Desh Language Family

 

Languages of the Desh family are the languages spoken principally in Kashdush and Ayodesh. They seem to have begun with Ancient Eoten in central Kashdush and then spread southward into Ayodesh, and then across the Odeshi Wastes and western, giving rise to two major branches - those spoken in Kashdush and those spoken in Ayodesh.

Ancient Eoten (before Year -5000 and possibly current)

Ancient Eoten is a mystery. Most scholars believe it is a dead language, spoken only by the Eoten of the First Epoch; the supposed ancient ancestors of the Spriggan, and never written down. However, some Spriggan elders claim that there are indeed Eoten still living in central Kashdush who speak the language. Regardless, the later propagation of the rest of the languages of the Desh family; proceeding southward into Ayodesh and then westward across it, provides evidence to support the existence of this language.

Eotish Dialects (Year -4500 to Year -1200)

This family of unwritten dialects probably spread from Kashdush into Ayodesh starting at the beginning of the Second Epoch. Like so many presumed languages of this era, there is no written evidence of these languages, but in this case, there remains something of an oral tradition, captured in Adi-Odesh (below). As these languages propagated across two continents, they continued to drift and evolve.

Adi-Odesh (Year -3500 to current)

This unwritten language is likely the last surviving Eotish Dialect. It is the language of the nomadic Odesherai who live in the Odeshi Wastes. As dialects and languages swept back and forth between Kashdush and Ayodesh for millennia, the Odesherai kept their language, which has continued to evolve and drift since at least the Second Epoch, but with the lack of a written language, it is difficult for scholars to classify it further.

Old Otesh (Year -1600 to Year -600)

Old Otesh first began to be written down in the cities and towns surrounding the Sea of Palms in south central Ayodesh around the beginning of the Third Epoch. The written language began as a series of simple pictograms taken from early religious or magical rituals, which then incorporated a simple marking system for counting and measures before slowly expanding to cover the language as a whole. With a written language to act as an anchor, Old Otesh swept back eastward and north into Kashdush, incorporating or erasing most of the Eotish Dialects as it went. The fact that the earliest written examples of this language family come from Ayodesh and not Kashdush is what left many scholars, even as late as the end of the Fourth Epoch, to question how the language could have - as on rude scholar put it - ‘begun with a bunch of talking trees in the icy wastelands of Kashdush’.

Middle Ka-esh (Year -900 to 405)

Geographically isolated from Ayodesh by the Isthmus of Desh and the Odeshi Wastes, the peoples of Kashdush evolved their own version of Old Otesh which came to be known as Ka-esh (later called Middle Ka-esh by scholars). Middle Ka-esh used the same logography as Old Otesh, but over the first half of the Third Epoch seems to have reversed many syntactical, grammatical and vocabulary changes, bringing it closer to Adi-Odesh, and thus, possibly, to Ancient Eoten - again supporting the argument that there were indeed native speakers of Ancient Eoten still living in Kashdush at the time.

Middle Odesh (Year -700 to Year 850)

By the middle of the Third Epoch, Old Otesh had drifted significantly. In particular, the logography of Old Otesh had undergone major changes, that made it mostly a syllabary. Much of the drift was toward increasing the utility of the language as a trade language, as it was dominant in many ports first in the Sea of Palms and then later along the northwestern edge of the Great Spiral Sea, where it was in use as far south as the northern pots of Sekhu. By the time of the Orcish Conquests, Middle Odesh would be supplanted as a trade language by Middle Vercian, though it would still persist in the interior of Ayodesh until the establishment of Kash-Odesh.

High Kaesh (Year 405 to current)

With the formation of the Eoten and Spriggan Kingdom of Kashdush at the end of the fourth century, the Great Families of the major cities of Kashdush - now the official nobility of a Kingdom - formalized High Kaesh as the official language of Kashdush. While all cities in Kashdush were ordered to adopt the language as their official language, the cities surrounding Blowhole Bay in the far north refused to do so, continuing to use Middle Vercian. Conversely, many charter cities in the Isthmus of Desh, which were not officially part of the Kingdom, chose to adopt High Kaesh as their official language for practical, geographic reasons - these cities are more isolated from western Ayodesh by the Odeshi Wastes than they are from Kashdush by the Isthmus of Desh. While later languages in Ayodesh would continue to drift and evolve through the Fourth Epoch, High Kaesh would continue to be the primary language of Kashdush all the way through the Fourth Epoch and beyond.

