Hey there, I'm a big conlang enthusiast who also happens to love TES V and stumbled upon your site when reading up on whether the Dragon Language is Skyrim was actually a substantial conlang. This is honestly one of the best conlang fan sites I've seen so far, in terms of both content and layout, so kudos for that! Anyway, I was browsing through the lessons pages to learn more about the language's structure, and I started noticing a few errors. Since this is a well-made site with an active community, I thought it would be worth typing up the things I noticed, nitpicks and larger errors alike. Hopefully you don't mind me submitting the list I've compiled for the authors of the site to go over at their leisure. :) Some of these things are small and a bit subjective, intended to make things more linguistically accurate, while others are factual errors. However, I wouldn't be offended if the admins decided not to change anything at all. xD

From the alphabet and pronunciation page:

AA aan /É’/ on, hot, rock

I'm guessing whoever transcribed this is British? The English examples match Received Pronunciation but for Standard American English, these are much more likely to be pronounced as /É‘:/. People who don't know IPA probably won't catch this, so maybe it would help to clarify the example if you want to be extremely precise about it. :I

D dah /d/ dragon, sword

You might want to take "dragon" out of the list for accuracy's sake, since a lot of speakers will swap in an allophone for /d/ in this position, namely /dÊ’/, unless they are thinking very carefully about it. Since it's an allophone, people will still probably know what you mean, but using a word that uses an allophone instead of the exact phoneme you mean to represent is probably not the best for an example of pronunciation.

L li /l/ lore, help

"Help" is another case of substituting an allophone, at least for Standard American English speakers. I don't know about you, but I sure as heck velarize that sucker to/ÊŸ/! Also, due to the font on the page, the IPA for what I'm sure is intended to be an alveolar lateral approximant /l/ actually looks like a retroflex lateral approximant /É­/. By reading the English examples, things are clarified (sans the whole velar bit), but it certainly made me do a double-take when first reading it!

Regarding the pronunciation of apostrophes:

"As two syllables with a stop - This is a rarer pronunciation than the other two. It is like the first in that the u's make up two syllables, except both are long /u:/ and they are separated by a full stop."

I'm going to assume you mean a glottal stop here, not just any kind of stop. You might want to insert the place of articulation, because otherwise the reader just has to guess, assuming they even know "stop" is a term for a manner of articulation. Or maybe the writer intended for us to produce an epiglottal stop, which would be pretty epic! :D

On the pronouns page:

"Dovahzul has 4 types of pronouns"

You might want to say "cases"? "Types" could mean a lot of things, including declensions, genders etc. This is more of a nitpick, but since the term is used elsewhere on the same page, might as well be consistent. x)

From the nouns page:

"The opposite of a plural noun is a singular noun, which refers to only one person, place, thing, or idea."

This again is a bit of a nitpick, namely because using the word "opposite" seems to imply a sort of binary distinction in plurality. Either something is plural, or it's singular. However, this is simply not true in a lot of languages including Koine Greek and Cherokee among others, which have a dual plurality (Cherokee arguably has a maximum of 5 modes of plurality, if you include the inclusive/exclusive distinction). Now, is that really important information for in this context? Not really, at least not enough to go into a long explanation of the plurality spectrum. However, the way things are phrased now do make the lesson seem a bit amateurish if one has a basic knowledge of linguistics, which I'm sure is something the site would like to avoid, so you might reconsider the wording a bit. :)

The paragraph about suffixes on the possession page is slightly more passable because prefixes and suffixes are a bit more akin to logical opposites than singular and plural, but don't forget infixes! D:

From the possession page:

"A suffix is a set of letters added to the end of a word to change its meaning."

I'm guessing you're trying to avoid as much jargon as possible by not using "morpheme" here, but something like "unit of meaning" would honestly sit much better with me than "set of letters." Maybe I'm getting too philosophical and nitpicky here, thinking about the underlying representation of words in the mental lexicon and so on. Describing any linguistic feature that is not restricted to the orthography as "letters" just sounds really wrong. o.O I'm probably way too much of a perfectionist though hahaha. :P

From the verbs and adverbs page:

"English has a lot of tenses while Dovahzul has relatively few. "

While some of the points I'm bringing up are pretty subjective, this one is definitely not. English has a total of 2 tenses, past and present. That's pretty pathetic compared to a number of languages, and certainly not "a lot." xD The other "tenses" in English have to be formed using auxiliaries and modals, meaning they're not really true tenses, at least how linguists see it.

"Kos is the infinite form, los is used for present tense, and lost is used for past tense."

