Hi!
As I'm writing my land before time stories I've some questions about how you think the dinosaurs could talk.
Firstly about the "correctly wrong" way Petrie is talking. Do you thing it's okay to let him treat irregular verbs like they were regular ones? For example let him say "taked" instead of "took" or "speaked" insted of "spoke"? Does this sound funny or just stupid to you? Does it sound like Petrie would speak that way?
I realized in LBT 5 Ducky did just that ("Spike finded it!"), and I think there is some scene in which either Ducky or Petrie even "disfigures" a regular verb ("talkted" rather than "talked").
Most delicate is the matter of letting the dinosaurs express their "aversions" or their "displeasure" about something the pedagogically correct way, using neither offensive language, nor an unnaturally high speech level that doesn't suit the dinosaurs.
I've looked up some words about whose suitability I want to ask the native English speakers here.
If Cera is really annoyed about something, can you imagine her calling "Confound it!"? I think it is a somewhat dated expression about whose strongness I've no idea. During a students exchange I realized that "Damned!" seems to be much stronger in English than the German counterpart which I could imagine the LBT characters to use. If neither "Confound it!" nor "Damned!", or the softer version "Darn!" works out, is there anything else you could imagine Cera to say when she's really mad?
The next thing are direct offences to characters which of course mustn't be too serious for the LBT characters. In some special cases references to the offended characters kind in combination with some unflattering attributes ("smelly old eggstealers") will do, but sometimes a more general term seems to be necessary. I dug out the terms "scoundrel" and "rascal" from my dictionaries, but I don't know just how old fashioned and how serious these words are. Are they okay to use for LBT characters?
Finally there are some words which I suppose can be meant friendly as well as unfriendly, depending on the context and the way they are uttered. For example there is nothing offensive in saying that somebody is a nice "bloke", but can the very same word be meant offensive too?