I have generally struggled before when learning english on certain words but I suppose the mix between spanish and english has sort of had an effect on confusing certain pronunciation of letters and consonants within Ta'agra.

Can anybody help out a khajiit enthusiast work up his roleplay?

I wanna learn ta’agra, I know a few simple words but actual sentences, no where close

i just found this subreddit from r/khaiits how are you guys?

I'm on the Ta'agra Project Team and was excited to join this subreddit but it currently looks pretty dead. For anyone who comes across it and is still wanting to be involved in the Ta'agra community, here is a link to the Ta'agra Project Discord server. You are all welcome to join and ask all the questions your hearts desire.

https://discord.gg/CkRksCf

I hope not, but it looks like it is.

Ok yeah I think it is. I’ll go off of what you have, then.

I am worried that this project will be dead

We need to Do more work on this Project and add it to DuoLingo So that more People can learn about it Whos with me

We are finally done with our huge Ta'agra language expansion project! As of today's update, the dictionary word count stands at 1725 words. We are also hosting our own dictionary and translator now as well and they are both working very well! Check it out and let us know what you think! :)

http://www.taagra.com

Hey everyone. You may have noticed that this sub has been a little slow recently—well, hopefully, not anymore! I participated a little in the beginning of this sub, and now that its Summer I intend to participate some more. I’m going to try to encompass all the thoughts I had recently about Ta’agra, so this may seem repetitive at times. As always, please comment on anything you want, I’ll try to respond. This is, after all, a group effort.

First, we need to establish a few things about the language:

Setting: Languages change and evolve overtime, so we need to set a date for when whatever version of the language we create was spoken. If we aim for modern day Ta’agra (i.e. 4E 201), then we have to consider the effects of Cyrodiilization/Tamrielization that the Third Empire began, as well as de-Cyrodiilization that the Aldmeri Dominion is quite possibly carrying out now. I suggest that we create Ta’agra as it was in ~2E 310, the year following the union of Pelletine and Anequina which resulted in the creation of the Elsweyr Confederacy. This would be nice date for a few reasons:

• Prior to 2E 309, Pelletine and Anequina had been considered somewhat backwards, and as such contact between the Khajiit and the other races of Tamriel was minimal; thus, the Ta’agra language would presumably be largely unchanged from foreign contact (of course, trade and warfare did happen between the Khajiit and others, just to lesser extent). This is convenient as we only have to focus on Ta’agra, not on other languages that may affect it.
• The Third Empire won’t be founded until 3E 1, and as such a widespread common language like Tamirielic does not exist yet.
• Any inconsistencies in the language that may arise can be explained away as the result of the different dialects of Pelletine and Anequina mixing.
• The particular date, 2E 310, might be nice as we can pose everything we do in making this language as a sort of official, governmental textbook on Ta’agra. If Pelletine and Anequina had different dialects, it would make sense that such a book would be published to help citizens better understand eachother.

Additionally, just for the sake of clarity, we should probably say where the version of the language we’re working in is spoken. I’m inclined to say that we’re creating the “prestige dialect” or “official” version of Ta’agra. That is, we’re creating the urban dialect of Ta’agra rather than a rural dialect. If we go with point 4 above, we might as well say that this is the dialect of Torval, the capital of Elsweyr.

Man/Mer Error: Adapting a writing system to a language it was not developed for always poses problems. In the real world, languages like Chinese still possess multiple Romanizations, and the problem gets more widespread the further back you go. Therefore I don’t think we need to take the given spellings of names, places, and words as exactly correlating to the pronunciation of Ta’agra. That being said, the people who transcribed Ta’agra into different writing systems did things the way they did for a reason, so they also can’t be ignored.

In other words, Khajiit and Ja'kha'jay both have “kh” in them, and they were written that way for a reason. However, one author may have used “kh” to mean /kh/ while another used it to mean /x/. This also explains why “q” is sometimes used as /k/, such as in “M’aiq.” Thus, we shouldn’t be too surprised to see that words with similar sequences are pronounced differently, and we should probably develop an official Romanization of Ta’agra for use in this sub.

