One Root, Five Hands

How every people in Areshnaat came to write, and how each hand descends from the elf script. Tags: canon = the author decided it, proposed = a suggestion awaiting a yes, open = undecided.

The five hands

What is decided

• [canon] The elves wrote first. Every other people's script descends from the elf hand, a vertical script in the Mongolian manner: a spine running top to bottom, with ticks and loops off either side, columns read left to right.
• [canon] Elves write vowels as full letters.
• [canon] Dwarves write tense in the stroke of the hand: present is the baseline, past is thicker, future leans at a cant of about 5 degrees, timeless gets a curled cap, and verbs are always capped. The dwarf hand leans toward Farsi in flow, and carving a flowing hand into stone is a flex expected of dwarven craftsmen.
• [canon] Refugees have added helper marks in daily writing, for both vowel and tense.
• [canon] Goblinoids use something in the manner of futhark.
• [canon] Halflings and gnomes share a Thaana-style script.
• [canon] Humans use a Latinized Thaana, with Latin-leaning letterforms and fewer accents.

How one hand becomes another

• [proposed] The dwarf hand is the elf column turned 90 degrees clockwise: top-to-bottom reading becomes right-to-left, the spine becomes the joined baseline, and the side ticks fold into marks above and below.
• [proposed] Corrected elf ticks: left of the spine for the deep vowels (a, o, u), right of the spine for the forward vowels (e, i). Turned clockwise, left lands above and right lands below, which matches the refugee marks, so the deep and forward split in _Karakeel (Dwarven) would be inherited from the elf script.
• [proposed] Goblinoid runes are the elf spine and ticks with the spine broken into separate staves and every curve straightened for carving.
• [proposed] The small folk keep the ticks as vowel marks and break the spine into short, separate hooks.
• [proposed] The small folk write left to right, so they look distinct from the dwarves at a glance. If right to left, they keep unjoined letters instead.
• [proposed] Humans took the script from their halfling and gnome neighbours, promoted the marks back into full vowel letters, and write left to right. The precedent is real: the Greeks turned spare Phoenician consonant signs into vowels.
• [proposed] Humans keep a few unmistakably Thaana-derived consonant shapes, so Common does not read as English in a funny font.
• [proposed] Halflings write loose and casual. Gnomes over-annotate, adding extra marks.
• [proposed] Real-world analogy: Syriac led to Sogdian, then Uyghur, which was turned on its side to become vertical Mongolian. This is a fact about real scripts, offered as precedent, not as canon.

The dwarven alphabet, in draft

Two drafts exist, both of the same alphabet. Only the letterforms differ: draft 1 is Cyrillic-leaning and blocky, draft 2 leans Farsi and flows. Draft 2 is the one that matches the canon line above.

• [canon] 18 consonants, written right to left, joined along a baseline. Consonants only; the vowels are carried by the refugee helper marks.
• [proposed] The inventory as drafted: b, p, t, n, y, h, kh, r, z, d, g, s, ts, k, l, m, w, and a glottal stop.
• [proposed] The arch carries b, p, t, n, y by dot count and position. The hook carries h and kh. The tail carries r and z. The bar and hook carry d and g. Teeth carry s and ts.
• [proposed] Helper marks for vowels sit above the line for the deep class and below for the forward class: a is one stroke above, o a ring above, u two strokes above, e one stroke below, i two strokes below. Tense takes its own sign at the start of the word.
• [open] The drafted alphabet cannot spell dwarven. There is no letter for dz and none for š, but dza appears in every Kord name and is explicitly the Latvian affricate, and the Onyx Kord is canon as Šohdzakoda, where the hacek exists to keep it apart from s. See Dwarves and Duergar. The sheet already distinguishes shared shapes by dot count, so a dotted s and a joined d-z ligature would be idiomatic. Needs a draft 3.
• [open] Which draft is canon, 1 or 2.

Open questions

• [open] Reading direction for the goblinoid and the halfling-gnome hands is unset.
• [open] The elf script redraw with corrected ticks, and the five-hand family tree drawing, have not been produced.
• [open] Whether the vowel shaping that separates dwarven, halfling and gnome speech shows up in their hands as well, or only in the sound.

Source provenance

Source: the "One root, five hands" section of the Areshnaat Dwarves artifact, read 2026-10-12. The dwarven alphabet material is read from two drawn script sheets of the same date, held outside the vault.