Eldren

The Eldritch language. Dumped from back of the book backmatter. You can view the existing vocabulary for Eldren here.

History

Like many of the languages of this setting, Eldritch was originally a conlang, created by the people who would become the Eldritch as a way to set themselves apart from the people they fled. It was constructed by non-linguists, using their conception of what would make a language difficult to learn, which for them involved agglutinating words, shifting the meaning of words based on their vocabulary, instating a formal grammar that differed from the 'vulgar' spoken commonly; and designing the words for maximum difficulty in pronunciation (for people who knew very few languages with unusual phonetic features).

Language tends to shift more quickly across generations, and the Eldritch have had very few of those since landing. Additionally, their populations are small and not breeding quickly. As a result, the language hasn’t undergone as much of the natural transformation that would have streamlined and broadened it into something more naturalistic.

Eldren in the Alliance

As part of the Veil and agreements with the Alliance, only five people outside the Eldritch may learn Eldren: one master trainer and one interpreter (both Seersa) and three military personnel. Laniis Baker is one of those who has been permitted to learn the language. Anyone else who picks up any of the language accidentally must not spread it.

Grammar

Word Formation and Pronunciation

Eldritch is an aggressively agglutinating language: if it can make a word longer by grafting things onto it to add meaning, it will, and if that makes it harder for non-native speakers to pronounce anything without stumbling, so much the better. It’s also fond of vowels, and almost inevitably if you see an Eldritch word with more than one adjacent vowel, they’re pronounced separately. There are also no “silent” vowels (so Galare is not ‘Gah lahr’, but ‘gah lah reh’ or ‘gah lah rey’ depending on your regional accent). There are some cases where I’ve misspelled things, or I’ve continued to write out diphthongs instead of using diacritics, but for the most part if you pronounce every single letter you see in an Eldritch word separately, you’ll probably be doing it right.

Plurals

In the vernacular, plurals are formed with adjectives ("one river, two river") or denoted with articles ("the river"). In the formal register, nouns are declined to derive their plurals.

Phonemes

• Accepted Consonants: p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, th, s, z, sh, jz, h, ch, m, n, l, r, y.
• Accepted Vowel Sounds: ah, au, ae, eh, ii, ih, oo, oh, uh

Color Modes

Color modes are used to shade meaning in words. According to Lisinthir Nase Galare, "so much insult could be given by changing a single syllable that it trained one to be careful with word choice." There are three pairs and one neutral modes, used to inflect word meanings by means of a prefix:

Mode	Prefix	Emphasis	Opposite	Description
gray	a	normal	none	the normal/neutral mode, and requires no modifiers. It has one, though, if one wants to be obvious about one’s neutrality.
silver	ei	hopeful	shadowed	the positive, hopeful shading, not as certain of itself as gold
shadowed	ie	negative, slightly	silver	gives negative (cynical, sarcastic, ironic, dreadful, foreboding, fearful, etc) connotations to words
gold	ue	joyful	black	the extreme positive end of the emotional spectrum, with the best assumed of everything
black	eu	dark	gold	gives violent, angry, dire, or morose connotations to words, and is the extreme negative end of the emotional spectrum
white	io	holy	crimson	refers to things of the spirit, of higher motives and holy powers, things that are ephemera; often used for mind powers
crimson	oi	sensual	white	gives a suggestive, vulgar, earthy, worldly, or concrete turn to words

In the spoken language, these moods are indicated with single-syllable prefixes; in the written, with colored ink. Color modes are carried into other formats, like music.

Formal vs. Informal Registers

Sometimes also called the 'church tongue', the formal mode of speech has more complex grammars, subject/object differentiation in pronouns (leading to the thou/thee/thine bits), and borrows heavily from the Latin system of cases. It's used for poetry, song, and moments of great lyricism, which is how it came to be associated with the church and other rites and rituals, as well as (among some people) romance.

The formal register was the only one developed by the people who would become the Eldritch, and was intended to be their only language... but it proved too cumbersome even for them, and the vernacular developed organically from it into their daily speech.

Special Words

ilil - an all-purpose interrogative that "apologizes for intrusion"... "It can mean 'may I' or 'pardon me' or 'please' or 'what do you mean' or 'will you help' or 'may I help' depending on the situation, and about a thousand other things.'

Written Language / Orthography

Eldren is written with standard Latin/English letters.
In hand-written communication (between Eldritch) they use cursive, disguising the fact that it is the Latin alphabet since even before the proto-Eldritch left Earth cursive was falling out of common use. They use dip pens with steel(?) nibs. During the Veil, when writing on tablets to members of the Alliance, they used Universal. The few Seersa who were taught Eldren were not given any written material, so they took any notes themselves, presumably in Universal (or being Seersa, the successor to the International Phonetic Alphabet?)
Now that the Veil has dropped, and after the events of Father's Honor, it can be assumed that cursive letter forms are going to be added into tablets as an option as Eldren is to be the language of the Naval Academy.

