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:

  • Red or Desert Elven (by Arabic dialects)
  • Blue or Sea Elven (by English and Spanish)
  • White or Snow Elven (by Latin and Greek)
  • Black or Cave Elven (by German)
  • Green or Forest Elven (by Native American dialects)
  • Brown or Jungle Elven (by certain African dialects)
  • Gray or Lava Elven (by Scandinavian dialects)

        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.