Eldritch
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):
Gray is the normal/neutral mode, and requires no modifiers. It has one, though, if one wants to stress one’s neutrality.
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 and black and gold the ends, then shadow and silver are between them and the gray center.
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.)
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 (thus, Araelis from the novel Rose Point is properly ‘ah rah EH lees’). 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’re probably 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.
Chatcaavan
On the other hand, the Chatcaavan tongue likes its consonants, dislikes agglutination, prefers its verbs separate from its nouns, and is littered with many other features that contribute to it sounding “choppier” than Eldritch does to the untrained ear. Where you see multiple vowels in Chatcaavan words (like the word ‘Chatcaava’ itself), they are intended to convey syllable stress, not phonetic differences: thus, chat CAA vah. (And the ‘ch’ is actually pronounced ‘sh’... sorry about that.) I have, for the most part, spared you this whenever the vowel sound is denoted by more than one letter. "Kauvauc" should properly be "Kauvauauc" but at some point one draws the line for readibility.
Lisinthir’s description of the reification of concepts in Chatcaavan is accurate. It’s also one of the most crucial distinctions previous ambassadors failed to grasp, through no fault of the Seersa who were sent to document the language; they didn't miss the linguistic differences, they just failed to map them accurately to the culture, which they were poorly prepared to grasp. This is one of the few times we see anything grafted onto nouns in Chatcaavan (that I know of). The difference between ‘treasure’ (the concrete thing a dragon hoards) and ‘Treasure’ (the abstract ideal, the platonic perfect ideal) is that the abstraction takes tense on the noun rather than the verb.
So, for the ideal:
Past-Beauty moves me > "Beauty moved me."
Future-Hope strengthens my fleet. > "Hope will strengthen my fleet."
Versus normal concrete nouns, taking the tense where English-speakers would put it, on the verb:
The wind buffeted me.
I will do that thing.
Or, to use the examples for the ideals:
Beauty moved me > A Chatcaavan named Beauty dragged me somewhere.
Hope will strengthen me > A weapon, or a ship, or a person named Hope will strengthen my fleet.
The idea there is that concepts exist throughout time, and all acts revolve around their permanence; while normal people and things do their time on stage and are gone. They don't get to exist forever. Titles, like abstractions, take tense on the noun. This is one of the reasons Chatcaava want them so badly; they imply immortality, significance. So here you can see the differences between a Chatcaavan named Knife and “the Knife”:
Knife pushed me. > A Chatcaavan named Knife shoved me around.
Past-Knife pushed me. > The Knife (the Chatcaavan wearing the title The Knife) pushed me around.
Universal and other Languages of the Exodus
There’s no discussing the languages of the Alliance without mentioning Universal, which is not just the lingua franca of the Alliance but the native tongue for those Pelted races that rejected the need to create their own language to sever themselves from their origins. Universal began as American English, with the Seersa as its stewards—but putting the Seersa in charge of any language project inevitably involves its expansion, since they are the Alliance’s premiere linguists. There are many, many loanwords into Universal from not just the Seersan tongue, but from all the languages the Seersa made for other Pelted races (including languages that were adopted and instantly abandoned, like the Glaseah’s). For the most part I’ve spared you those loanwords, save for the most common (like arii and alet)... but it is apparent to everyone in the Alliance that Universal is “sticky” and keeps rolling around in other cultures and coming back with new words clinging to it. This is one of its charms: it reflects the overarching Pelted culture, with its big tent philosophy.
Arii and alet, interestingly enough, are not loanwords from the Seersan tongue, but from Meredan, the Exodus language. This was a pidgin that began formation on Earth, where it was used by the Pelted (before they were called the Pelted) to communicate with each other without being understood by their owners. Meredan did not become a full language until after the Exodus, and its heyday was brief—it was spoken on-ship and then fell out of use in favor of Universal not long after the first settlements. The reason for that abandonment is still hotly debated today; you will find many academic dissertations on the topic if you browse a Pelted library in the historical linguistics section. The most popular theory is that its association with victimhood and powerlessness made it less popular than Universal, with its implication that the Pelted were free to use the language of their oppressors without fear of retribution. But no one’s sure why Meredan use dwindled, and to this day its study remains an eccentricity particular to scholars. The few words that have survived in the Universal lexicon are assumed by laymen to have been borrowed from Seersan.