(I tried writing SH and TH below with the actual dragon runes using square brackets, but for some reason this messed up the text of the entire post. Krosis.)

One thing that strikes me as odd with the Dragon alphabet is the spelling of the sounds /ʃ/ and /θ/. These are conventionally spelled with the digraphs sh and th in English, but the reason for this is primarily a “historical accident”. (In Old English /θ/ was written þ or ð, but these letters fell out of use with the advent of the printing press.)

The Dragon alphabet uses rune digraphs SH, TH for these sounds. Under the common assumption that the language has been largely unchanged since its creation, this makes no sense: why would these two sounds in particular be written with two runes each, instead of one?

One explanation might be that the sounds /ʃ/ and /θ/ were not part of the language when the runes were created. The spelling SH and TH might then suggest how these sounds arose: as variants of /s/ and /t/, respectively.

For /ʃ/, we might se indirect evidence of such an evolution in the word pair shul ‘sun’ and sul ‘day’. At the time of the creation of the runes, this would have been the same word *Sul ‘sun/day’ (the capital S represents the sound – probably /s/ – of the rune S at the time).

I have not been able to discover any evidence of a connection between /θ/ and /t/. However, related words such as su’um ‘breath’ and thu’um ‘voice’ indicates fluctuation between /s/ and /θ/. Assuming that /θ/ developed from /s/ just like /ʃ/, it is notable that this new sound did not use a spelling based on S – possibly because SH was already in use for /ʃ/. Assigning the new sound to the rune sequence TH might simply be a choice of convenience, /t/ being the closest related sound with an existing rune.

~Zul

Great question, Zul. For practical reasons, the alphabet has 34 runes, which come from the 25 alphabetical keys on the keyboard (excluding 'c') plus the numerals 1-9. A 35th rune is mapped to 0, which could have been a rune for /ʃ/ or /θ/ but ultimately doesn't appear in the final game or official material. So the short of it is, the dragon language's alphabet is limited to 35 characters due to keyboard constraints.

Unfortunately this explanation doesn't help much when thinking about the language internally.

Indeed. Yes, I can imagine that there would be some boring, primary-world explanation. ;-) It's still somewhat interesting that they chose to invent a rune for /ur/ which occurs in a total of three words, rather than one for /θ/ occurring in sixteen words. I imagine the ancient Nords would have been especially happy every time they had to write the word qethsegol.

Another explanation for the digraphs might be that one or both sounds were originally actual sound clusters, /sh/ /th/ (or /s^h/ /t^h/).

Well, surely Akatosh is above all mortal judgment. Who of us dares presume to know better than an eternal deity?

/sarcasm

'ir' and 'ur' are most definitely pure exoticism. I've always mentally chalked them up as grammatical endings in proto-Dovahzul, or something of the sort.

It's possible Bethesda invented the runes for 'ir' and 'ur' before creating the vocabulary, and didn't end up using them as much as they had planned.

From an internal perspective, a decent portion of the alphabet is dedicated to vowel or semi-vowel sounds, whereas X is the only rune that stands for a consonant cluster (/ks/). This makes sense given that vowels are more intrinsic to the language's primary functions - Shouting, and communicating over long distances.