So I saw the derail going on in Lamora's newest fic's thread and decided to make a discussion where we can hash it out without being obnoxious. (Check out the story; what's there is amazing)

The main issue I can see is that the game-mechanics for Shouting makes no sense logically and can't be applied to fanfiction, yet the lore surrounding Tiber Septim makes it clear that reaching your full potential as a Dragonborn is basically a step into Godhood. These two ideas need to be merged into something logical so future stories don't sound retarded.

Here's my take:

The dragon tongue is not natural to the human vocal chords. If one were to speak entire paragraphs in their tongue, it would do as they commanded with no limitations, but it would also rip their throat to shreds. This damage can be repaired with some decent Restoration spells, but this would take time that isn't available to you in the heat of battle.

Minor Shout use would cause little to no irritation. Any irritation that did occur could be healed with mama's standard Resto spell. Thus, using them sparingly throughout battle would give someone an amazing edge, while still not making them so overpowered it is ridiculous.

Discuss, plox.

 

Another potential way to limit Shouts is mental fatigue. The Thu'um requires you to internalize and mimic a state of mind that is simply alien to mortal kind. It's definitely feasible that repeated use of it saps your ability to focus without a period of rest between uses. With this interpretation, the user could theoretically force themselves to repeatedly Shout, but doing so does significant psychological damage, up to and including strokes and/or brain death.

I rather like this particular interpretation, but I'm also partial to the self-sacrificial hero moments, and this interpretation of it leaves lots of room for that.

 

I personally would prefer a combination of the two. Something similar to the Words of Power Harry uses in the Denarian Lord. Those are taxing both physically and mentally, and so cannot be repeated again and again - even if you were the self-sacrificing type, eventually your focus would just collapse and you'd need to take a breather of a few minutes. It's essentially warping your mind, your voice and your perspective to that of a dragon, which also explains why it is easier for one with a dragon soul, in a sense.

 

It also explains why it takes normal people so long to master the Tongue. Most people can't understand how other people think differently, never mind completely different species.

 

When a human learns a new tongue, or as a child, acquires a mother tongue, he or she merely needs to learn how to control the muscles in their mouth, tongue and throat to replicate the sounds he or she is hearing. For example, if you hear an alveolar plosive (T [t] or D [d]), you need only learn to place the tip of your tongue on your alveolar ridge (that fleshy bump behind your teeth), stop all airflow ever so briefly, and then release it. In the case of a D-sound, you must simultaneously vibrate your vocal chords (which is why a T is said to be voiceless--no such vibration--whilst a D is said to be voiced). Very little of human speech really involves modulation of the vocal chords. That is to say, the difference between the seemingly high-pitched EE-sound in English ([ij]) and the seemingly low-pitched OH-sound ([ow]) has nothing to do with your vocal chords, only the position of your tongue in your mouth and the rounding of your lips. The human mouth contains nine places of articulation (from front to back): the lips (labial: p, b, m), the teeth (dental: th [θ], dh [ð]), the alveolar ridge (alveolar: t, d, n, l, r), the back of the alveolar ridge (post-alveolar: sh [ʃ], zh [ʒ] {measure}, ch [tʃ], j [dʒ] {judge}), the hard palate (palatal: y [j]), the soft palate (velar: k, g, ng [ŋ] {as in sewing, not finger}), the uvula (French and German R [ʁ]), the pharynx (pharyngial: no English equivalent, sounds like hocking a loogie), and the glottis (glottal: the beginning of any English word that starts with a vowel, and often heard as a British tt in butter {buh-'ah: [bʌ.ʔə]}). That's to say nothing of opening the nasal passages to produce Ms, Ns, Ñs (Spanish), and NGs; or, the three other methods of producing air-flow (some languages have sounds produced by closing and lowering the glottis to suck air in (called implosives), raising the closed glottis (ejectives), or the various clicks). The dragon mouth looks to me like it would have at the very least double the places of articulation that we have, if not triple (don't think size, but length--a dragon-sized human would still have the same nine places of articulation); and, since the dragon tongue is more serpentine, it will add an entirely new dimension to how air passes though strictures in those places of articulation. TBH, I'm rather surprised that there are any stops at all (P/B, T/D, K/G)--since dragon tongues look far too thin to be able to produce them; and, that the dragon tongue doesn't sound permanently L-ly (producing an L involves making a T and then allowing air to flow past the sides of your tongue, and that is essentially what all dragon sounds would be colored as.

