On the Common Elven Tongues

The student who purchases a grammar of Common Elven commonly supposes that he has purchased instructions for speaking to Elves. He has purchased instructions for being understood, which is a substantial advantage, though a smaller one than the booksellers imply. No tribe speaks precisely the language of his tables. Several will recognise those tables as the work of a rival tribe, and one hospitable community corrected my pronunciation throughout a fortnight while assuring me that its own speech possessed no peculiarities whatever. I have since heard the same assurance from a professor whose vowels identify the very quarter of the capital in which he was badly educated. Common Elven is an agreement maintained among speakers whose ordinary habits differ; a grammar records the agreement with varying degrees of honesty.

The recorded history admits two principal stages, Early Common Elven and Modern Common Elven. Each designation embraces a considerable diversity of tribal speech, together with forms employed between tribes. The Modern descends from the Early through changes whose intermediate conditions survive in inscriptions and manuscripts. There was no assembly at which the Elves voted to shorten their grandmothers’ words, nor does the division indicate that every district altered its speech simultaneously. The conventional boundary is useful because a reader trained only in the Modern must acquire additional grammar to understand an Early text securely. Its exact position is the librarian’s convenience, and becomes a nuisance only when the librarian begins explaining history by reference to his shelves.

Elven writing is older than that of any other known people. The qualification known has repeatedly disappeared between my lectures and their appearance in the newspapers; I restore it here at no additional charge. Priority is established by the available objects and their circumstances of discovery, though it confers no immunity from the discovery of something older. The Elves themselves have often encouraged extravagant conclusions from a modest body of evidence, although their antiquity requires very little assistance. They were writing while the ancestors of several industrious modern archivists were leaving us chiefly broken utensils. Their surviving written inheritance nevertheless occupies less space than a Human ministry can fill during an energetic period of administrative confusion.

This apparent disproportion follows partly from what they chose to preserve. A boundary judgement, a marriage obligation or the authorised words of a lament might be committed to writing; the ordinary proceedings surrounding it frequently were not. Portable texts travelled with households, and damaged copies were replaced. Consequently, the age of a composition, the age of its surviving copy and the age of the spelling employed in that copy require separate investigation. We nevertheless possess sufficient material, distributed across the recorded history, to describe both stages with reasonable confidence. Our deficiencies concern such matters as domestic conversation, local pronunciation and the speech of particular generations. The absence of an account of breakfast scarcely warrants announcing that an entire century has been lost.

Early Common Elven presents the beginner with long, open-sounding words, abundant vowels and grammatical endings which remain comparatively easy to distinguish. Many syllables end in a vowel; consonant groups are restricted, although neither their scarcity nor their permissible forms are identical throughout the record. Nouns commonly carry endings indicating relations which Modern speakers express more often through separate words or construction. Verbs distinguish person and number with considerable explicitness, and several forms used in dependent statements have no exact Modern equivalent. These features give Early verse its familiar rolling movement. They also tempt amateurs to pronounce every inscription as though addressing the moon. A receipt for lamp oil deserves an intelligible reading, however agreeable the evening.

The apparent regularity of Early grammar owes something to editorial selection. Tribal forms differing in their endings were reduced, in inter-tribal use, to those most widely recognised; local vocabulary was avoided where a travelling audience might mistake it. This process produced a shared written and spoken practice without extinguishing the usages from which it drew. Certain surviving agreements actually give alternative forms in their margins, apparently for recitation before different assemblies. I take this as evidence of deliberate accommodation, though whether the accommodation originated with travelling singers, negotiators or some earlier association cannot presently be established. Professor Lorimer has assigned the achievement to a permanent council, furnishing that body with duties and a meeting place. He has been less generous in furnishing it with evidence.

Modern Common Elven has undergone extensive loss of unstressed vowels, contraction of adjacent syllables and alteration of consonants brought together by those losses. Its words are generally shorter, and their boundaries less obligingly advertise their grammatical relations. The opening consonant of a word may change under the influence of a preceding particle or a closely attached word. Such alterations follow recognisable patterns, though dialects disagree over their extent. A learner who memorises a noun in isolation may therefore fail to recognise it in the next sentence; I recommend learning short constructions from the outset. This advice has displeased teachers paid according to the number of paradigms their pupils can reproduce, a consequence which strengthens my willingness to repeat it.

The Modern language also makes greater use of fixed constructions where Early inflection permitted considerable freedom. Word order supplies distinctions formerly carried by endings, while small particles bear a burden quite disproportionate to their size. None of this constitutes decay. A meaning expressed by an ending can survive perfectly well in another arrangement, as anyone capable of moving his furniture ought to understand. There have been losses of distinctions, and there have been new distinctions acquired through usage. Certain Modern constructions distinguish reported information from a speaker’s own undertaking more neatly than the corresponding Early forms. I would be cautious about attributing this development to national character. Negotiations over grazing rights provide quite sufficient practical encouragement for precision concerning who has promised what.

