Sendings

The Languages of Abode
by Howard Yune ("Kir")

ELFIN
(all elves; all trolls, with Thuggop (New Blood) possibly the lone exception; the Hungtsho humans of Sunholt in New Blood and Fire-Eye; probably Iceholt humans in Rogue’s Curse, probably all humans and certain Neverending in Jink, The Rebels and FutureQuest)
Dialect groups known (some dialects are derived from older ones):
• Wolfrider - Go-Back - Plains Elf (Teir’s birth-tribe)
• High One (the earliest elfin dialect) - Glider
• WaveDancer
• troll
• Hungtsho
• Iceholt elfin (later Rogue’s Curse, from Second Elfquest 9 and following) – modern elfin (the future-era stories: Jink, The Rebels, FutureQuest)

Because elfin originated among the “Coneheads”, aliens who arose many galaxies away from Abode, the “spirit-talk” has the fewest linguistic affinities with the other, native tongues. Brought to the World of Two Moons by the High Ones - and to the Blue Mountain area (in West Iceholt) by the Gliders - elfin was adapted by the nearby humans of the Hoan G’Tay Sho tribe, originally as a “liturgical” speech removed from everyday life; it also became the “house language” of Winnowill’s human servants inside Blue Mountain, such as Kakuk. An example of this is shown in Elfquest 11, during the human ceremony honoring the arrival of new “bird spirits” (in fact Cutter’s tribe); here a shamaness speaks first in elfin, then in Iceholtish – perhaps to suit the needs of longtime worshipers and novices, respectively.

The Hoan G’Tay Sho brought knowledge of the speech with them as they migrated south to Sunholt (Siege at Blue Mountain 8), and elfin continued to hold a revered place in this human society. Over the ten thousand years that the transplanted nation evolved into the Hungtsho (the tribe encountered by Dart and his fellow adventurers in New Blood), the elf-talk slowly percolated into the larger human society, probably first among the ruling classes but eventually among the proletariat too. By the time of the New Blood’s adventures in the Forevergreen, the humans’ old, Iceholt-based speech was entirely lost, so that even those opposed to the elf-cult - notably the revolutionary Pei-Lar - could only express their hatred of elves, in the language of elves. This may be what the monarch Aramak means when he speaks to Windkin about his forefathers’ abandonment of “the old ways” (New Blood 19):

My father – and my father’s father – they worshiped your kind. They taught the people to worship your kind; and the people did, willingly. They gave up the old ways, for now we had Door; we had the spirit of the sky itself.

Not only has the old Iceholt-based speech faded away, but the tribe has even evolved an elfin-language writing system, alluded to in New Blood 35 (the final episode) when a town father of Port Passage reads from an ancient text, proclaiming the young Ahn-Lai the town’s new leader. So the evidence from the New Blood story suggests that:
1) Some knowledge of elfin had always existed among the Hungtsho elite, for the whole of the tribe’s 10,000 years in Sunholt; and that
2) Tribal knowledge of the spirit-talk increased, first in depth and later in breadth, under the influence of the Hungtsho elf-religion. In other words, the use of elfin was considered a spiritual imperative by many, and grew in popularity for this very reason.
3) Finally, by the time of New Blood, elfin had been the only Hungtsho language beyond recent human memory - in my opinion, for at least two hundred years and possibly as long as a thousand.

With the destruction of the Lost City of the Hungtsho - the center of royal power in Sunholt - the continent’s humans became dispersed. Although this point will remain uncertain until the “Final Quest” story is published, it is possible that some Hungtsho, having lost their homes and livelihoods in the Forevergreen Fire, migrated north to Iceholt; some of these settlers, then, could have been among the founders of Wayfair, the future world-capital. If these migrants had contact with the Wolfriders or Shuna (or both), the spirit-speech could have become a lingua franca for the new settlements, even among non-elfin-speakers. The language, which was likely a better communications tool than the native Iceholtish speech, would have stood a good chance of becoming universal, first across the continent (as may be the case in the later Rogue’s Curse era, circa “1850” in Earth terms) and later worldwide, as Iceholt, growing in power and prosperity, became the governing power for all Abode. As for the world of Rogue’s Curse, the issue of what language is used for elf-human conversation is probably settled by the appearance of the troll Flam in the “Lost Shard” sequence (Second Elfquest 22-26); since few if any trolls speak a second language – Thuggop, in the New Blood story, is the only troll heard speak to humans in their own speech - Flam’s presence is a strong hint that all three races (elf, troll, human) shown in this tale are speaking elfin.

A final word concerning the human influence on the elfin language

©Sendings 2000-2002. Content copyrighted by its original creators. Elfquest is a registered trademark of Warp Graphics, Inc.