On the seven thousand steps leading to the monastery there are several inscriptions that tell the story of the war with the dragons when you activate them. But if you walk up to the inscription there is some actual writing that is fairly visible, and I know for sure it isn't the Latin alphabet being used, and I don't think it's draconic either. If anything, I would say it looks most like the Daedric alphabet, but that wouldn't be very fitting.

Is this the "runic transcription of nordic speech" that Ysgramor created? (Sorry I can't seem to find any images of the emblems..)


On a related note: why would Ysgramor, who was quite possibly a high ranking member of the dragon cult, develop a new writing system, having the dragon one?

I imagine that dragon priests would be able to read dragon script, but whether or not the common Nord could read that script is another story. That's almost certainly true in the Fourth Era, and probably true in the Merethic. Ysgramor probably provided his people with literacy in such a way that he and his peers still retained their spiritual power over them because, while they could read messages written between each other, they still needed the dragon priests to translate the important spiritual stuff.

If the tablets lining the way to High Hrothgar are meant for public consumption (and considering their placement, they'd better be), then they would have to be written in a language that modern Nords could understand. Dragon script it's not, then. Considering Imperialization, it might be the same language that's prolific in all the other provinces of the empire, but considering that the Graybeards are a living link to a past that predates the empire by millennia (and considered extremely important to the Nord identity for that very reason), it's more likely that the language is still traditional Nordic (unless the majority of Nords no longer read the traditional script; I don't know of any evidence one way or the other).

Here, took a screen of the tablet in question: http://imgur.com/Fxvn3

It doesn't quite look Daedric to me, but you're right that it doesn't quite look like the dragon language either. I would guess that they are archaic Nordic runes.

As for why Ysgramor would develop a new writing system, that's easy. It was for his followers who lacked talons and dewclaws with which to write.

I myself like to imagine that when we talk to rural nords, for example, we are actually speaking in traditional nordic, and in the cities we speak in Cyrodiilic. But I don't think Cyrodiilic would completely replace the native language in every shpere of society.

@Jiub, thanks, for the pic. And yes, now that I put some thought into it, the whole lack of talons thing seems to be a good explanation, although dragon language has always reminded me of cuneiform writing.