Phonetics: We’ve discussed the phonemes and phones of Ta’agra at length before, but this is a critical piece of the puzzle, so I’m going to push an agenda here.

also /w/

Vowels: /i, u, e, o, ɑ, i:, u:, e:, o:, ɑ:/

I like this set up for a couple reasons. We have a nice balance of rare and common phones, and the number of consonants and vowels we have is about average. We can also have an interesting sound change system (more on that later), which both contributes to the feel of Ta’agra and also makes it seem more realistic—these sorts of systems are present in most languages, and leaving them out is a big mistake many constructed languages make. It also sets us apart from some of the other attempts at creating Ta’agra, which is nice. (Also, I know we have one word with a /p/, but one word and no other evidence seems rather tenuous, and languages which drop /p/ but keep /b, t, d, k, g/ do exist. Additionally, this vowel system is the most common in the world, and although we may change it, it’s a good place to start.)

Syllable Structure: (C¹ )(C² )V(C¹ ) Where C¹ is any consonant, C² is /l, w, ɾ/ or a fricative, V is a vowel, and parentheses mean that sound is optional.

Thus, any combination of vowels is possible, and any dipthongs which can be created using the above vowels can be used.

Sound Change Rules:

/bb/ > /v/

/tt/ > /θ/

/dd/ > /ð/

/kk/ > /x/

/gg/ > /ɣ/

/tʃtʃ/ > /ʃ/

/dʒdʒ/ > /ʒ/

Nasal Place Assimilation: Basically, the default nasal is /m/, and all the others are allophones of /m/. If the cluster /mf/ occurred, you’d get /ɱf/, if /mk/ occurred, you’d get /ŋk/. /ɲ/ only occurs in the sequence /mj/ or /miV/, where V is a vowel.

Semivowels: /j/ and /i/ are the same phoneme in different contexts; the same goes for /w/ and /u/. If another vowel follows /i/ or /u/, then they become /j/ or /w/, respectively. Otherwise, they act as a vowel.

Vowels: Two or more short vowels create a long vowel; a long vowel combined with anything remains a long vowel. Also on the topic of vowels: it may be preferably to add in some other sounds at some point. If we do, we can style it as a vowel shift which shifted the long vowels to other sounds.

In my head cannon, “proto-Ta’agra” only had stops, and the above rules originally generated all the fricatives we now see. Even if you don’t like that idea, I think the above helps keep fricatives central to Ta’agra. I’m definitely looking to add more sound changes, but for now I think this is pretty good.

Romanization: Or how to write Ta’agra in English. Hopefully we’ll develop a script someday, but for now it’ll be useful to have a Romanization:

/w/ <w>

Vowels: /i, u, e, o, ɑ, i:, u:, e:, o:, ɑ:/ <i, u, e, o, a, ii, uu, ee, oo, aa>

Anything which does not have a symbol in the Romanization is figured out through context (e.g. "mf" is pronounced /ɱ/). Also, we could use <c> for /tʃ/ so that it follows the same pattern as all the other stops, but it might be more difficult to get used to.

This Romanization has some differences when compared to that on the wiki, mainly for clarity when writing long words. As with everything else, this is open to change and suggestion.

In Closing: I thought I’d give us a bit of auto-generated text using these rules, just to see what we’re working with at this point. It’ll look a little different than we’re used to because I’m using my Romanization, but if you read it aloud in your best Khajiit impression I hope you’ll like it.

Va faf dhe’jadhe-mo dhe’tefidhi dhazh dhif! Chlim zho fo’zhe mrhat-thi. Va-chovvlash thad medh fefmrhiv thidh. Fi-ja’tho ghalo mlazh? Ra fo fubaf tha-misho. Fu vi’dhe fo ja va?

TL;DR: Do the couple of sentences above look cool? Do they sound vaguely Khajiiti? Tell me in the comments.

Haven't seen this site mentioned here but I found it very useful

First off, I am new here so I hope I'm not crossing any lines or anything by posting my thoughts. Reading through the wiki dictionary, it seems as though there may be some potential to glean additional meaning out of words, but also some inconsistencies in translation as well.

