Sendings

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

JUNNISH
(all known humans of Junsland, both the “Caucasians” of the east and the “Asiatics” of the west – Kings of the Broken Wheel 8, Hidden Years 9.5-15, Shards, The Wild Hunt, WaveDancers, the early Rogue’s Curse episodes)
Dialects known:
• East (the Djunate and its successor states (such as Port Bane), as well as the other cities of the eastern shore – Hidden Years, Shards, The Wild Hunt, WaveDancers, early Rogue’s Curse)
• West (the Longriders, and also Dalan’s birth-tribe in South Junsland – The Wild Hunt: Mender’s Tale)

Though its history as an “advanced” language is relatively short, the speech itself (at the time of the Hidden Years and Shards stories) is old, having already existed in the period before Cutter’s Great Sleep (see the Little Patch story in Hidden Years 3). As the Kings and Hidden Years series make clear, Junnish is entirely different from Iceholtish, meaning that the Wolfriders, upon entering the New Land, had to relearn how to communicate with the five-fingers - a process started by Tyleet, their first and best Junnish-speaker. (See her open-sending to her tribemates in Hidden Years 14, as she passes her newfound knowledge to the others, bit by difficult bit.) Despite the basic differences between Junnish and elfin, the elves find themselves borrowing many words from these Tall Ones, a sign of the language’s strength as a means of expression; Junnish seems to be regarded by humans as the prince of Abodean languages, and the elves often find it easier to appropriate the Junslanders’ untranslated words than to create their own, so that such words as “tower” and “hound” are spoken phonetically. Junnish appears to have a cultural position on Abode very like that of German here on Earth: complex to foreigners, but an extremely precise verbal tool whose words often end up in other languages “as is”.

The early Rogue’s Curse stories, based in central Junsland some eighty years after Hidden Years/Shards (see the introduction to the episode from Second Elfquest 3), take place in the days before widespread human contacts across the oceans, so it’s fair to say that the Junnish speech is still current at that time. In the WaveDancers story (set some years afterward, and a few generations after Grohmul Djun’s lifetime), the use of “Woodstock” squiggle-marks to denote human dialogue (between Ardan Djarum and Bran Porak) indicates that their speech is foreign to their elfin prisoner Darshek (GN 16); so in this later period, too, Junnish remains distinct from elf-speech.

However, a revealing clue from The Rebels 6/GN 13 points to the probable extinction of Junnish as a living language, in the future times. (In this scene the crew of a Skyward spacecraft, policing the solar system, discusses what to do about a mysterious spaceship.)

An ENSIGN: Captain Junnard, we’re receiving a transmission. The encrypt indicates it’s from the hijacked stealth ship.
CAPTAIN HALM JUNNARD: On screen.
WATCHWARDEN THERA STEELE: Some kind of physical data… it’s all Junnish to me.

This obvious echo of our saying “It’s all Greek to me!” indicates that Junnish has fallen into a disuse so deep as to become proverbial; thus, despite its virtues, the language of the New Land has been superseded, along with other tongues, by the dominant speech of latter-day Iceholt, probably a modernized (and Junnish-influenced) form of elfin. If so, Junnish could be considered the “classical” language of Abode by its future-era denizens: a major contributor to modern language, but no longer extant itself.

A final word concerning the human influence on the elfin language

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