Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: The Elb are the aliens humanity became most acquainted with, not to mention ones that are fascinated by humanity. Unfortunately they are also rather strange… strange enough to become the basis for many mythological creatures in the past, like elves and some youkai. In this text, we look into the Elben languages, or rather the different forms of their lingua franca.
Though the spoken tongue of the Elb cannot be emulated by human beings, its written form is very much within our reach to learn. The writing system, referred to as Dendric by human scholars, comes in a variety of dialects and forms. For this coursebook, we will focus on explaining the forms. For the most part, once one knows one dialect of Dendric learning other dialects is a matter of learning the words. The deeper differences between the pronunciation of words between dialects are lost on us humans.
The three basic forms are:
♦ Lower Dendric
♦ Mind Dendric
♦ Soul Dendric
These are rough translations at the very least, especially in the case of the final one since the Elb do not have a concept equivalent to our human concept of the soul.
Lower Dendric is the simplest form, it is used by the lowlier Elb and is the form taught to children. By all means, the Lower form is poetic, making it the clearest of the three forms from a human perspective. Any Elben concept can be expressed in the Lower form, but it cannot be expressed in a “clever” or “beautiful” way, by the standards for these two words that exist in their culture. This form is the most linear and codified form. It is clear, without much room for “wordplay”. We will discuss the meaning of wordplay to the Elb in detail at a later time.
Mind Dendric is the “clever” way of writing Elben. Comparatively to the Lower form the Mind form generally lacks sentences. Mind Dendric is not meant to be read “out loud”. The form is meant only for writing with emphasis on creating expansive written networks similar in nature to mind-maps or semantic nets. The cleverness of the form comes from word plays one can construct by attaching additional information to words in a variety of ways and the forethought required to lay the whole structure out often on the fly. A single massive sentence in Mind Dendric is a way of very thoughtfully expressing a complex set of interwoven concepts. To the Elb it is the language of both their science and their philosophy, between which they do not make a distinction.
Soul Dendric is the “beautiful” way of writing Elben. It retains the sentence structure of the Lower form but adds a degree of wordplay and ambiguity to it. For its complexity Mind Dendric remains a very well structured written form. The Soul variant does away with this. When writing in the Soul form one does not use the sun thorn, forcing the reader to figure out which side of the text is which. Elben poets use this to write texts with multiple meanings that need to be interpreted by the reader. The Soul form is, in essence, the process of taking artistic licence with the grammatical rules of the language in order to challenge the reader with finding a meaning among the words. Recitation of Soul Dendric is performed, but it is always seen as the speaker giving their interpretation of the words.
A rare fourth form of the script exists, High Soul Dandric, this form is actually a merging of the Mind and Soul form but it is used exclusively as an even more intricate version of the Soul form. It uses the highly interconnected single sentence structure but combined with the disregard for proper grammar displayed by the Soul form. Out of the different forms, this one is used the least often and it a very difficult form to both write and read, even of Elb.
In this book, we will be focusing on the basics of the Lower form, which prepares you to deal with Lower Dendric and to an extent Mind Dendric. Soul Dendric remains a matter of experience, however.
Esoteric Musings... 