Old Elvish

Old Elvish is the ancient language of the elves, dating back to long before the founding of the Ancoran Empire.

History

A unified language

According to legend, it was the language spoken by the very first elves, though legends vary widely on how these first elves came to be. At first, the elves were few in number, and Elvish was a secret language, spoken only among other elves and half elves, a part of a cultural identity that elves kept alive and distinct while travelling with larger tribes of humans and other shorter lived species. Under these conditions, its evolution was slow - an elf might go a century or more without speaking to another outside of their immediate family, making consistency in the language critical to maintain its usefulness, and stability came to be a prime ideal of their culture.
Generations passed, and eventually Elves became more common, and eventually began to split off into their own communities, seeking a life of stable relationships, apart from the humans who often went from birth to death in a mere 8 decades (less time than it takes for an elf to fully develop as an adult). Now their culture began to flourish and grow; fragments of stories passed mother to daughter, father to son through the ages were pieced together, though each community came to its own conclusions, filling in different gaps, resulting in a number of distinct legends of the distant past.

Drifting apart

As time passed on, Elven communities began to tackle the next source of instability in their lives: the powerful magic storms that rage across the surface of Irion. Several different solutions were found over the years. One community realized that the storms could not penetrate deep below the surface of the ocean, and eventually developed into the Sea Elves. Others developed powerful magical devices that could tap into the building energy of an impending storp to plane-shift an entire settlement to the Fey realm. And some pooled their resources and developed the first Anchor, inviting a wide variety of sapient peoples to join them in the new Ancoran Empire.
It is these differing solutions that led to the major splits in the language, altering to suit their new circumstances. The Sea Elves, for instance, found it difficult to make their voices carry, and over time, dramatically adjusted the phonemes used to more heavily emphasize those sounds that carry well in water, and remove those that fail to carry entirely. The elves of the Ancoran Empire had to expand their vocabulary greatly, as their settlements and territory grew, they found they needed both new words to convey new concepts and a means to convey those words over longer and longer distances. Their solution was an adaptation of a system of standardized marks on clay tablets that was adopted by the humans within a century of the empire's founding.
Today, Elvish has developed into four major dialects: Sea Elvish remains grammatically similar, but is phonetically unrecognizable, and has a vastly more complex array of terms useful for life underwater: names of sea creatures unheard of on the surface, specific terms for types of current that effect swimming, and more. Fey Elvish is spoken by the Elves who live in the plane-walking cities, having adopted many loan words from the languages spoken by the Fey. Ancoran Elvish is the language of Elves in the Sleeping Lands, and is the only form of Elvish to have developed writing. And finally, Old Elvish is still spoken by a number of smaller Elvish communities that still explore the Wildlands.