Archaic Wood Elven language

Archaic High Elven was the stage of the Wood Elven language spoken between 1300 BEKE and 700 BEKE. During this period of time, the foundations of the Wood Elven literature were laid down, the first written records made their appearance, and the first divergences between dialects appeared as well.

Archaic Wood Elven is not only the first Elven language to have written records written by native speakers, but also the first Elven language to have dialects.

While it may not have boosted as a large collection of famous literary works or famous poets as it's successor Classical Wood Elven, the era in which Archaic Wood Elven was spoken was still an important era for Wood Elven literature, as both early music and works focused on Wood Elven mythology flourished in that era, and their legacy continued to live on, inspiring many poets during the Classical era.

Consonants

 * Assibilation: the clusters become . This happens before any of the consonant shifts described below.
 * Partial depalatalization: the palatal consonants dissimilated to  clusters. The retroflex series  merged with the plain alveolar series . This shift happened before all other sound shifts mentioned below. Nevertheless, the palato-velar series  was preserved fully intact.
 * Deaspiration: the aspirated lost their aspiration, merging with plain.
 * Loss of
 * Post-consonantal is vocalized to, just as  to . This only happened when the consonant before } didn't constitute the coda of a preceding syllable, such as in word-initial consonant clusters.
 * Syllable-coda vocalized to, unless it was following a diphthong (in which case it became silent)
 * Every other instance of (syllable onset) merged with
 * Reduction in the distribution of
 * Coda-position is lost altogether
 * Post-consonantal is vocalized to, such as  to . This only happened when the consonant before } didn't constitute the coda of a preceding syllable, such as in word-initial consonant clusters.
 * Phonotactical simplifications:
 * The language makes all complex consonant clusters illegal, limiting it only to, where V stands for vowel, C for consonant, G for glide (semivowel). Any consonant cluster that consists of more than two consonants gets broken up by an epithentic schwa inserted between the last and second last consonant in the cluster, such as  →.
 * Only semivowels, nasals and voiceless stops are allowed in the syllable coda. Every other coda consonant was augmented by an epithentic schwa and then migrated to the onset of the following syllable.

Consonants
While the Archaic Wood Elven consonant system was rather simplistic, it nevertheless is unique for preserving all 3 velar series of the Proto-Elven language, the plain velar, labio-velar and palato-velar series. Other traits setting it apart from other Elven languages is the deaspiration of aspirated stops instead of fricatization, lack of full depalatalization (instead of depalatalization, there was dissimilation to consonant + clusters), full shift of  to  or, and overall simplified syllable systems.


 * It is important to note that the Archaic Wood Elven sibilants were apico-alveolar  - in sound halfway between the lamino-alvolear  and postalveolar  (but closer to the latter in my opinion).
 * The rhotic phoneme was apico-alveolar too,.
 * In the successor language, Classical Wood Elven, the apico-alveolar sibilants got fronted to a denti-alveolar position. The shift may have happened already at a later stage of Archaic Wood Elven, as the Old Etrandish - which was previously transcribed as it was  by Wood Elven authors - was being transcribed as  from 800 BEKE. Others however are more skeptical about this, and believe that the shift of  from apico-alveolar  to denti-alveolar  was in essence a process of dissimilation - retraction to  in a palatal(izing) environment (before  and ), fronting to  in every other environment - this shift however only happened in Classical Wood Elven, although some dialects could have already made the sound shift before the 700 BEKE.

Northern dialects merged the labio-velar with the bilabial. This divide between Northern and Southern/Central dialects remained even in Classical Wood Elven, when all dialects turned into, and  delabiliazed to  in mainstream speech. This is the reason why the name of the Wood Elven / Orcish general - whose name was originally pronunced - was transcribed as Thorm'fa by High Elven scribes and chroniclers.

Vowels
The Archaic Wood Elven vowel system have have consisted of only six vowel phonemes with no vowel length distinction (unlike the Proto-Human and Archaic High Elven), but it has preserved most of the distinctions Proto-Elven had - instead of merging the Proto-Elven with, Archaic Wood Elven diphthongized them to. The Proto-Elven schwa was also preserved too in Archaic Wood Elven (but it wasn't distinguished from  in writing), even though later varieties merged it to.

The vowels may or may not have had fronted allophones  after the glide. There isn't much evidence for it - other than the still-existing vowel harmony of versus, Proto-Elven heritage, and  being allophone of  after  and palatalized consonants in Contemporary Wood Elven -, and even if it was true, this feature was lost in Classical Wood Elven, where focus was put mostly in the palatalization of consonants rather than vowels.

Grammar
Archaic Wood Elven was a flexible subject-object-verb and agglunative language. It has also preserved the vowel harmony of its ancestor Proto-Elven in grammar, having most (but not all) conjugations come with two variants, depending on what kind of vowel did the Proto-Elven root word end with.