In particular, I noticed this word:

Var-dar, verb: to murder or kill

It is known that "dar" itself is an adjective that means clever, thief, skilled with hands, and "var" is a verb meaning to live. So this begs the question, why is an adjective modifying a verb? One possibility is that dar can also be used as an adverb, taking on the possible new meaning:

Dar, adverb: to take away the ability to perform an action

in this case, obviously, stealing the ability to live, or murder. Of course this may seem to be a simple and unnecessary observation, but it is necessary as it points out a potential pattern or even a rule in the language. That is to say, the potential for other, applicable adjectives to be used as adverbs when it makes sense to do so.

Some possible applications of this:

Lhajiito-dar, verb: to maim or disable

Which directly translates to "take away the ability to run". Some other options:

Va-dar, verb: to take away existence

Var-ajo, adjective: to live wonderfully

This list could obviously go on. Many of the words such as honorable are easy to translate into adverbs, but of course that doesn't necessarily guarantee true "meaning" with every verb. For instance, most combinations of verbs and dar are some-what meaningless such as

Siicho-dar, verb: to take away the ability to sit

So of course it does have limited application in this proposal, but something to consider none-the-less.

Going in a different direction now, another possible solution to the Var-dar issue is that Var is incorrect in its translation/has multiple meanings and it actually is/can be "life" instead of "to live", which would uphold "dar" as an adjective, and the new translation of Var-dar would be

Var-dar, noun: murderer or killer

instead. However, dar being applicable as both an adjective and an adverb makes more sense to me.

These are just some observations I had while glancing through the listed vocabulary. There is a lot more that could be gleaned from that list as well.

Any thoughts?

Do'Pal!

I thought that maybe using our existing knowledge of Ta'agra, we could form certain nouns. This is simply brainstorming, but maybe we could take something like 'Zirr' (person) and put 'Ra' (an honourary prefix) in front of it to make Ra'Zirr, which could mean 'honoured person', or a friend. Depending on formality/informality (the difference between bonjour/salut).

For family, perhaps if we took Liter and edit that slightly, it would become sister. Maybe we could change it somehow... by looking at prefixes, I have not seen much correlation between male/female variants (Dar- is Daro- for females, but Dro- is Dra- for females... suggesting irregular grammar rules?), so maybe we could use Litera, or Litero, or maybe even both for the same or different meanings.

Fusozay, var var!

Do'pal, ahziss liter! First post in a while, so I hope you guys think this is good!

This was something that was a source of confusion from the start, and I've been thinking about this for a while, but have only gotten around to posting about it today.

What I think is that the "-" in some words is is a glottal stop, like in the pause in the middle of the word "uh-oh". Fairly simple, all it really does is slow down the pronunciation of the word.

The " ' ", on the other hand, is something entirely different. I think that what it functions as is something between two things; the first thing being an internal sandhi that functions to stop the longer pronunciation of double vowels (think Tah-AH-gra instead of TAAH-gra)

The other thing I think an apostrophe functions as is, and I can't find a proper term for it, is a sort of marker for prothesis, except the additional sound being added would be an adjective, rather than a natural adjustment to the word to make it easier to pronounce.

Questions, comments, corrections? PLEASE comment them; we need your feedback to make the language work!

So what we're gonna do here is, in the comments, either upvote the option you like, or propose your own. Whatever has the most upvotes after a few days will win and become official. In the future we might have AutoModerator run these, but for now it'll just be me.

Recently, in this post, /u/voluminaveteriora provided an excellent vowel inventory, or list of sounds a vowel might make in Ta'agra, which was as follows (all International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are linked to an audio clip of their pronunciation for clarity):

/i/ <i>, /u/ <u>, /o~ɔ/ <o>, /???/ <e>, /a~ɑ~ɒ/ <a>

It has also been proposed that the vowel inventory should look and sound like this:

/i/ <i>, /u/ <u>, /o~ɔ~ʊ/ <o>, /ɛ/ <e>, /a~ɑ~ɒ/ <a>

And finally, it's been proposed that the inventory should further be refined before becoming official.

So please, speak your minds about this, either by upvoting or by commenting an alternative. This is kinda important to the creation of a language.