Kash-Odesh (Year 850 to Year 1300)

As Middle Odesh was ‘gobbled up’ by Middle Vercian, and High Kaesh rose in importance due to its imposed establishment across Kashdush, speakers of Middle Odesh in Ayodesh and the Plains of Marqash soon found themselves in the minority. At the same time, as the wars of the Imperial Era engulfed Ayodesh, political boundaries further siloed the languages. As a consequence Middle Odesh split into two different dialects which then blossomed into the their own languages; Kash-Odesh and Kash-Marqash. Kash-Odesh was a complex jumble of a language with two different written forms; one the logography of High Kaesh, and the other a syllabary similar to Middle Odesh, but which also incorporated many written and spoken elements of Middle Vercian.

Kash-Marqash (Year 850 to Year 1190)

With the Tuloszian invasions of the Imperial Era, the Plains of Marqash were politically isolated from central Ayodesh. The version of Middle Odesh used in the region mixed with Royal Tuloszian to become a new language of its own. Kash-Marqash jettisoned the complicated logography of Middle Odesh and adopted an alphabet similar to that of Royal Tuloszian, while also adopting a lot of Tuloszian syntax, vocabulary and grammar.

Marqashi Dialects (Year 1190 to current)

With the collapse of the Kingdom of Tulosz at the end of the Imperial Era and the departure of Royal Tuloszian speaking armies, with the rise of Comerta, and with the sweeping improvements made to the accessibility of Odeshi, the Kash-Marqash language shattered into a dozen sub-regional dialects. By the middle of the Enlightenment, almost every city in the region had its own dialect, and none of them were aligned with whatever their official language was supposed to be. Toward the end of the Fourth Epoch, most major cities were either adopting Odeshi or Comerta as their official languages, and the scattered Marqashi dialects were starting to fade into smaller cities and rural areas of the region.

Odeshi (Year 1300 to current)

While Ayodesh never formed a centralized government during the Imperial Era, Shahaifor was still the pre-eminent city on the continent during the era, and the majority of the written culture and history of Ayodesh was stored there. While the printing press had enabled many ancient texts to be reproduced and distributed, the wars of the Imperial Era significantly impeded this effort. When the Great Fire struck, a significant percentage of the written history and culture captured in Middle Odesh and Kash-Odesh was lost forever. With the rebuilding of Shahaifor and the establishment of the University of the Seven Spheres in the Enlightenment, scholars embarked on the ambitious task of rebuilding their own language. Odeshi was the result of that effort. It used a single, much simplified syllabary, and kept the most common syntactical and grammatical structures of Middle Odesh. Conjugations and declinations were massively simplified, gendering was removed, and the vast majority of exceptions were brought into conformity. Additionally, it jettisoned its own numeral system and language of weights and measures, and adopted wholesale the numerals, weights and measures of Comerta. It wasn’t so much the creation of a new language, as the clean-up of a very messy and unnecessarily complicated one.

By the end of the thirteenth century, as the scholars were finishing their ‘overhaul’, they released many different dictionaries and grammars, and worked to translate popular and important works from Middle Odesh and Kash-Odesh into Odeshi. They provided support to different City Councils to simplify their documentation, and convinced many of them to make Odeshi their official language. They also worked with companies and different trade groups to write ‘working songs’ - simple catchy tunes that captured the rhythm and flow of work for various trades. Additionally, they commissioned writers, poets and musicians to write nursery rhymes and children’s tales which were printed on broadsheets and given away for free on street corners. Over a generation, these efforts had paid off. Kash-Odesh was, simply put, a cumbersome, overwrought language, and the many shortcuts and simplifications brought to Odeshi allowed the population to migrate to a new language, without leaving native Kash-Odesh speakers behind.