beltsquid:

mouwrost:

elvenartifact:

thegingercaptain:

alrnalexia:

alrnalexia:

dragons have lips

this isn’t a shitpost. in skyrim’s dragon language there are pairs of distinct words such as: ‘nid’ (no/none), ‘mid’ (loyal/loyalty), ‘mu’ (we) vs ‘nu’ (now), and ‘aan’ (an) vs ‘aam’ (to serve). this indicates that dragons are able to distinguish between the sounds ‘m’ and ‘n’. 

the only difference between ‘m’ and ‘n’ is that the latter is formed with the tongue, while the former is produced with the lips 

therefore, dragons have lips 

This is some solid linguistic field work and I look forward to the followup post.

I am not sure what to do with this information, but I too await any follow-on research

i knew exactly what i wanted to do with this information

I’m gonna kill the joke by being pedantic (that is a very lovely dragon drawing, however, and blue is a nice shade for them). Many animals have lips, but they aren’t used for vocalization.  In fact, most don’t.  Even if Skyrim dragons had lips, they probably wouldn’t be very useful for language.

However, I would posit not that Bethesda designed their dragons incorrectly with respect to their made-up dragon language, but rather that the OP has a rather anthropocentric idea of sound production and has not considered birds.

Dragons don’t have lips for speech, they probably have a syrinx–the organ that (most) birds use to produce sound, and in the case of parrots, mynahs, and crows, imitate human speech.

So dragons are just giant angry parrots? WHERE’S MY GILBERT GOTFRIED DRAGON