Dinosaur con-lang

Let it be said that I listen to commenters! When a linguist and a dinosaur-nut both told me to write a dinosaur con-lang, I couldn’t say no!

So first of all, what sort of sounds did dinosaurs make? It turns out there’s been some real science done to answer that question, and it turns out (non-avian) dinosaurs probably didn’t have a voice-box  (a larynx, or, in birds, a syrinx). In other words, dinosaurs had no vowels.

That leaves dinosaurs with plenty of consonants, however, from the hiss to the bellow to the growl, croak, and cough as well as drumming, clicking, rattling, and booming. Hadrosaurs had more complex vocal apparatus in the form of their noses, some of which were pretty spectacular. Then you have your whip-cracking Brontosaurus and so forth, but I’m going to keep things restricted to a non-specific “dinosaur,” so we have no special physical adaptations to producing sound except, say, stomping.

That leaves us with a phonology a little something like this

= hiss (sustained, un-constricted airflow)

~ growl (sustained, constricted airflow)

H cough (ejective, un-constricted)

X croak (ejective, constricted)

C click (made with beak or teeth)

N snort (ejective, nasal)

M sustained snort

(V, W) rough snorts (hadrosaurs only)

> diminishing volume

< increasing volume

_ stomp

Syllable nucleus is formed by a sustained sound of variable duration and volume, which may be proceeded or followed by ejectives.

Ex:

X=>C (Croak, diminishing hiss, click) “Threat”

~~~< (V. long increasing growl) “Food”

N=< (snort, hiss) “Disgust”

MM>H (long,  sustained, diminishing snort, growl) “Sleep”

Sentences are constructed as “prey” (object) followed by “teeth” (verb) followed by a “head” (subject), sometimes followed by a “tail” (modifiers).

Ex:

~ ~~~< M_ N=< ~~< ~~

gloss: (Tyrannosaurus food plant disgust Triceratops. Tyrannosaur food Triceratops)

loose translation: “I do not eat plants because they are for you. I eat you.”

Words to live by indeed, assuming that I am a tyrannosaurus.