On the other hand, when a parrot learns to mimic human speech, it doesn't have this luxury. Parrots don't have these places of articulation--at least, they don't have the same places as humans do. Therefore, it must listen to the sounds it hears and then modulate its own vocal chords to mimic those sounds. Parrots don't have lips, so they cannot make an M, P, or B-sound, but when you make those sounds, ultimately, you produce a sound frequency, and the parrot can modulate its vocal chords to produce that frequency, and thus mimic a sound that it physically does not have the ability to produce otherwise.

Spoiler

When Paarthurnax speaks to you in English, he's probably doing the same thing. No wonder he keeps slipping back into dragon-tongue every two or three words: it's got to be hard on his voice box!

The Chinese characters 中國人 (a Chinese person) is Romanized into Pinyin as zhōnggúorén, but this is only an approximation of the pronunciation using the Roman alphabet. Using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), we can show that in fact, the pronuncation is [tʂʊŋ˧˥.ku̯ɔ˧˧˥.ɻən˧˧˥]. The Japanese word for "rude" is 失礼, and is romanized in Kunrei-style as siturē and as shitsurei (or shitsurē) in Hepburn-style. Again, these are just Roman-alphabetical approximations of 失礼【しつれい】. IPA shows its pronunciation to be [ɕi.tsɯ.ɽe̞ː], and even then, [ɯ], the Japanese U is not as precise as it ought to be due to lip-compression of an otherwise un-rounded vowel).

Therefore, with regards to the tongue of the dragons: (1) we do not have the same places of articulation that a dragon has, so like a parrot must modulate its vocal chords to mimic sounds that it cannot otherwise articulate like we can, we too must modulate our own vocal chords to mimic sounds that a dragon can easily articulate; and (2) Romanizations like dovahkiin and fus ro dah are merely Roman-alphabet approximations of the actual sounds of the dragon tongue.

Thus, I have to agree with snarf on this. I see little to no reason for there to be any mental fatigue or such, but it does make sense that if you're making your vocal chords do weird shit they're not used to doing in order to produce sounds that no human produces (normally), it can fuck up your larynx something fierce. Also, you need dragon-souls, which probably recharge using your life-force or some shit.

 

My own personal interpretation is an mix of the two. To create the Thu'um, one has to do two different things at the same time - grasp the understanding of a concept (say, Force) deeper than most living things consider anything, something that takes so long that a man studying the Thu'um all his life might only master eight or so Shouts. Since each Shout is three words, let's say that you have time to understand twenty one concepts on a level that would allow you to Shout them in one lifetime. Assuming they don't have a Greybeards kindergarten, let's say they start at 17 or so, and devote the rest of their life to the study of the Voice.

Average life expectancy of 75 (optimistically, since I see the Greybeards living on the higher spectrum of Elder Scrolls healthy living, much like monks), minus 17
years is 58 years. Divide it by 21, and it's a little over two years per Word. And these guys do pretty much nothing else.

Consider modern learning. Around eight years in a higher education institution will get you a PhD, and bring you pretty much up to speed in one area of your field. It will get a Greybeard about one Shout. You college students, and I'm one of you, imagine if all your classes were erased, and replaced with one concept, the concept of Force.