Relationship Terms

One of the most egregious points of failure in Eldren involves the vocabulary of family. The Eldritch didn’t think through the implications of their self-engineered longevity on fidelity and child-rearing. Even the first generation after landing, which lived about 500 years, wasn’t prepared for the issues that came up in families where the same couple might have children who are in completely different generations, and someone’s grandson might be older than their father’s brother. The problems were far more glaring than they were in humans, particularly amid the first generation which wasn’t yet having the fertility problems of later generations. The Eldritch had already generously decided they wanted to consider each generation a cohort, like a big ‘family’... which is where the custom of calling everyone in your generation ‘cousin’ comes from. But when they actually got down to the business of marrying, breeding, and rearing those future cohorts, they started running into age-related awkwardness. “One should like,” they said, “for one’s aunt to be both older and more worthy of deference due to her greater experience in life.”

Which is really what the Eldritch wanted. They wanted to use family relation labels as a shortcut for clarifying who is supposed to hush and listen to their elders, or betters. This is why Sediryl, who is genetically Liolesa’s cousin, decides eventually to call her ‘aunt': it’s an acknowledgment that Liolesa is due respect as an elder family member, no matter the actual genetic relationship.

Because it's useful to know who’s actually related to you or not, Eldritch use some modifiers, which is where we get things like ‘House-cousin,’ ‘near-cousin’, and ‘far-cousin.’ But even these are vague and poorly standardized. Prefacing a family-word with ‘House’ indicates you’re in the same House (a collection of families that have submitted to a single authority to which they are related either by blood or marriage, almost invariably a matriarch). ‘Near’- anything indicates blood-relation, and close consanguinity on top of that. ‘Far-cousin’ can mean either blood-relationship but distant consanguinity, or it can mean ‘member of the same generation’ or it can mean ‘person whose consanguinity I’m not sure of, except that we’re probably related.’ Plain ‘cousin’ could mean any of the above.

In plainest of terms, ‘aunt/uncle’ and ‘cousin’ are hazy terms more concerned with demarking generational divides, not with literal consanguinity. Unless, of course, it’s being used for the latter purpose.

Examples: Sediryl, Fassiana, and Liolesa

Having established that ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ are mostly generational terms of respect, we have to get to the ‘great-‘ appellation, which is a most often used as a marker of formality. Your aunt is someone you might see often and expect to have a personal relationship with. Your great-aunt, though, is someone of more power and position. Sediryl’s use of it for Fassiana, who is head of the northern branch of the Galare families, is a nod to Fassiana’s rank on top of the acknowledgment of Fassiana as coming from a prior generation. That later Sediryl decides to call Liolesa just ‘aunt’ is a form of intimacy.

One has to remember that geography plays a role in the perception of these relationships. Because traveling takes time on the Eldritch homeworld, it’s rare that someone might interact frequently with members of the older generation that are not part of the immediate family. Correspondence is popular, though, and this is where most of the ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ might find an opportunity to become more important role models and mentors to their younger family or House members.

The reverse is not always true, as an aside. Fassiana can call Sediryl ‘niece’ or ‘great-niece’ interchangeably. Some people might use ‘great-niece’ or ‘great-nephew’ as a way of putting the youngers in their place, but it’s rare. Personality in the case plays more of a part on whether the elder in the relationship observes the nuances.

Examples: Jahir and Sediryl

We learn in multiple novels that Jahir has been avoiding Sediryl because first-cousin marriages are considered anathema among the Eldritch… which gives one to wonder how they keep track, when the actual word can have so many meanings. Nevertheless, keeping track actually is important. The Eldritch population isn’t enormous, and the wealthy upper class is a slim minority of that already tiny number. In a culture without the technology to correct for genetic malformations, the stricture against close relations with close relations is practical. And the Eldritch do keep detailed family trees, and are obsessed with bloodline—within their immediate families. Most of them don’t care at all to track other Houses’ lineage with the same mania they do their own.

The stricture against cousin-marriage, then, is applied to cousins within the same House. Sediryl and Jahir’s problem, by Eldritch social standards, was not that they were first-cousins (though they are), but that they are both Galare, and worse, both from the western Galare families. Minimizing the complexity of genetic tracking to a simple tenet to marry outside your House keeps things easier—no need to look up the bloodlines—and helps maintain the alliances between politically like-minded Houses. One of the reasons there are any neutral Houses at all in the divide between Liolesa’s aggressive pro-outworld policies and Surela’s coterie of anti-Alliance Eldritch is that a neutral House can reasonably expect to entertain marriage proposals from both sides of the aisle; indeed, they must, and do their best to balance the number of attachments to each political group in order to keep from being perceived as a partisan. This is by no means easy, but by walking that line, they have access to a broader genepool… and because of that, it is a sad fact that the neutral Houses, on the whole, have more and healthier children. If Galare had not had secret access to reproductive technology, it might have eventually lost precedence as the ruling dynasty because of politically-induced inbreeding. That Galare’s enemies would also have crumbled would be little consolation, as the neutral Houses have spent so long avoiding any political temerity that they would be poorly positioned to save the species in the wake of the ‘extremists’ collapsing.

So, Sediryl and Jahir: both Galare, both from the same geographical area. The scandal is less the literal consanguinity and more the implied one (which in this case, correctly forecasts the genetic truth). Fortunately for them, they don’t have to worry about lack of modern gynecology/obstetrics.