Ethnographic Records
One Root, Five Hands: difference between revisions
12 October 2026 at 04:21 UTC → 12 October 2026 at 05:19 UTC
Lat. IIILong. IX
Revision 1 → 2: +24 −3
| 23 | 23 | | Halfling and gnome | Not set | Thaana-like, short hooks, vowel marks | Spine broken into hooks, ticks kept as marks | canon | | |
| 24 | 24 | | Human | Left to right (proposed) | Latinized Thaana, fewer accents | Small-folk marks promoted back to letters | canon | | |
| 25 | 25 | ||
| 26 | + | ## Who writes with which hand | |
| 27 | + | ||
| 28 | + | Five hands, more than five peoples. A people can borrow a hand without being | |
| 29 | + | descended from it. | |
| 30 | + | ||
| 31 | + | | People | Hand used | Note | Status | | |
| 32 | + | |---|---|---|---| | |
| 33 | + | | Elves | Elf | The root hand | canon | | |
| 34 | + | | Sea elves, wood elves | Elf | The same elvish script, unchanged | canon | | |
| 35 | + | | Drow | **Dwarf** | Elvish words written in the dwarven hand, with adjustments for spelling | canon | | |
| 36 | + | | Dwarves | Dwarf | — | canon | | |
| 37 | + | | Goblinoids | Goblinoid | Futhark-like runes | canon | | |
| 38 | + | | Orcs | Goblinoid | The same runes | canon | | |
| 39 | + | | Halflings, gnomes | Halfling and gnome | One shared hand | canon | | |
| 40 | + | | Humans | Human | A Latin script | canon | | |
| 41 | + | ||
| 42 | + | - **[canon]** The drow are the exception to the whole descent tree. They are elf-lineage but write with the dwarven hand, carrying elvish words in it with spelling adjustments. Every other people uses the hand it inherited. | |
| 43 | + | - **[open]** How the drow came to take a dwarven hand, and when. Nothing fixes it, and it is the most interesting unexplained thing in the writing canon. | |
| 44 | + | - **[open]** Whether the drow adjustments amount to a sixth hand in practice, or stay a spelling convention inside the dwarven one. | |
| 45 | + | ||
| 26 | 46 | ## What is decided | |
| 27 | 47 | ||
| 48 | + | - **[canon]** Sea elves and wood elves write the same elvish script, unchanged. | |
| 28 | 49 | - **[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. | |
| 29 | 50 | - **[canon]** Elves write vowels as full letters. | |
| 30 | 51 | - **[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. | |
| 31 | 52 | - **[canon]** Refugees have added helper marks in daily writing, for both vowel and tense. | |
| 32 | − | - **[canon]** Goblinoids use something in the manner of futhark. | |
| 53 | + | - **[canon]** Goblinoids use something in the manner of futhark. Orcs use the same runes. | |
| 33 | 54 | - **[canon]** Halflings and gnomes share a Thaana-style script. | |
| 34 | − | - **[canon]** Humans use a Latinized Thaana, with Latin-leaning letterforms and fewer accents. | |
| 55 | + | - **[canon]** Humans use a Latin script. It is described elsewhere as a Latinized Thaana, with Latin-leaning letterforms and fewer accents. | |
| 35 | 56 | ||
| 36 | 57 | ## How one hand becomes another | |
| 37 | 58 |
| 41 | 62 | - **[proposed]** The small folk keep the ticks as vowel marks and break the spine into short, separate hooks. | |
| 42 | 63 | - **[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. | |
| 43 | 64 | - **[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. | |
| 44 | − | - **[proposed]** Humans keep a few unmistakably Thaana-derived consonant shapes, so Common does not read as English in a funny font. | |
| 65 | + | - **[open]** Whether humans keep a few unmistakably Thaana-derived consonant shapes, so Common does not read as English in a funny font. This was proposed, but "a Latin script" may mean the Thaana inheritance is not visible on the page. The two readings differ and the difference is worth settling. | |
| 45 | 66 | - **[proposed]** Halflings write loose and casual. Gnomes over-annotate, adding extra marks. | |
| 46 | 67 | - **[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. | |
| 47 | 68 |