Nouns
The various cases had the following functions:
 * The nominative case usually marks the subject of the sentence.
 * The genitive case marks ownership. For example, "yaubyoan piomyanyo" means "(the) male elf's manliness".
 * The dative case usualy marks indirect objects, similar to the use of English "to" and "for"
 * the accusative case usually marks direct objects, ones that are being directly targeted.
 * The locative case is used in conjunction with various suffixes, in itself it has no meaning at all.

Verbs

 * The infinitive is marked by -iri, just like Present Simple.
 * Adding an extra -i at the end turns the verb perfect. An example:
 * "seppiri" means "to make someone/something beautiful". It is in Present Simple.
 * "seppigyo" is the same verb, but in Future Simple instead. For example, "you will make her beautiful".
 * "seppigyoi" is the same verb, but in Future Perfect instead. For example, "you will have made her beautiful".

The present simple also has a secondary role - being used for ordering. For example, in Archaic Wood Elven, there was no distinction between stating that someone is doing something and ordering someone to do something. The difference between stating facts and ordering/commanding is indicated by context and tone of voice.

Adjectives
Adjectives had three forms in Archaic Wood Elven:
 * Normal adjective: -ani / -yani
 * Comparitive adjective: -anori / -yaneri
 * Superlative adjective: -anogi / -yanyogi

Adverbs
Adverbs had three forms in Archaic Wood Elven:
 * Normal adverb: -ann / -yann
 * Comparitive adverb: -ainn / -yainn
 * Superlative adverb: -auga / -yauga

Inclusive or vs Exclusive or
Archaic Wood Elven - and by extension, all of its descendant languages - distinguish between the "inclusive or" and the "exclusive or". The earlier means, "either A, B, or both of them", while the latter means "either A or B, but not both of them - never both of them".
 * The word for the inclusive or is
 * The word for the exclusive or is

Numerical system
Archaic Wood Elven used a hexadecimal system.

Numbers larger than 16 would be formed by chaining up multiple numbers and adding a postfix. Numbers larger than 16 and smaller than 256 are divided into two numbers that are smaller or equal to 16. Numbers larger than 256 but smaller than 65536 are divided into two numbers that are both smaller than or equal to 256. Similiar segmentation goes on with numbers larger than 65536 but smaller than 4294967296, or numbers larger than 4294967296.

Numbers from 0 to 16

 * 0: myoi
 * 1: au
 * 2: pau
 * 3: gwon
 * 4: nai
 * 5: tsai
 * 6: zoi
 * 7: goi
 * 8: tepi
 * 9: rougau (greater 1)
 * 10: roupau (greater 2)
 * 11: rougwon (greater 3)
 * 12: rounai (greater 4)
 * 13: routsai (greater 5)
 * 14: rouzoi (greater 6)
 * 15: rougoi (greater 7)
 * 16: routepi (greater 8)

Numerical postfixes

 * hexadecimal up: -apa / -yapa
 * Used to separate the upper and lower segments of a hexadecimal number larger than 16 but smaller than 256. For example, "auapa-au" - "1 up 1" - is the hexadecimal number 0x11, equivalent to the decimal 17. Logic and consistency would suggest that 16 (or 0x10) be said as "auapa" - "1 up", but it is actually said as "routepi" - 16. The reason for that is that the concept of zero was discovered by the Proto-Elves roughly at the same time as they transitioned from octal to hexadecimal, and the use of the number carried over.
 * double: -ipi
 * Used to separate the upper and lower segments of a hexadecimal number larger than 256 but smaller than 65536 - both segments being numbers smaller than or equal to 256. For example, "auapa auipi auapa ai" - "1 up 1 double 1 up 1" - is the hexadecimal number 0x1111, equivalent to the decimal 4369. Both segments are 0x11, and the usage of the word "double" combines them into one number: 0x1111.
 * quad: -kwotu / -kyotu
 * Used to separate the upper and lower segments of a hexadecimal number larger than 65536 but smaller than 4294967296 - both segments being smaller than or equal to 65536. For example, "auapa auipi auapa aukwotu auapa auipi auapa au" - "1 up 1 double 1 up 1 quad 1 up 1 double 1 up 1" - is the hexadecimal number 0x11111111, equivalent to the decimal 286331153.
 * octa:-eiti
 * Used to combine the upper and lower segments of a hexadecimal number larger than 4294967296 but smaller than the second power of 4294967296. Used similarly to quad and double, with both segments being smaller than 4294967296.
 * negative: -niu
 * Used to postfix a negative number. For example, '"auapa au" - "1 up 1" - is the equivalent to the decimal 17, while '"auapa auniu" - "1 up 1 negative" - is the equivalent to the decimal -17.
 * Ordinator: -izi
 * Turns a cardinal number into an ordinal number. For example, "au" means "one", while "auizi" means "first".
 * Radix point: tuwi
 * Literally means "full", it separates the integral part of a number from the fractional part. For example, "au tuwi routepi" means 0x1.F, equivalent to the decimal 1.9375.