Eldren

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

Most readers of this series will be familiar by now with some of the conventions of the Eldritch language; particularly that of shading words with colors meant to inflect their meanings. In the spoken language, these moods are indicated with single-syllable prefixes; in the written, with colored ink if people want to bother with them. (And as we learn in this text, the color modes are carried into other formats, like music.)

So, to refresh, the seven modes (three pairs, one neutral):

• Gold is the best of all worlds, and foil to Black’s violent, angry, dire, or morose connotations. This pair is the extreme emotional end of the spectrum, good and bad.
• Silver is the positive, hopeful shading, foil to Shadow mode, which gives negative (cynical, sarcastic, ironic, dreadful, foreboding, fearful, etc) connotations to words. If gray is in the middle of the spectrum, black and gold the ends, then shadow and silver are between them and the gray fulcrum.
• White is the mode for holy things; its foil is Crimson, for things of the body. (If you want to be technical, Eldritch illustrations put it on a perpendicular line from Gold/Black, with gray still in the center: white above, crimson below.)

I put a table here later when I take this giant paste-in of text and make it prettier:

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/ephemeral	crimson	refers to things of the spirit, of higher motives and holy powers, and often used for mind powers
crimson	oi	sensual/earthy/worldly	white	gives a suggestive, vulgar, earthy, or concrete turn to words

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.

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 has been several thousand years since then, though, and the language has only become more convoluted since, a reflection of its people’s needs.