Os Afat

Os Afat is an archaic language spoken on the continent of Neronas.

=Origin= According to the book Ke Hurh azh Afath ("Concerning the Origin of the Divine ones"), the goddess Avanÿa created the Afathi, "the equals of the gods". This race of mystics and high magicians later ascended to become the present-day Avatars. In the beginning the Afathi did not need a language as they were still a part of the divine existence but, as their beloved goddess was weakened due to the creation of the Dwarves, they started to carefully develop a system of syllables followed by a shift in the aether indicating what the sounds meant. When Avanÿa was banished by the elven gods, the Afathi started using a combination of syllables to form exact words and this later became the Os Afat.

Whether this is historically correct is for the reader to speculate as Ke Hurh azh Afath is the only written record of the early Afathi history.

=Concerning Words and Phonology= As the "origin section" above explains, Os Afat is based on a limited number of syllables (105, to be exact). All words in Os Afat are derived from compound words of these. The Afathi created a pictogram for each syllable, but as the knowledge of how to interpret them was decreasing, various transcription and transliteration systems were created, the most common is the Derolian versions as they are quite close in phonology.

Vowels
Each "syllable" has at least one of these five possible vowels:

A, O, U, E or I

These alone are actually the five first words in the Afathi-"alphabet": a, o (I/ me), u (he/ she/ it), e , i (many).

Consonants
Usually vowel is either followed by, or preceded by a consonant. The original consonants are:

P, T, K, B, D, G, N, R and L

Hence the original syllables like "le (wing, roof)", "in (do, make)", and "ba (man)" are possible while combinations like "psi", "vin" or "met" are impossible as they contain more than one consonant.

Speaking
The attentive reader may have noticed that these few sounds is not enough to create the name Afathi as it lacks both f and th, not to mention the book title Ke Hurh azh Afath that seem to contain an awful lot of H's. You have just discovered the biggest problem when speaking Os Afath, the so called "Changing Wisper".

=Word Building= Words are formed using the "syllables'" different meanings.

An example: The word for "temple" is athol created with at, meaning "god", and ol, meaning house. A temple is simply "the house of a god". More abstract words can even be created using this simple method: "Sanctify" is a bit harder, meaning "to make holy". A direct translation would be athuin: at (god)+ u (adjective-suffix) + in (do). However the Afathi has a different view as their word for "sanctify" is actually atholin (at ol in), "to make into the house of a god". For some reason they generally avoid using adjectives when creating verbs.

=Dictionary= ...

=Example Text= ...