Book of Visions

The Book of Visions is a collection of texts sacred to the Church of Titanius. There was no single canonical Book of Visions until 832, but various individual scrolls, oral traditions and inscriptions, which were all compiled into a single huge book in 832.

The Book of Visions is highly diverse in types of content: it contains Church laws, historical narratives, lessons, prophecies, poetry and epistles. In addition to being a holy book - the single greatest source of inspiration for the church -, the Book of Visions also had a heavy impact and influence on secular literature - a good deal of (now clichéd) tropes that would appear in later secular literature first made an appearence in the Book of Visions, and some of the stories within the book happen to be love stories and shaped Froturnish, Etrandish and Artaburran perceptions of love, especially for writers.

Even though the book was written by many authors, it is widely believed that the message itself - which was recorded by the writers - was sent by Titanius himself, as those most of those literate people who have had the fortune to read the Book of Visions consider it the single best book that exists, filled with the most epic stories one could ask for.

Language
The language of the Book of Visions was halfway between Archaic High Elven and Classical High Elven: the language was mostly Classical (stop + non-sibilant fricative clusters already coalesced into aspirated stops, schwa already merged with short /a/, etc.), but the fricatives /ɸ θ xʷ~ʍ/ were still distinct, rather than merged as /f/, as evidenced from the writing which rendered them as, rather than just. Sometimes, /ɸ/ was written as instead of, causing confusion with /pʰ/. Some believe that this confusion between /ɸ/ and /pʰ/ is further proof that the latter had fricative release in Classical High Elven.

In later versions - after 600 BEKE -, would be replaced by, and the use of  for former /θ/ - causing confusion with /tʰ/ - would remain only in personal names and placenames, otherwise replaced by.

The original Book of Visions is the first piece of High Elven literature to use diacritics to mark long vowels, but even then, sometimes long vowels are left unmarked (most often when there are no minimal pairs to confuse with), or written either or  instead of  - once again, later copies would remedy all of these inconsistencies and use diacritics with consistency.

In the original version, no distinction was made between the vowels /ɪ ʊ/ and the semivowels /j w/ - only after ~100 BEKE, when the Middle High Elven translations were made - would new copies start using the new letters to distinguish between the two, when copying the Classical High Elven version.

Ownership
While the Church of Titanius does not make it illegal to own a copy of the book, it is difficult for ordinary people to acquire the Book of Visions - due to the excessive length, most of the richer civilians only own a few parts of it, due to the harsh price of owning a full copy - the Church does not share any expenses at making sure every church and monastery has at least one copy though.