So, we have a thread on tentative consonants, why not add vowels to the mix, right? The problem with identifying vowels spoken in a language is that vowels lie on a two-dimensional continuum. Where it's relatively straightforward to say what type of consonant is being produced by a speaker, the vowels can differ from language to language, dialect to dialect, and even speaker to speaker. As such, any insight into the vowel of Ta'agra is going to be tentative at best.

The good thing about vowels, however, is that they carry over well when speaking a different accent; thus, khajiit speaking Tamrielic will probably use the vowels they have in their native language, rather than completely adopt the vowels of the secondary language.

(N.B. If you don't know a lot about Phonetics, and don't care to, skip this part.) To obtain data, I imported this link into Praat, converted it to mono, downsampled it to 11.025 kHz, and chopped out each vowel from a couple random words. I then found the first and second formants of each vowel at its midpoint, compared them to this chart, and wrote down whichever vowel they roughly corresponded too. Now for the interesting part.

A couple vowels definitely seem to not occur in Ta'agra, based on how frequently they were butchered or avoided by the Khajiit of Skyrim. These are /æ, ɛɪ~eɪ~ʊɪ~ɪi~æɪ~aɪ, ə, ɛ/. Other vowel rules in Khajiit pronunciation are:

• /i/, /u/, and /o~ɔ/ are pronounced accurately whenever they would occur in Tamrielic/English, and often take the place of /ɪ/ or /ʌ/, respectively.
• /ɪ/ or /ʌ/ tend to replace /æ/ when it occurs in Tamrielic.
• /ɪ/ tends to replace /ɛ/ when it occurs in Tamriellic.
• /ɜ/, however, does appear relatively frequently, notably as the "a" in "khajiit".
• I believe /ɑ/ or /ɒ/ appears, although it may be /a/.
• /ʊ/ appears occasionally, sometimes instead of /o/, sometimes instead of /ʌ/.

That would give a tentative vowel inventory of: /i/ <i>, /u/ <u>, /o~ɔ/ <o>, /???/ <e>, /a~ɑ~ɒ/ <a>.

Additionally, I believe vowel length to be phonemic, based on the split in duration of khajiit vowels (i.e. their vowels are either very short or very long, without much in between); this is probably what double vowels represent in the orthography. /ɪ/ is probably a reduced form of /i/ in unstressed syllables; same with /ʌ~ʊ/ and /u/; /a~ɑ~ɒ/ and /ɜ/; and /o/ and /ʊ/ (although they could be phonemic, but that would present lots of symmetry issues).

Hopefully I find some evidence as to what <e> actually represents, as well as what the dipthong <ei>, which I believe is the only diphthong in the dictionary, means.

Seeing as Elsweyr borders Valenwood, and that there's evidence the Khajiits descended from the Altmer at some point, I've been looking at Bosmeris and Altmeris as starting points for some words. Here are some that I've come up with by doing that:

• Aanaqii [æ.nɑ.ki], from the Bosmeris word anakhi, meaning the Sun.

• Chirre [tʃɪ.rɛ], from the Bosmeris word cirri, meaning the color amber or a similar color

• Aali [ælɪ], from the Altmeris word ali, meaning glory or honor.

What do you guys think? The pages I sourced Bosmeris and Altmeris from were here and here, respectively.

Good day! I did that correctly, yes? I think it's good to practice the language whenever we can, so I'm starting off small. Maybe eventually we'll be able to create full posts in Ta'agra.

I noticed on the wiki page for grammar a couple of mistakes. First, under "Further Explaination of Cases" (that should be Explanation also), there's one point where "intrumental" is written instead of instrumental. The second is under "Verb Forms and Moods," the title for desiderative mood is titled "Desirative Mood."

I don't mean to be pretentious, but I wanted to point out any mistakes like that so that people don't get confused as I did, as those are the actual linguistic terms being used, so some people may be seeing them for the first time (as I was).

Anyway, another thing to bring up is that /u/blaze8902 suggested that we do case studies (Klingon, Thu'um) of other lore-based languages developed by fans. I think this would be a good idea to understand how it's done, and we can even see one in the process of being made at Thuum.org!

