What language do they speak.

And how do you pronounce the names?

They speak dragon tongue, apparently.

Ok, thanks. I just read what a Draugr said and couldn't translate it using the words list on UESP.

By names, do you mean things like "Otar," "Volsung," and "Vokun," (all dragon priests) or something else?

Sorry, I just meant how to say 'Draugr'. I noticed my flaw after I posted, but I had to temporarily leave and I forgot to change it.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1268343-how-do-you-pronounce-draugr/

Ah good, that's how I've been saying it. Thanks.

That post however never reached a conclusion.

The "au" sound in Draugr is impossible to represent in English through text so you really have to hear it and the "g" is soft unlike the hard "g" of English. This whole topic makes me wonder if I should try to find a recording of the word or even record it myself to have an audio reference for people to listen to.

Granted it may well be that Bethesda does not intend to have the words said the same way in TES as in real life in Nordic countries despite the obvious inspiration from Nordic languages, for example you can listen to an NPC called Heimskr say his name in the game but he pronounces it completely wrong if we are aiming for a Nordic pronunciation.

Would be nice to get a confirmation from Bethesda on if they intended the words to have a completely new TES only pronunciation or if they intended them to be pronounced the same was as in most Nordic languages.

I'd be a big fan of that.

Me too.

Augh why did I say that, now I got to do it Got a pretty bad voice and despite being quite okay in English when it comes to spelling and in some cases grammar (if I say so myself), I'm horrible at speaking the language due to a lack of practice (oh and I woke up this morning with a bit of a cold too...).

Probably went over this text here (see inside spoiler) more than ten times and I'm still not happy with the end result but I guess I have to post it at some point, can't wait until my mouth catches up to my mind when it comes to English now can we. So here you go.

http://kiwi6.com/file/8rpwfyg4n9

Oh and please don't assume everyone here fails so horribly at English speech, it's just me and a handful of people like me

It says private.

Strange, I have it set to public and I even tested the link on another computer and it worked. I guess if there is something wrong with this link (granted there shouldn't be anything wrong with it) you can try this one, it opens the .mp3 up directly rather than having you listen to it on this site.

http://k003.kiwi6.com/hotlink/8rpwfyg4n9/draugr_pronunciation.mp3

Got it, thanks. Where are you from? You have an awesome voice.

Well, I'm from Iceland BTW thanks for the compliment but you're being too kind. I always cringe when I listen to myself on recordings :yuck:

If you heard my voice, you'd puke.

While this is the correct way to pronounce it in Icelandic, which has pretty much the same vowels as western Old Norse, it's not how it would be pronounced in eastern Old Norse (which was spoken in modern-day Denmark and Sweden, basically). In the eastern tongue the vowels representing "au" are a lot more similar to the English ones, so instead of how you pronounce it ("Dr?ugur", i would represent it as), my pronunciation would be more like "Drauger". Not saying your version is incorrect, obviously, just saying that it can be pronounced rather differently depending on which Norse dialect you're speaking.

True, it's really hard to even know which Nordic language sounds the most like it used to back a thousands years or so. I'm just going out on a limb here based on the fact that the Nordic language that has changed the least in the last 1000+ years in terms of spelling and grammar is Icelandic, so I'm also taking a wild guess that the speech has changed the least here too. Not to mention many of the words are written exactly as they were in Icelandic letter by letter.

I guess the only way to truly find out what they are basing their inspiration on is to hear it from whoever made those decisions in the first place our discussion here kinda falls into a pit all things considered as long as we don't know that.