stomach.  To an English speaker, this sounds almost exactly like Ú, but to a dragon, they are quite different.  (Ú is IPH ɯ, O is IPH ɤ).

Palatal:
TC - Exactly like the English T.
DC - Exactly like the English D.
S - Like the English 'SH' as in bash.
J - Like the sound of S in Measure.  A french J.
R - Lightly trilled.  Sounds almost, but not quite, like a 'D'.
E - As in Wet.
U - As in "Mud"

Velar:
K - Like the English 'K', but pronounced just a touch farther back in the mouth.
G -  Always hard as in get, not soft as in age.
H - Like the ch in loch, only a bit softish.
Q - This is hard to describe.  It's like a French 'r', an 'r' sound produced in the back of the mouth.
Y - Same as English.
A - As in "Ha!"
Á - As in "Awesome!"

Notice, Draconic has no 'u as in boot' or 'o as in note'.  These vowels require the rounding of the lips, a talent few dragons acquire.

So... when you see a draconic sigil, how do you know which of the seven possible sounds it represents?

First:  Each sigil has four variants.  It can have a curved 'vowel mark' put into it, to indicate that it is a vowel. It can have a straight 'voice mark' put into it to indicate it is a voiced consonant or a back vowel.

But what about the fricatives and the liquids?

As far as dragons are concerned, the fricatives and the liquids are not exactly separate letters.  They are how letters sound when tucked into different roles.  Basically, for all draconic words that aren't grammatical particles, there is a two-letter (almost always two-consonant) cluster.

Root words in proto-draconic have three key letters, and are therefore written by arranging the three sigils in a triangle, like the triforce in Zelda.  Once you move beyond the root vocabulary things start getting more complicated, so let's start there.

Here are two such trigrams, both of them (if read left-to-right, top-to-bottom) reading "Labial (Voiced)", Dental, Palatal (Voiced)", or for shortsies "B-T-DC."

The top one is in function formation, or point-down, which means that it is serving in the role of verb.  This also means that it is read "C1C2-V-C3-V" where 'C' is a sigil from the trigram, and Vs are vowels known to the reader (because there do not tend to be homonyms in proto-draconic).

In other words, because the two consonants are side-by-side, they are pronounced side-by-side, and in this case, the second 'mutates' into a Liquid.  So, this would be pronounced "BL(vowel)DC(vowel).  The vowel following the mutant consonant tends to take its form from the consonant, so the final word will be "blédcu", a word pronounced almost exactly like the English phrase "Blade, uh..."

The lower trigram is in argument formation, or point up, which means it is an adverb, adjective, or noun (in English terms).  Unfortunately, the modifiers (adverb and adjective) are pronounced one way, while nouns are pronounced another way.

The modifiers follow the form C1-V-C2C3-V.  Remember, consonants side-by-side in the trigram are side-by-side in the pronunciation.  C3, as you may expect, mutates into the liquid, which means the second vowel takes on a front or back position, as necessary, to indicate the original voicing of the sigil.  C2, however, becomes fricative at this point (leading to the draconic rule that verbs are harsh, and nouns and modifiers are gentle).  So, as a modifier, this trigram is pronounced B(vowel)THRU, or "bethrú".

The noun form is C1-V-C2-V-C3.  C2 becomes liquid, C1 becomes fricative (to allow flow to the next word despite the lack of a trailing vowel), and the second vowel, once again, goes front or back to maintain the information lost by the liquid transformation. "belij".

Oof.  So much for three sigils in exactly the same order.

The only differences if one of the sigils represents a vowel are that vowels don't mutate -- they flow enough as is -- that the vowel filling a 'consonant' role is separated from preceding and following vowels by a light breath, almost like the English 'h' (this is represented in transliterations by every fantasy author's favorite:  an apostrophe), and preceding or following vowels must be one of three diphthongs "AI" (pronounced 'eye'), "UI" (pronounced by running the two sounds together), and "EI" (pronounced the same as 'é').

Thing is:  the three pronunciations above are all the same word as far as dragons are concerned.  They are how the word B-T-DC is pronounced in different contexts.

Have you ever heard a hip young smartass say "I'm going to broom the floor" as opposed to "I'm going to sweep the floor"?  That is how Draconic works (although to the outside listener, a verb and its associated adjective/noun sound like very different words).  Nouns get verbed.  Verbs get nouned.

Two more things:  Observe the following Draconic Trigram:

Holy Moses!  Where do you even begin?

First off, when you have a trigram of this size, the central 'triforce' set, in this case T-G-B, is the heart of the word, as it is the word's root.  The outer sigils, the wings D and K, and the tail, E, represent further sounds that have been tacked onto this word, usually through compounding (the wings are a prefix, the tail a post-fix).  The central sigil, P, is a particle said before the word, to identify it's role in the sentence (most verbs and all nouns will have this; adverbs and adjectives will tend not).  The 'horns' on the point indicate that the point 'consonant' (first 'consonant'in an argument, last 'consonant' in a function) is a fricative.

This is as big as a trigram ever gets.

So, the phrase is "P DK-TGB-E"

"Pi dyathéyavu'e."