To pass the 'class', you have to understand this concept so hard that you can produce it just by naming it. And did we mention part two? The name is a noise giant flying fire-breathing lizards make, and you have to scream that noise, all the while holding all the understanding of that concept in your head. Welcome to Shouting 101.

Maybe if you aren't in a hurry, you might be able to 'chain-shout', so to speak, healing your throat while you calmly pull up each entire spectrum of concept in your head and Shout it.

Could you do it while some hairy douchebag is trying to shorten you a foot with a battleaxe, arrows are whizzing above you, all your comrades are screaming and dying around you, and your heart is trying to pound its way out of your chest and all you're thinking about it how much you don't want to die?

Yeah. You go ahead and try to enter zen mode there, or even catch the breath you need.

Basically, unless you're a kung-fu master (IE, Greybeard) or you have the soul of a dragon and regularly tear hundreds of years of knowledge from the souls of immortal beings and devour it, you can forget about using Shouts anywhere outside of meditation, let alone in battle, or against a giant flying fire-breathing lizard who is Shouting at you in the same language and is also an apocalyptic god and also you are in Valhalla.

EDIT: Also, the dragon tongue itself doesn't warp the world around you. It's the fact that the dragon tongue is basically the base language of magic, and people who understand it can use it to fuck with reality without the aid of magicka. You remember Paarthurnax slipping in interludes of plain dragon tongue while talking with you, and nothing happened? That's because he was saying them, as opposed to Shouting them. You can compare it to knowing a programming language and speaking the root commands, as opposed to actually knowing where to input them into the computer and doing so.

 

The thing is, just speaking the words isn't enough. You can run around shouting "fus ro dah!" all day, and it wouldn't do anything. You need to force yourself into the mindset of a dov. The mind of a dragon is utterly alien to mortal kind, it's different on the most fundamental levels. In a real-world scenario, it would be roughly analogous to making yourself think like a shark. It would take decades of behavioral study and rigorous mental discipline to actually pull off.

Not to mention forcing your mind to do just about anything is rather taxing. If you want an example, spend an hour where you're only thought is "cupcake", and if you think anything else you gotta start over. Mental discipline on that scale is extremely difficult and takes quite a bit of practice.

That's actually what the dragon souls are for in-game. They let the dovahkiin completely bypass the need to manually learn the dragon mindset and just pushes it into his/her brain. You learn the words from the walls, then you learn the understanding from the dragon souls. Combine the two and you are able to use the Thu'um.

 

I kind of agree with Lamora's interpetation as to how long it takes a normal man to learn Thu'um Shouts. Consider Ulfric if you will. This is a bit of postulating mind you, but here we go:

Ulfric served in the Imperial Army during the Great War, trained with the Greybeards, sacked Markarth, was imprisoned, left to become Jarl after his father's death, and later on killed Toryag and started the civil war.

Seven major events in the guy's life, with only one Shout to his name.

Now, I'm assuming that he studied with the Greybeards after he returned from capitivity, around the same time the war was comin to a close. It makes sense, he was emotionally, mentally and physically broken, he makes a pilgrammage to High Hrothgar where he spends a couple of years training with the Greybeards, meditating, restoring his inner peace, learning the Way of the Voice, etc...

During those two years, the native revolt in Markarth occurs and Madanach takes over, killing out the local Nords. Maybe it's word from pilgrims or the guy who sends food up there that tells all this to Ulfric, but the guy decides that he can't stay while brother and sister Nords are getting killed and evicted. At the same time, he probably gets wind of the Talos ban (if he didn't already and it was just building up resentment in him during his time as a disciple). So he gathers followers, rallying them with a warcry of Skyrim for the Nords and what have you, and goes to Markarth and wages the campaign and takes Markarth using Fus Ro Dah.

After that he got arrested by the Thalmor and did his time in jail before going back to Winterhelm to become Jarl. He probably knew the Greybearsd wouldn't take him back, and with his time in prison and his more jaded attitudes, he probably understood and didn't want to go back.