#if anyone knows a good diacritic mark that could cause “hag” to be pronounced as “haug” please let me know

[here-there-were-dragons]

The modern term, "dragon", does not in actuality derive from draconic common language* at all, but instead has it's roots in an archaic long-dead beastclan tongue.... 's misinterpretation of a word from the very earliest variants of earth flight's equally long-dead archaic tongue.

The ancient earth flight word, Dûnhag (Dune-haug, rolled slightly in a growly sort of way), the precise translation of which has long since been lost*, was the name of one of the earliest ancient breeds of dragon, and the first draconic civilization to emerge from within the cradle of greatwyrm's breach. in the very earliest days of interaction between the newborn dragonkind and the beastclan civilizations of the day this ancient breed's name was interpreted by the common languages of the beastclan societies who first encountered them (who's vocal cords were not precisely up to the task of imitating quite all of the sounds a giant growling predatory quadruped elemental death-lizard can make, much like many dragon breeds have their own sounds that other breeds find difficult to imitate themselves-for example ridgebacks' signature cetacean-like "zipper noises") as "Drohag" (Droe-haug), further misinterpreted not as the name of that breed (as intended) but instead a blanket term for all creatures of their general category of shape.

the ancient beastclan language in question quickly appended the suffix " 'an" (pronounced like a cross between the word "on" and the sound "ahn" , and roughly translating to something along the lines of "-people" or "-race") to this sound, resulting in Drohag'an. So when these first-contacted beastclan peoples went out to the rest of the world to tell them of these strange new Drogah'an people they had encountered, that was the name what would become dragonkind became known to them by.

In the early days of dragonkind, there was no agreed upon unified name for all among their kindred. The ancient breeds, as biologically and culturally separate and at odds as they were, saw eachother to be as fundamentally distinct from eachother as modern dragonkind sees themselves to be from beastclans. Each ancient breed an entire "dragonkind" unto their own-and "breed" in those days meaning something more akin to what users on the forum out-of-universe would call "subspecies" and "linebreaking terts". Gaolers to their own and Banescales to their own and Undertides to their own and so on, each of those names as all-encompassing a description of a class of being as "dragon" itself to their respective holders. to the ancients of the time, "gaoler" and "banescale" were not just names of breeds, but entire distinct species that shared no common nature. there was, in effect, no dragonkind, and therefore, no unified name. why would they need one? it would be like calling apes and elephants and dolphins and octopi the same, just because they're all intelligent.

Tens of thousands of years of history-the rise and fall of civilizations, creation and extinction of many breeds, the drifting of language and the death of nearly every one of these ancestor tongues that had come before-later, modern dragonkind began to view themselves less as disparate unrelated entities at fundamental odds and more as something of a shared clade, and eventually as one single species of many morphologies. Rather than use the existing name of one of the many breeds of the time, or make up and somehow collectively agree on (using "papyrus scrolls carried by trade caravans" levels of communication technology) a new word to describe themselves as a collective, they simply began, almost entirely unthinkingly out of pure simple casual convenience, to simply adopt the term-it's meaning long forgotten, it's origin in two long-dead languages of civilizations equally long-gone- the beastfolk often called them all as a category already- Dragon.

*modern draconic common language is a trade-tongue derived from the most dominant language spoken by the people of wind flight, spread out by their traveling traders and merchants in the early days of the beginnings of more shall we say cooperation and travel-friendly relations between flight societies, and adopted for convenience of trade by the many population centers they did business with.

*Some scholars have suggested the possibility that Dûnhag may have been an ancient name for the ancient genetic progenitor breed to what in modern times has become the Dusthide breed (the actual, in-universe, non-translated-to-english name of which is actually "Dûsaah'ad" or "Dûsaah'ad'a", which also does not originate from or have meaning in the modern dragon common tongue), meaning the modern words would share ancient roots with the origin of the word "dragon" itself. Other scholars dispute that just because two things sound similar doesn't mean they necessarily have anything to do with eachother.