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Originally posted by The Hooded One

Well met again, fellow scribes. Reefy, rest assured that I shall treasure my friend and great dungeon master Ed, who herewith speaks on the matter of the language of drow:


Faraer, Zandilar, et al: I believe that the language spoken by the drow of today is rooted in the elf tongue spoken by the drow before they ‘went under,’ but all that survives from the elvish they spoke then (which of course has continued to be spoken by other elf races, and hence developed in a different direction, changing more rapidly in the last few centuries than it ever did in earlier times, thanks to all the intermingling of elves with other races, and words being needed for new concepts and things as elves encountered genuinely new customs, industries, and so on) is a smattering of vocabulary and the grammatical structure that underpins it all.

Which as Zandilar correctly points out, is the aspect of all non-Common tongues in Faerûn most neglected thus far. Most of us haven’t the time to delve into full linguistic development, particularly as most publishers would regard promoting such a thing (as anything but a web enhancement) to be financial suicide. What most DMs and Realms fiction writers are looking for is a handful of useful, cool-sounding words or phrases to give flavour to the speech of nonhumans (like the orc guards the PCs are creeping up on, the elf courtiers they’re eavesdropping on, or the dragon they overhear). In many cases, these will be used mixed in with Common, just as many English speakers of today lard their speech with individual words or even phrases from Spanish or French.

The reasons the drow tongue now shares so little vocabulary with surface elven speech is threefold: the Underdark is a very different environment than the Realms Above, so new names and terms were urgently needed, while a lot of words were no longer in daily use and started to fade; there was a deliberate political attempt to distance the drow from the Hated Ones who’d spurned them (other elves), just as there’s a recent real-world American mood of anger against France re. the political disagreements over Iraq, with moves to change “french fries” to “freedom fries” and so on; and Lolth / Lloth (and her priestesses, under her command) saw controlling the very speech of the drow as a sure means to complete dominance over other faiths (both the “former faiths” of the surface elves, and the various other faiths, such as those of Vhaeraun, Ghaunadar, and later Eilistraee, that the drow had been dabbling in).

(snip)



So saith Ed. Who’s answered Faraer’s question very well, I think, though of course debates on drow language and everything else drow will continue to rage for years, alongside creative work on drow speech. All of which proves that most of us have too much idle time, but we sure know how to choose a superior way to fill it!
love to all,
THO

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Originally posted by Volo

Actually, it's the chief language of most of Faerun. Which is why I want to go about constructing it. Or expanding it, anyway. Although I'm not aware of any place where any part of it has been written down; it's simply translated into English in every text I've read.

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Ed
I made much of this up on the spot, because the Chondathan written language in my notes consists of only a few fragments (so there isn't much more than what's here to reveal to you).

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Originally posted by The Sage

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Originally posted by Jashan

Hrm. Not familiar with Chondath, although for some reason I'm thinking it's very far north. Is that a race or a region?

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Chondath is a region and Chondathan is a human ethnic group. And it's located in the south... south of the Inner Sea and just south of Turmish across the Vilhon Reach.

Major references to Chondath occur in the FRCS 1e, 2e and 3e, Old Empires, Vilhon Reach, Sea of Fallen Stars.

Vilhon Reach can be downloaded for free at WotC here:- http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downloads

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Originally posted by Jashan

Hrm. Not familiar with Chondath, although for some reason I'm thinking it's very far north. Is that a race or a region?

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Originally posted by Vangelor

I was looking for something of this sort just recently, and found a document in which some hardworking soul had compiled published snippets of elven words and phrases from the Forgotten Realms corpus, in spreadsheet form.

Googling just now, I have located the page where I found this again. Here is a link:

http://hometown.aol.com/semberholme/language.htm

Apparantly a lot of this material originated with Steven Schend. Perhaps the good elvenfolk of Semberhome can be persuaded to share a copy of this scroll with Candlekeep? It seems a worthy resource.

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Originally posted by ode904

I'm intrested too. If someone could kindly place a link here to those pages, which contain grammars of Elven or so on.

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