Glimmertongue

Spoken In: Bailbor (destroyed in the Sundering War); no living speaker community.

Evolved From: No recorded ancestor; emerged during the gnomish migration to Devindra's Reach.

Script: Angular glyphs preserved in Cogtongue and Gearscript; alphabet, left-to-right.

Type: Fusional, SVO.

Common Use: Ceremonial practice among gnomish descendants; academic study; no native speakers remain. Direct ancestor of both Cogtongue and Gearscript, which diverged sharply after the fall of Bailbor.

Glimmertongue is the dead ancestor of Cogtongue and Gearscript. It died when Bailbor fell, and no one alive speaks it as a first language. What survives lives in two places: ceremonial recitations among gnomish descendants, and the angular alphabet that Cogtongue and Gearscript both still use.

The two daughter languages drifted in opposite directions after the Sundering. Cogtongue kept the grammar and lost the technical vocabulary. Gearscript kept the technical vocabulary and broke the grammar down into something a workshop could shout across a factory floor. The numbers (vak, aun, bel, trim, kor, hael, zost, klav, arn, dral, volm) survived intact in both. Most of the pronouns did too. Almost nothing else.

"Cogtongue and Gearscript share the same script. Ask a Cogtongue speaker to read old Glimmertongue and they'll get maybe a third of it. Ask a Gearscript speaker and they'll get a different third. Between the two of them, you can almost reassemble what Bailbor was."

— Tessimer Quolt, patent clerk and amateur linguist, Knob

Grammar

Noun Case (bailbor, "knowledge")

Verb Paradigm (thron, "to forge / to know")

Pronouns

Numbers (0–10)

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