Ancient Azlari
Common Phrases
“My dawn.”
“May your nights be bright. / Bright nights.”
“The [pet] won’t work.”
“Create your treasure/fortune”
“Trying to call shadows? / They're calling shadows.”
“A lifetime in a word/rune”
Verbal System
No one in living memory has heard it spoken properly, though some scholars, under the effects of ill-advised doses of Life Trance, have provided basic words. In spoken form, the language is abrupt and made up of short phrases, often just commands. The rest of the contexts and emotional cues seem to have been delivered by displayed facial emotions and body language.Theories even persist that the empire had a form of telepathy, like the harinae tribes. Perhaps the spoken language is only for the common citizen, while nobility used this theorized telepathy?
Writing System
Most surviving examples of ancient azlari are carved into stone or metal, but even that is often broken apart by the ages.
Cross referencing what is known from trancers, to what pieces of written examples still exist, it seems that ancient azlari has a surprisingly vast vocabulary of written symbols for those of higher rank, presumably because they did all the record keeping. In written form, the length of vertical words, the density of words, and depth seem to convey what is missing with the lack of face-to-face communication. Emotions, urgency, and respect toward rank all conveyed in subtle ways the text is crafted, potentially even relaying a whole separate message then the words alone convey.
Sentence Structure
Rune Names
Though the typical words are written in blocky marks, there is a pseudo sub-language that the nobility of the Azlaryn Empire used. Rune names were magic runes that became an individual’s official name for legal documentation. These runes are unique to each person, and often have delicate, sharp curves and dots. These runes appear in place of names for many noble texts, making it nearly impossible to recognize or translate them into the common tongue.Ancient Azlari is, by all accounts, a dead language. Not enough of it survived the fall of the great empire to be revived in full; though scholars have managed to translate short, common phrases. These have become akin to idioms in the common tongue.
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