I think the writer meant "infinitive" not "infinite" here. :)

"The verb kos can be used to make adjectives out of verbs. "Rek siiv" would mean "she finds", but with the kos we can make "Rek los siiv", or "she is found". Likewise "rek lost siiv" could mean "she was found"."

Only the first example clearly shows a verb (in this case, a participle) being used adjectivally. In the second example, the past participle is more likely being used to indicate passive voice. The only way to indicate that the second example is certainly a participle being used adjectivally would be to make it comparative, i.e. "She was more found," which sounds a bit bizarre in this case but it does work with other gerundives (verbs being used as adjectives), like, "She was more bored," "She was more frightened," etc.

"Kos can also be used to express what's called progressive tense."

Progressive is an aspect, not a tense. Aspect and tense are very different and some languages only have one or the other (i.e. Mandarin has only aspect and not tense).

"The suffix -taas is a suffix for progressive tense that is somewhat equivalent to English's own "-ing". Take viin, "to shine". If you wanted to say "a shining blade", you could use -taas to make "viintaas tuz"."

"Shining" as in "a shining blade" is not progressive aspect, it's a gerundive. In English, "-ing" is the ending frequently used for progressive aspect, gerunds, and gerundives, so it's not a big surprise that people get them mixed up a lot. I haven't really studied the Dovahzul in depth, but just from what I read here, it sounds like "-taas" is an exact morpheme-to-morpheme lexical substitution with "-ing", meaning it retains all the functionality, including creating progressive aspect, gerunds, and gerundives. Christopher Paolini made the same oversimplification in his creation of the Ancient Language, albeit his is even worse from what I know.

"The suffix "-taas" is rarely used. Save it for making present particples (as in "a shining blade"), or when you want to clearly specify progressive tense in place of using "kos"."

"Shining" isn't a exactly present participle either, but a gerundive as I've stated (or an adjectival participle if you prefer haha). The forms are identical so unless you really think about the role of the word in this sentence, it's impossible to tell the difference. :P

"An adverb is a word that describes a verb, much like an adjective describes a noun."

I think it's worth mentioning that adverbs can describe adjectives and other adverbs as well.

There are other nitpicks I have but those ones are more personal preference and wouldn't really benefit readers with little or no prior linguistic knowledge, so I'll keep them to myself. xP

Anyway, there you have the list for your consideration. Keep up the good work on the site! :D

Thanks for the in-depth feedback! I'll definitely work these changes into the lessons when I can.

It could be helpful to add an mp3 file to the lessons at each word that comes up so we can hear it making it a bit easier (for some xD) to start get the hang of it and / or for pronunciation and accent skills making the ones that @starting points to pick it up more quickly (at least that is my thinking) and / or the ones that already fluent in Dovahzul to keep practising via hearing 

Plus the same idea could be done (i think) for the translation webpage but that would require much more mp3 files since you have like a database of 4000+ dovah words

Ps: Sorry for posting but since a thread with lesson suggestion was still open i just find it more proper to post it here. No need creating a new thread for the same topic right?

That could definitely be a useful thing, but you would need to get someone who could accurately and consistently pronounce all the phonemes, including the non-English ones. I'm in the middle of doing a phonological analysis for Dovahzul and there are actually a surprising number of phonemes which aren't found in most English dialects like /q/, /χ/, and /ʁ/. It also seems that all voiceless plosives are aspirated, which is different from English and native English-speakers have a very difficult time distinguishing between aspirated and non-aspirated plosives (my main linguistics prof has told me she will never learn Mandarin since its aspiration is not allophonic ha!). Basically, if you wanted it to be super legit, you'd probably need somebody with a good amount of knowledge in phonology.

Thus i posted the idea here ... i would do it if i was capable enough and speaking fluently with a good amount of knowledge in phonology and dovazul but unfortunately i am at a ''newbie'' level hehe 

Hope someone would interested enough to this kind of task since its a huge load with the amount of 4000+ words that are known here!!

I think it'd be unfeasible to have pronunciations for every word. I do have some approximate, computer-generated pronunciations for the canon words though (there are about 600 of them), it would be neat to have human pronunciations for those.

Based on the canon words or the ''rules'' that define the canon words wouldn't be possible to create the same or more-in-less the same pronunciations / phonology for the semi-canon and the non-canon?

It might be possible to try and set up some kind of automated text-to-speech pronunciations, which may or may not be worth the effort if it isn't accurate enough. For this I'm talking about an actual person recording audio, which isn't feasible for 4,000+ and growing words. So it might be best to do that with only the canon words, since those will never change.