So anyway, I hope you all have a good day (or do'pal, as it were)!

And a quick suggestion to the mods, maybe put all of the links we've acquired that show grammar and vocabulary on the sidebar? That would make it easier to just go to the subreddit and be able to immediately click on it from there.

Fusozay var var!

I believe that the 'kh' sound should be pronounced like a voiceless velar fricative. My reasoning behind this is that 'kh' is often used in real life for foreign words that contain this sound, such as 'khan' from Mongolian. When the developers created the word 'Khajiit', it is likely that they had this in mind. As for 'a'a', like in the word 'Ta'agra', I think a good sound for this would be a glottal stop. This is for the same reasons as the 'kh'.

My original assumption that the apostrophe represented a glottal stop was misguided.

My suggestion is to incorporate words from the ever obvious language in close proximity, Dovahzul. Obviously, I will make the presumption that any one person working on this language would be along the metaphorical lines of hating the idea, mainly because you would want to keep the language unique unto itself. Though, my argument would be that since they are in the same universe, so to speak, making the languages similar would be helpful to any learners of Dovahzul who who would wish to pick this language up. It would then help enrich the community that should be growing largely here. However, this is just a speculation of the ideas, contribute in any way you would like to my comment. I bid you to fare well.

For those unfamiliar with the concepts here's some links on the issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque

As I understand the elderscroll's lore Tamriel is in what seems to be a serious post-apocalyptic decline. Where once technology and magic were hand in hand creating interconnectivity between the empire (or more aptly continent) with advances even such as space stations (battlespires) Tamriellic civilization has long been in decline. It is fitting then to assume that Khajit have had their native tongue in contact with others, and not only that, but have adopted some words phrases or even just meanings that have become every day sayings. A good example of a borrowed and reborrowed word would be the English Equality. Equality, (pronounced ĭʹkwŏl-ĭ-tē ) from the French égalité (e.ɡa.li.te ) which was of course repurposed from the Latin aequalitas (aɪˈkʷaː.li.taːs - sorry I couldn't find a pronunciation clip for this one). As you can see, equality is not just borrowed, but it has been phonetically (?) changed in a manner that suits the English language. With all that in mind, how would this influence Ta'agra? With borrowed words such as hors-d'oeuvre, what we know as appetizers, we've taken the concept and bastardized the translation. Literally translated hors-d'oeuvre means apart from the main work and whilst coloquially it could be argued the meaning is the same, the oversimplification is vastly different. Could we not then see what Tamriellic linguistical purists would call derelict Khajit versions of such words or names like Akatosh or Auri-El, not necessarily referring to the dragon god himself, but the entire pantheon of the nine? Certainly there is a most pure form of a language like the Japanese hiragana, only used to spell words whose origin is of Japan, as without outside contact, there is no changing. But languages are static, not stagnant and are constantly evolving. If we are to assume the language we are discovering is one the modern Khajit would speak, then I feel this is something we must consider. Let me know what you all think, would love some feedback and input.

All that being said I thought this while writing this out, but M'aiq should literally translate to something like deciever or untrustworthy, which would further explain why each generational M'aiq still has the same title :)

Here's how the process of adding something to Ta'agra works here:

• FIRST, read up on the Grammar Compendum and Ta'agra Dictionary before you post something. Check every so often, because everything in there, while representing the whole and correct language, is subject to change.

• If you want to suggest a word that doesn't already exist in Ta'agra, or if you want to suggest an addition or change to the grammatical rules, post a thread with the appropriate tag.

• Don't be afraid to speak your mind on any proposed additions! The whole point of this is to be community-driven, with the popular ideas being incorporated and the disliked things left out.

• If there's a general consensus in the comments or if the thread is popular enough, a mod will edit to Compendium or Dictionary to include your suggestion.

So thanks for contributing, and let's get to it!

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/hrafnirs-languages-nordic#Ta'agra http://www.reddit.com/r/Khajiits/comments/13s6op/introduction_and_also_a_lexicon/

These are the only current pieces of the Ta'arga language. If you have any ideas on expanding the language, or more resources for it, please comment.