The change in sound is striking enough that an Early hymn and a Modern conversation may initially seem unrelated. Set a sufficient number of ordinary words beside their predecessors, however, and the correspondences become systematic. An internal consonant weakened in one environment recurs in that condition across many words; a vanished vowel leaves predictable effects upon its neighbours. Such recurring relations permit us to distinguish inheritance from resemblance. They also reveal the danger of working exclusively from ceremonial recitation. A singer may preserve an Early ending while giving its consonants their Modern values. His performance is evidence for the history of the song’s transmission, but it cannot, without further examination, supply the pronunciation of its first audience.

Most Elves speak both stages with at least some fluency, though the phrase conceals very unequal accomplishments. Early Common remains active wherever inherited songs, poems and writings are preserved in their original language. A child may learn an old composition long before understanding its difficult constructions, and acquire the grammar later through explanation and further reading. Some adults converse readily in Early; others command the language within a substantial but restricted body of familiar works. I once accepted a celebrated reciter’s fluency as evidence that he could assist with an obscure agricultural dispute. He knew every word of nine lengthy laments and could make very little of a clause concerning drainage. The mistaken appointment was mine, and cost us an afternoon.

The customary resistance to translation helps maintain this knowledge. The received wording of an old poem belongs to its identity, and an Elven audience will often regard a Modern rendering as an explanation suitable for instruction rather than a performance of the work itself. This practice preserves grammatical forms which ordinary speech would otherwise abandon. It also preserves difficulties, ambiguities and occasional errors with admirable fidelity. When I proposed that a manifestly damaged line should be corrected in a public reading, its custodian asked whether I wished my conjecture to acquire the authority of the poet. I withdrew the proposal. I still print the conjecture in my edition, where its uncertainty can be stated and its merits examined without assistance from a fine singing voice.

Excellent memory contributes to continuity, but anyone treating an elderly Elf as an incorruptible archive should first ask two elderly Elves about the same meeting. I have done so. The disagreement concerned a phrase each had supposedly heard, and each remembered in a form suspiciously favourable to his present argument. Written evidence eventually showed that both had modernised its grammar. Long familiarity can make an alteration feel ancient, especially when a familiar text has been heard repeatedly in a later pronunciation. Living testimony is valuable because it permits questions which a manuscript cannot answer, though it must still be compared with independent testimony and contemporary writing. An elderly Elf who remembers my own youthful errors in detail is not thereby exempt from scrutiny of his other recollections, however satisfying he finds the exchange.

Across both stages, the tribal dialects form an intercommunicating field. Neighbouring usages overlap; distant ones are connected through intervening communities and through the shared forms of inter-tribal speech. Particular dialects can present formidable difficulties, especially in rapid conversation, but the recorded evidence does not establish separate descendant branches comparable to those of the Human, Dwarven or Aesir families. Local developments have continually circulated beyond their first speakers, while travel and deliberate accommodation have checked divergence elsewhere. Tribal movement matters here because speakers repeatedly encounter other speakers along customary routes. Movement alone explains little: a household could wander for centuries among people who spoke exactly as it did and receive no linguistic benefit from the exercise.

Common Elven is therefore artificial in the limited and perfectly respectable sense that speakers select among their available habits for a particular purpose. They suppress a narrowly local word, choose a widely understood ending or slow a pronunciation which has become excessively economical at home. Repeated choices acquire authority; teachers and copyists give them greater consistency. The resulting common form has never included everything shared by every dialect, an impossible requirement which would leave the speaker with painfully little to say. It favours a broad area of agreement and provides conventions for the remaining difficulties. Its authority rests chiefly upon continued acceptance: an assembly may reject a fashionable expression without possessing any means of preventing its children from using it.

Urban Elves now participate vigorously in this adjustment. Railway employment and telegraphic correspondence reward expressions understood beyond a single territory, while mixed households give local speech new combinations of influence. Some tribal critics call the resulting usage impoverished. I have heard that charge applied to a railway clerk whose Elven instructions were considerably clearer than the critic’s explanation of his own objection. There are genuine losses when a local distinction disappears, and they deserve recording; an unfamiliar expression also deserves examination before condemnation. The history already before us shows sustained alteration alongside sustained mutual understanding. Our task is to describe how the Elves have accomplished both, using dated texts, comparable speech and explicit evidence. Their achievement is sufficiently remarkable to endure an accurate account.