When I finish analyzing the phonology, I might be up to trying to record a few things. I don't know if it would technically count as canon because my phonology would only be a statistical analysis of the canon, not a written statement from the creators themselves. I've had some advanced courses in phonology so I guess I would be above average, though not an expert. :P Though I am a girl... I don't know if that would bother some people since I've heard a number of people describe Dovahzul as "deep and booming" which my feminine voice obviously is not! xDD Oh well....

Hmmm true that... canon words will be best to start BUT if we want to gone one step further and to accuratly speak / hear Dovahzul we need the other words too i believe ... thus my original idea for all 4000 words... with of course the same principles that exist in canon words! 

Either way.. i believe its best for educational reasons only(!) the lessons is a "must" for having this... in order for at least learn how to speak... now afterwards -as i said- if we want as a community to turn it up a notch a bit... other words (semi-canon / non-canon) have to follow up the same path of course!

Many words might change -again- to something else... or rephrase them or something ... but if we are talking about a vocabulary (and so many words) there isn't much logic to say that 600 words (which are canon) has pronunciations since they already exist and the others that as a community build to expand a fictional language up to a point to use it and of course be proud of it don't have a pronunciation!! 

I ain't say it wouldn't be hard or tricky but we try out to see what will have as a result ;D

I don't want to be hasty in all this (or) show off (or) anything that might be as a bad thing i just want to see this language gets expanded more and more ... plus expand it up to a point that all words will be usefull and can be use in writing AND speaking it / hearing it! :) 

Thats all 
With all do respect

Sandpiper

When I finish analyzing the phonology, I might be up to trying to record a few things. I don't know if it would technically count as canon because my phonology would only be a statistical analysis of the canon, not a written statement from the creators themselves. I've had some advanced courses in phonology so I guess I would be above average, though not an expert. :P Though I am a girl... I don't know if that would bother some people since I've heard a number of people describe Dovahzul as "deep and booming" which my feminine voice obviously is not! xDD Oh well....

I wouldn't be too concerned, the voice actors in-game play it pretty fast and loose with the phonology so I'd say you're the most qualified of any of us! Gender doesn't matter, in fact it would be great to show a range of voices speaking the language. After all, we're not dragons ourselves!

I wouldn't be too concerned, the voice actors in-game play it pretty fast and loose with the phonology so I'd say you're the most qualified of any of us! Gender doesn't matter, in fact it would be great to show a range of voices speaking the language. After all, we're not dragons ourselves!

I would be willing to voice some words, a wide range of genders and accents would be good to approximate words (since the game is rather loose on pronounciation in some cases).

It's true that the pronunciation seems pretty loose if you compare between voice actors; however, my theory is that each voice actor uses a distinct idiolect with real phonological rules which can be determined by analyzing allophony and possible neutralizations (I'm pretty sure I've discovered at least 2 allomorphs for dov already, at least with Paarthurnax's idiolect). Even when people speak total gibberish without instruction, they still abide by phonological rules because that's how our neurolinguistic systems work. Since Paarthurnax has the most Dovahzul dialog in the game (I think?), I'm using him as my model for analysis. Transcription takes a long time, though, so I've only done about 5 minutes of dialog. I have managed to discover what I believe to be the universal sonority scale for Dovahzul; it's similar to English but not exactly the same:

CONSONANTAL ----> SONORANT

Stops, Affricates -> Fricatives -> Nasals -> Flaps, Trills, Rhotics -> Non-rhotic Approximants -> Glides -> Vowels

The minimal distance is 3.

Syllable stucture is as follows:

(C-Adj)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C-Apx)

Adjuncts and appendices can ONLY be {+ant}. Possibly might be revised to {-son, +ant}.

All of these rules are consistent between voice actors and true of every canon Dovahzul word. My point being that even though pronunciation does seem to vary between voice actors, they actually aren't random and do adhere to a deep phonological structure like all other languages. :)

When I'm finished compiling all the transcriptions and write out the appropriate allophonic and neutralization rules, I'll be putting it in a separate post so everyone can contribute to and critique my work. Might be a little while before that happens though because it's super tedious work haha!

I believe Sandpiper ( lol the username xD ) you are more ... capable due to your field to understand how pronunciation works (at the official aka canon words at least) since we have already a recorded material (i guess) from inside the game ... 

And not only for word-per-word pronunciations but inside a full sentence (or) phrase (or) a complete dialog between two persons...

Thus we all await (anxiously - at least i do) for your work and analysis ;D

@ASTORKiT : Well the game i believe pronunciations and accent has to be derived from one person (for example Paarthurnax) so we can have one solid start to procceed .... Of course we ain't dragons ourselves but since accent is a bit heavy (it sounds like german to me  btw xD) i think accent is something controversial so i won't focused way to much in it! But someone that do knows the