LoreWeaver: ELVES OV ALYTH

ELVES OV ALYTH

Alyth, as the elves call it (or Alith, as the rest of the Known World spell it), is a Earth-sized planet drifting in space around a Sun and accompanied by two moons. The elves prefer to stay put in their secret out of the way places and practice their devotion to Thee Cosmology. They know that life is like this throughout the vastness of Space and that the less they interfere in the affairs of Mortals, the less likely they will have to move on again. Elves can see through The Dreaming, talk with The Ancestors and walk through the trees. Most folk of The Realms call the elves Valar, Val or 'gypsy' when they want to incite some rancor. All that is commonly known about the origin of the elves is what is written on The Stone:

THW VLVR sailed here upon the STRVGHT RVD long before the DRVGVN WVRS and the AVGV OV GVNTS

GVYDE TO ELVEN LANGVAGE

The Valar originally had no need for words as they were part of The Dreaming itself but when they arrived on Alith they found need to communicate with it's inhabitants through their methods of speech, sounds and writings. The elven alphabet contains no vowels and thus throughout history, the written and spoken words of The Conquerors has been at a loss for characters and prober phonemes required to speak the language of the elves. In short there is no proper translation for 'I' and 'U' in the elven tongue. 'V' is commonly used to represent this in The Writings. The long 'E' sound or 'ee', is also difficult to translate and is often replaced with a 'W'. Another missing phoneme is the 'F' that sounds like 'V' as in 'of'. Thvs we have wrytyngs svch as thys and the people ov Corwyn wyth theyr covncyl; Thw Eldar Thrw.

BEHYND THW CVRTAYN: When speaking the elven tongue, the 'A' sound is always long as in 'stave', and the 'E' is always soft as in 'ever' unless there are two (ee) and then it is long as in 'tree'. This is written out as a 'W' so 'thw' sounds like 'thee'. You can make the 'O' sound long or short and don't forget the 'V' sound when a word ends in 'f'. Try it, you'll be sounding like an elf in no time. Also, it works well when writing riddles to the players, to simulate a commoner's knowledge of the elven script, by writing it out funny with reverse capitals lYkE thYs oR THyS.

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