Learn Dragorean

The Dragorean Language

In short, Dathzhad is the ancient language of dragons; at least, those created for and used within the lore of the Pick-n-Mix Comix universe and other stories created by Thomas Castle, such as Sorrows Of Blackwood and Solemn Graces. Also known as Dragorean, it's primarily spoken by dragons and the cultures they've affected within the universe, and has several work-in-progress (as of 11/23/2025) written forms.

Defining the terms on this page

APS: Akthorian Phonetic Standard. Within the lore of Dathzhad, or Dragorean, Akthorian Phonetic Standard is a romanization system for Dragorean based on the idea that, since it's been spoken by so many dragons for so much of history, cultures with “Latin” alphabets (in-universe, Regatrian) such as the people of the Kingdom of Inglenook would generally prefer to inscribe Dathzhad phrases using their native alphabet, rather than Dragorean's preexisting writing systems.

Akthorian Phonetic Standard, then, comes into play during the 2100s OE (the in-universe calendar era, Our Era, differentiated from our own although similar in some places). The Byrennian wizard Akthorian assembled the system from comparing a wide variety of different cultural spelling standards for romanized Dragorean, and attempted to present a median average of the most common spellings for Dragorean using the Regatrian (read: in-universe Latin) alphabet. The result is, APS; used for much of his writings with the fictitious in-universe entity he called the Dragorean Language Center, founded in 2156 OE.

DDS: Dragorean Diacritic Set. This was based on a mixture of Regatrian and Bonsaric (read: in-universe Latin and Cyrillic) characters to provide a pronunciation-based alternative to APS, mostly for usage on signs and pamphlets and the like. As opposed to the mark-less APS system, Dragorean Diacritics presents an alphabet of 38 characters to represent Dragorean's various phonological soundages; digraphs, trigraphs, consonants, vowels, and different versions of vowels based on length etc, represented either by unique characters or accented/diacritic-modified variations of characters

TS-APS: Tovoshok Syllabary, Akthorian Phonetic Standard. At some point, it was discovered by Akthorian and company that, historically-speaking, Dragorean wasn't always written with Regatrian, Bonsaric, or the well-known Mezhon runes; this is where the Tovoshok ksingirima comes in. The ksingirima are a system of several thousand individual characters designed to represent all possible syllabic constructions of Dragorean which match a CV or VC structure (where C is occasionally a digraph or trigraph in addition to a singular consonant). The system fell somewhat out of use in the 400s OE or so due to Regatrian invaders toward the Kingdom of Inglenook (what was then known as “Hothrian Terrishoth”, or “Hidden Land”, in Dathzhad), and the Regatrian attempts to erase all knowledge of and connection with the dragons and the Dragorean culture in general, but aspects of it survived in tablets and on memorial-stones across the universe beyond the Hothrian Terrishoth, which became the basis for understanding the ksingirima system in the 2100s.

Thus, TS-APS is a phonetic, Regatrian-based romanization system with no diacritics or unique characters and transfers the syllabic variations of Dathzhad present when using the Tovoshok system into a Regatrian-readable presentation.

TS-DDS: Tovoshok Syllabary, Dragorean Diacritic Set. It does the same for the Tovoshok syllabary that regular Dragorean Diacritic Set does for Dragorean words as rendered in Regatrian, Bonsaric, or Mezhon characters. It breaks down each syllable-based spelling and transliterates the extra sounds and characters pronounced when the ksingirima are used to provide a full romanization of the Tovoshok system as accurately in pronunciation as possible, using a mixture of Regatrian and Bonsaric, as well as diacritic-marked characters for vowel length and intonation.

Notes on Dragorean Diacritics & Pronunciation

As the Dragorean Diacritic Set was developed to aid in communicating pronunciation in the romanization of both Mezhon-written and ksingirima-written Dathzhad words, it must therefore be established before anything further what each character in the DDS system represents. There are a total of 38 characters representing 38 different phonemes, listed here alongside their Earth-based, IPA equivalents and common Latin/Regatrian depictions; all of these are used to represent the sounds communicated by Mezhon runes and ksingirima when using the Tovoshok syllabic alphabet for Dathzhad instead.

Dragorean Diacritics & IPA Phonemes

Notes, etc

Tovoshok Vs DDS

Note that, while the Tovoshok syllabic alphabet includes many more phonemes than just a simple 38 — including what would, in other alphabetical systems, be digraphs and trigraphs — the Dragorean Diacritic Set is limited to what characters can be taken from existing romanization-style sets of characters and represented as closely as possible to audiences which are familiar with those alphabets. Thus, the DDS system can't fully encompass every phoneme in the same way Tovoshok's ksingirima can, which would be a massive task, considering the list of ksingirima syllables number into the several thousand based on the different phonemic mixes and matches represented by the Tovoshok system overall.

The intent is to simplify and standardize the many different potential ways to romanize and transliterate native-written Dragorean words, but not necessarily to represent every possible sound and combination actually possible from the wide array of phonemes within the language itself.

Note on Ë

The letter Ë is a representation of the suffix from traditional Dragorean -ë, which turns verbs into agent nouns related to that verb, and is pronounced similar to the DDS letter Ā, representing a long A sound; however, despite the similarities, it's presented and considered a different letter. As in Akthorian Phonetic Standard and all other cases where this character appears, it only ever refers to this specific suffix with which it's practically one and the same; these usages stem from traditional, pre-APS and pre-DDS methods of writing Dragorean phrases and was one of the characters which have been grandfathered into 2100s OE-era systems due to its historical importance and the necessity of representing this crucial suffix, which can't easily be written in any other form or with a different spelling than it already is and still retain the same immediately-obvious meaning which it currently does.

As it is a suffix, the letter Ë only ever appears at the end of words which are modified by it — such as erimë, orrimë, mantë, and konë — and is not one of the 13 vowel-based phonemes represented in Tovoshok's ksingirima. In terms of the ksingirima system, the letter Ë appears as a separate syllabic character, affixed where the suffix would normally occur, as a completely-separate and individual character within the Tovoshok system altogether.

Note on H

The Latin/Regatrian letter H is not officially a “letter” in the Dragorean Diacritic Set, but rather, it's represented by an apostrophe to represent a sound — that of the voiceless glottal fricative — which is typically either underenunciated or overenunciated by Dragorean speakers, but depending on accent, not pronounced at all, and so isn't officially considered a valuable letter for these purposes.

The letter H is represented as a consonant alongside the others for listing and presentation in the ksingirima list, has its own Mezhon runes, and has traditionally been well-represented with Latin and Regatrian spellings of Dragorean words, such as hamaj, where the sound is present; Dragorean Diacritics, however, uses an apostrophe for the same sound.

This can occasionally make transliteration difficult if one doesn't know the pronunciation. The word kahr might appear to need the apostrophe used by DDS to represent the sound, but the usage of the letter H here is actually part of the APS digraph “ah” and is transcribed in DDS as kár.

DDS does not use an apostrophe in any other context (possessives are usually modified with a hyphen), nor do most other forms of written Dragorean, so the apostrophe when seen in DDS words is almost entirely going to represent this sound and no other lexemic meaning within the word in which it's being used.

Example Dragorean Phrases

Proper Nouns

Sentences & Constructions

Alphabetical Dragorean Wordlist

The following presents a collection of all known Dragorean words, regardless of word type or part of speech, in alphabetical order according to the Regatrian/”Latin” alphabet. It also organizes them into different columns based on what romanization system they come from, for ease of reference.

List of all currently-known Dragorean words (last updated: )