Languages

Open the Old Arram translator - gloss between Old Arram and your site language, with a grammar reference and the full lexicon.

• The Tongues of Elshore Elshore's linguistic landscape is shaped by a single ancestral family, the Arram line, and one wholly alien interloper. Old Arram, the first naturally evolved language, gave rise to New Arram, the world's shared tongue, while the extinct Ati'inim branched independently from the same Proto-Arram root on a separate continent. Standing apart from all of these is Waihy, the Meir language, which arrived from off-world and shares no ancestor with any planetborn speech. New Arram is the common tongue all sapient peoples of Elshore hold in common, and it is written in the Arram Script, the engineered, block-form writing the empire manufactured so a shared tongue could spread quickly. Older still is the Ilso Script, the naturally evolved, flowing hand of the Iru in which Old Arram was set down. The Meir alone write in a wholly distinct system, the Waihy Glyphage.
• Old Arram Old Arram is the first naturally evolved language in the history of Elshore, arising from the continuous cultural development of the Iru. It served as the foundational grammar for all subsequent interspecies tongues, encoding philosophy, memory, emotion, and technical control across millennia. The language is now extinct as a living tongue but is preserved in ceremonial use by the Iru and as the core of Isist ritual language. Relics survive in honorifics, liturgy, and poetic formulas, especially among the Iru, Bar, and Annil.
• New Arram New Arram is the living lingua franca of Elshore, spoken by every sapient people on the planet. It emerged approximately 400 to 450 years before the present era as a physiological compromise between species with very different vocal anatomies, from Iru glottal precision to Annil sibilance and Meir harmonic resonance. Though structurally simplified, New Arram retains the philosophical and root-based integrity of Old Arram, and its words are still recognisably descended from the older tongue.
• Ilso Script Ilso is the naturally evolved writing system of the Iru, the oldest true script of Elshore and the one in which Old Arram was set down. Organic and flowing rather than ruled, it carries meaning in the shape of a stroke itself: the curl of a line or a mark set above a curve can bind a written word to a particular person, marking lineage and home. To many it is simply the old writing, the writing that meant writing. It survives on Iru-legacy inscriptions and on the sealed consoles of pre-Flight machines, unreadable to most in the present age.
• Arram Script The Arram Script is the engineered, block-form writing devised for New Arram. Where the Ilso Script grew slowly and organically among the Iru, the Arram Script was deliberately manufactured, its glyphs built from a small set of geometric forms, circles, crescents, triangles, and marked blocks, so that a shared tongue could be printed, stamped, and spread quickly across many peoples. It is the everyday script of the present age: imperial posters and terminals, ration cards and manifests, and the neon that flickers through the mist of Udhafa.
• Atinim Atinim, formally Ati'inim, meaning 'Speech of the Selves' or 'The People's Word', is an extinct language that evolved from Proto-Arram independently of Old Arram, among the Iru populations of the southern continent Khaldaara. Its most distinctive feature is the ati-ra address system, a prefix-based mechanism for marking the life-stage and social status of both speaker and addressee. The original Khaldaaran Iru speakers and their distinct culture are no longer extant, but key grammatical features of Atinim survive as borrowed elements in the speech of Erg communities of the Frozen Highlands.
• Waihy Waihy is the living language of the Meir, brought to Elshore with the Vaparium and maintained without compromise or borrowing from any planetborn tongue. It has no relation whatsoever to the Arram language family. Waihy is carried not in conventional audible sound but in low harmonic pulses, layered vibrational bands, and pressure-encoded resonance, a form of speech that is felt through bone conduction and cranial pressure gradients as much as it is heard. No planetborn species can learn or produce it in full.
• Voice and Hearing Speech in Elshore is an artifact of origin. The Iru evolved Arram, a harmonic and near-musical tongue, and the peoples they engineered (Maan, Bar, Erg, Annil) were imprinted with its phonetic scaffolding, producing the shared New-Arram. Each people hears and speaks differently, shaped by the body its makers gave it, so that every voice quietly reveals what it was made to be.