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Faenaril

The Old Fairish Tongue

Copyright © 1999 C.E. by Dustin Jon Scott
[Last Update: June 6^th, 2018]

In the days when Humans had many different languages, the Faenaril tongue allowed the Elves to communicate with each other, to have a unity with one another that the Humans didn’t have. This sense of “unity” dissolved several thousand years ago when the common tongue began spreading and when the different races began mingling together. Today, most Elves, many Gnomes, Faeries, and Halflings, and a few Humans speak the Faenaril tongue as a second language. Only a few Elves and Halflings, particularly those that hide away together and shun the rest of society, speak Faenaril as a first language. There are still a few isolated pockets of Faerykin who speak Faenaril exclusively, but those are exceedingly rare.

Modern Faenaril, often called “Elvish”, is extremely formulaic in nature. Those who still speak Faenaril as a first language often complain that modern Faenaril is spoken “poorly” by most Elves. They claim that it has lost the fluid, poetic eloquence that once set it apart from the Human tongues. Even they, however, are at a loss as to how to remedy the situation, as they tend to know little more than one or two simple proverbs or sayings in ancient Faenaril and would have no idea who to apply it daily.

Presented here is modern “Elvish”, or Faenaril as it is spoken by the majority of modern Faenaril-speakers. Though it reputedly bears little resemblance to ancient Faenaril, this is the form that even most separatists have come to learn and speak.

As a side note, the so-called “Drow tongue” is said, by some, to be more in keeping with ancient Faenaril than modern Elvish is. Most speakers of modern Faenaril find this notion offensive, as the “Drow tongue” is reputed to be somewhat similar in structure to the common tongue.

Grammar

The grammar of modern Faenaril, though complex, is strict and rigid enough to make it easy to learn. It’s consistency makes for a communicative medium with very little room for error in interpretation. Parts of speech, plurals, and other modifiers are so clearly defined that context is seldom the sole indicator of a word’s meaning (although this is sometimes inevitable in any language).

Interestingly, those who’ve been able to study ancient Faenaril say that this is a relatively modern invention, and that grammatical rules were often broken in the ancient tongue to allow for smoother, more fluid speech. It may be that as the common tongue began to spread throughout the continent of Borea (and the rest of Gaia), the Faenaril tongue underwent many intentional revisions to differentiate itself further from the more ubiquitous Mannish language. Many would argue that this has damaged the integrity of the language itself, causing it to lose its historicity, and that modern Faenaril has, ironically, degraded into more of a “code” to be used in substitution for the common tongue than a whole language unto itself.

Initial Word Modifiers

When the same word has different parts of speech, they are distinguished by suffix. The __ or “root words” are almost never used in modern Faenaril, except when a suffix needs to be dropped in order to make a compound word, which will be discussed later (or in the case that a ___ is completely unambiguous, such as with numbers, most pronouns, adjectives such as the and of, or copular verbs, to name a few).