Divathan
Ages ago, dragons were free and ruled the lands. One of the largest draconic empires was Divatha which controlled vast swaths of land in southern and middle Istervyn . Although Divatha's language has largely been lost to history along with most other information about the dragon's era of rule, Divathan was one of the most influential languages in the creation of modern Draconic. Modern Draconic borrows many of its more melodic sounds from Divathan as well as Divathan's tenses which communicate how long ago or how soon something has or will happen with much more granularity than the languages of those who live much shorter lives than dragons. Some common sounds of Divathan and modern languages of southern Istervyn overlap although whether this is coincidence or shreds of Divathan that have managed to survive in the area is uncertain.
Writing System
Divathan utilized a largely pictograph alphabet. Tenses were established with special characters that enclosed the statements they applied to within them.
Syntax
Divathan sentences were usually structured in the order of verb-subject-object. Occasionally when a sentence involved a particularly important individual the sentence was constructed in the subject-verb-object format. The most important person in the sentence was always portrayed as the subject.
Tenses
Divathan had nine different tenses:
- Deep Past--events that occurred before the speaker was born
- Far Past--events that occurred after the speaker was born but not within the last four hundred years
- Past--events that occurred after the speaker was born but not within the last one hundred years
- Recent Past--events that occurred after the speaker was born within the last one hundred years or less
- Present
- Soon Future--events that will occur while the speaker is alive within the next one hundred years or less
- Future--events that will occur while the speaker is born alive but not within the next one hundred years
- Far Future--events that will occur while the speaker is alive but not within the next four hundred years
- Deep Future--events that will occur after the speaker dies
The tenses are so interesting. I think you've written past instead of future for a couple of them. I love the idea of the deep past and the far past - makes sense for dragons.
Ops. It's fixed now, thank you for telling me about it. I had a lot of fun with the tenses and how they would be different with dragons' extended lifespan.