On the Supposed Language of Dragons

The belief that Dragons possess a magical language owes much of its survival to the difficulty of asking a Dragon a sensible question. Ask whether his ancestors spoke the words which raised the mountains, and he may assent because he remembers a song to that effect, because he enjoys your astonishment, or because he wishes you to leave. Professor Halbrecht obtained seven such affirmations and published them as independent testimony. I asked his most celebrated witness what he understood by raised. The Dragon supposed it meant that his ancestors had named the mountains. Halbrecht has since accused me of impoverishing the enquiry, although the mountains remain available for investigation.

The native communication of Dragons combines vocal sound with bodily movement and chemical secretions, each modifying the others. A low, interrupted rumble accompanies several quite different exchanges. With the throat folded and the shoulder spines depressed, it commonly solicits continued proximity; with an extended throat and a particular secretion from the mandibular glands, it warns against approach. Even these descriptions conceal qualifications of distance, familiarity and recent conduct. Townspeople who have lived for years beside Dragons distinguish many signals which our instruments have yet to separate, and I have found their judgements substantially more reliable than the elaborate transcriptions sold as Draconic grammars. Those transcriptions preserve the audible portion of an exchange and supply the missing sense from the compiler’s imagination.

At Merewick, a town with which several Dragons have allied themselves, I challenged the assertion of Senn, its go-between with those Dragons, that a particular crooning sound reassured Dragons newly arrived in the valley. I had heard it precede two violent encounters and said so with the confidence appropriate to a man possessing two observations. Senn invited me to attend a third. The resident female crooned; the newcomer relaxed until a shift in the wind carried her scent away, whereupon he withdrew to the far side of the valley. I asked her leave for a controlled repetition, which she granted on condition that I kept my distance, using a speaking trumpet and cloths she allowed me to press separately against her cheek glands. Sound alone drew attention. The scented cloth alone reduced withdrawal. Together they permitted an approach which neither reliably secured. My objection had been useful; my proposed explanation was wrong. Senn accepted the distinction with an expression I have encountered among technicians shortly before they become intolerable.

There was nothing magical in this result. An appointed mage detected no working during the exchanges, though such a negative finding cannot settle every conceivable claim. More decisively, altered air currents changed the response while leaving the sound intact, and washed cloths lost their efficacy. The evidence supports a material secretion borne upon the air, though its composition remains unknown. Nor do I claim that Dragons can never attach magic to an utterance: several practise magic as a learned art, and a spoken direction may accompany their work as readily as ours. What requires dismissal is the proposition that their ordinary cries constitute spells, or that correct pronunciation gives a Human authority over them. I prevented one visiting enthusiast from testing the latter doctrine upon a Dragon who had already warned him twice. His subsequent complaint alleged interference with research; I returned it with corrections.

Yet complexity alone does not establish language in the Human sense: we can formulate a denial concerning an absent person, describe an event which never occurred, and explain how it might have occurred differently. In native Draconic exchanges we have established finely discriminated communications concerning disposition, recognition, immediate intention and remembered associations; we have yet to demonstrate freely recombinable signs by which a Dragon conveys a novel proposition independently of the circumstances attending it. Their signals possess structure, but every attempted grammar has so far mistaken a catalogue of situations for rules of expression.

This limitation concerns the native system, and must be kept distinct from the capacities of its users. Their considerable vocal control permits Human speech; some Dragons employ our languages with formidable precision, including in arguments about their own behaviour. One Merewick resident explained a disputed inheritance to me more clearly than the solicitor engaged upon it. When I asked him to convey the same particulars to his companion without words, he eventually resorted to Caldric. That failure settles little by itself; taken with repeated trials, however, it supports the present conclusion: Dragons possess sophisticated natural communication and can acquire language. A magical ancestral tongue remains a claim awaiting evidence, however agreeably it may sound when growled.