Eldren

The Eldritch language. Dumped from back of the book backmatter. Still not sure about putting vocabulary in too.

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.

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.

Color Modes

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.