Why Elven?
About translations and usages in this work. Please suspend all disbelief before continuing.
This work deals with the seven major races (and by major I mean "general",
for it may be said for example that the witches represent a different race than
the cave elven, yet they will be included as the same race) of one world. Each
of these races share many characteristics, and even connections between their
languages might be divined given a thorough enough study. Nevertheless, no such
study has been performed, and an effective transliteration of the languages of
these races has yet to be accomplished (in other words, neither their written
language nor a way to write their language with human letters has been created).
As such, the choice was made when presenting this work, to use Human languages
to supply the place of each language, and make such modifications as were fitting
to get more authentic sound. Therefore "Oberon" is not really named Oberon, that
is a translation of his name into the language being used for his people (in this
case German). Each of the names for the main characters and indeed any characters
are chosen in this fashion.
Thus we dodge around one issue: What are the seven races? Naturally since they
are from a different world, we don't have a name for their races. They chose names
based on two things: the color of their magic and the land where they live. Since
the 7 homelands are sufficiently different this was possible. But in reality their
different races are very similar, or at least share some characteristics: Namely
their pointed ears, their general affinity with magic (despite desert elven claims
to the contrary, it is quite clear that their "antimagic" abilities are actually
magical in nature), beauty (it is rare that one elven would consider
another elven inherently unattractive physically), possessing only hair about
the head, and their many human-like qualities (such as having two legs).
These shared characteristics led to the obvious choice: to give them a name
from mythology of or relating to human-like beings that had these characteristics.
In modern times these are elfs, elves, elfin people, etc., the current incarnation of
the 'people' once known as the Alvar. So we have elves, even if they are for all
intents and purposes "space aliens". However, there was a slight conflict: even among
the various races there was only one term that described point-eared humanoids
(rather that should be one word per language, though for the most part they varied
little in pronunciation from race to race on this one term). That is to say, there
was no plural form, no possessive form, no singular form, etc, and in fact that
would have been considered rude in most cultures, denigrating the people to the
level of inanimate objects.
Thus the word is "Elven". The plural of Elven in this case is Elven. The
possessive is Elven. Oberon is Elven, an Elven. Oberon and Diane are two Elven. She
is Snow Elven and he is Cave Elven, and they wear elven clothes. To mimic their
word usage, I have chosen not to use the word "Elf", "Elves", "Elfmaid", etc. I
chose "Elven" over "Elfin" or "Elf" because "Elf" when used a plural sounded too
much like "Elk" (There go two Elf... There go two Elfin.. There go two Elven) and
Elfin didn't sound versatile enough. Elven sounded like "Men", and thus was chosen
to suit.
The language chosen to represent the Sea Elven was the californian dialect of
English. Sea Elven was chosen as a sort of interlanguage by the Elven races
largely because the first two races the Sea Elven met,
the Jungle and Snow Elven, both were good with languages and
picked up Sea Elven quickly. Given these two facts, the names of the 7 races would
be:
And the names of the explorers as shown in this work are chosen from these languages,
with the "nicknames" as given largely by Michael being in English.
It is worth noting that during the course of this work,
the explorers are under a "translation spell" cast with Brown Elven magic, and
thus can understand what the others are saying. The truest way to show this would be
to have each one speaking a different language, with subtitles, and have them simply
understand each other, but for simplicity's sake everything is shown in the same
language (English). The word balloons Are the subtitles. Due to the nature of the
spell sometimes a word cannot be understood, and in cases where the spell is broken
the person would no longer be able to understand any language they did not know. The
spell itself is limited in scope, and does not allow the enchanted to understand
All languages, only those languages that were incorporated into the spell. In this
case the 6 major languages each explorer did not know: there is no spell on
B'khee to let her understand squirrels or Desert Elven, because there are no
squirrel explorers with them and because she already understands Desert Elven.