Elcenia Spoilers

[DanielH]

A lot of these aren’t actually from the Chalk thread; is it possible for Bluelantern or Alicorn to change this thread’s name?

[Alicorn]

I have changed the subject of the first post; this doesn't change subject lines in subordinate posts but does change it in the index.

[DanielH]

Could you give a rough translation of “ialsafei” into English?

[Alicorn]

"Go on being the adjective following". Has not appeared in published Elcenia but customarily appears with "siaddaki" and dates back to original RP version.

[Anya]

Is the original RP version still around?

[Alicorn]

I have logs of it but principally write the reboot from memory.

[DanielH]

Wait, does that mean a (rougher than usual) translation of “Ialsafei siahrraki” into English would be (a species-specific version of) “Don't forget to be awesome”?

[Kappa]

...More or less, yeah. XD

[DanielH]

How does dragon magic work with things which aren’t really words in a language, but a native speaker would still understand? It’s hard to ask this given that most modern linguists are descriptivist while Draconic seems prescriptivist, but I’ll do my best. For a simple example, in English, the accepted plural of “moose” is “moose”. I expect dragonishes, even those who had never heard of English before, would understand but not produce “mooses” in most cases. What about more complex examples? For example, suppose I was telling a story about a literal genie which sandwichifies somebody asking for lunch. Would a dragonish who had never before encountered English be able to understand this?

I started thinking about this question when combining Draconic morphemes. For example, Draconic appears to have a suffix -aki, “awesome, glorious, spectacular, cool, in the particular way characterized by [the rest of the word]”. Would dragonishes understand this suffix when applied to things Draconic doesn’t natively apply it to? For example, suppose Mallyn from Elcenia canon makes more progress on Draconic than is expected, discovers this suffix, and then decides on his own to use the word “shrennaki”. Assuming that the Elcenia-canon dragons don’t gain access to Reform Draconic despite it being a language that now exists somewhere in a multiverse, how would they react?

Whether the word is parseable by dragonishes without access to Reform Draconic or not, how would 169-year-old Mial react to somebody saying that set of syllables because it’s combining Draconic morphemes?

EDIT: Just to be clear, I’m not talking about somebody babbling nonsense syllables that happen to form Draconic morphemes in interesting orders. I’d expect most or all sequences of syllables to be words, phrases, or sentences in some multiversal language dragonishes can understand, and they are able to keep this separate from people actually speaking those languages. I’m talking about somebody who is saying these things because (in the English case) a native speaker would understand, or (in the Draconic case) it’s still combining existent morphemes.

[Kappa]

(I'm not Alicorn, but this is what I think is true about Draconic here)

Before Reform Draconic existed, it was possible to invent "shrennaki", but it would have registered to Draconic-speakers as a horrible travesty without even the excuse of being a real word in any language. They would have understood what was meant by inventing the word, because it's a pretty obvious reverse-engineering of "siaddaki", but it wouldn't have had a definition or set of connotations of its own the way real words in languages do.

I think "siaddaki" is probably the only word in original Draconic that has that "-aki" in it with that meaning, so before "shrennaki" and "siahrraki" came along, it wasn't really a suffix that way.

Before Reform Draconic existed, if Mial had ever encountered "shrennaki" being said without the support of a language behind it, he would have been intensely excited, intensely heartbroken, very uncomfortable, and really, really pissed off at Draconic. He would have wanted it to be a real word more than he has ever wanted any other thing in his life.