The Tao of Languages

Actually much less broad-sweeping than the title suggests; the title's actually a parody of "The Languages of Pao" by Jack Vance. You know, the one where the dude tries to create three castes by use of carefully tailored conlangs. Did anybody bother, when the Sapir-Whorf silliness still ruled the roost, to point out one key fact:

Apache has no word for war.

Nope, they just call it "killing foreigners".

Anyway. So I have a D&D setting that's largely traditional, since it's too complicated to convert D&D for a different setting. The setting I use instead does have a thematic twist that I won't divulge here (let's just say their mage-guilds=our corporate capitalism, and they have a cult dedicated to destroying "mage tyrant aggression"). I base the human languages, principally encountered only in names, on Proto Indo-European, because I can—also because it lets you have familiar-sounding names without having to use real world names. It's pretty easy, PIE being, bar none, the most thoroughly reconstructed of all proto-languages. And I do little things like usually rendering the PIE feminine *-i ending with a -y, so it feels less Hittite ("Dhali") and more European-diminutive ("Dolly").

Ah. But. What to do with the elves? For the elves' language in this setting, I used the roots of proto-Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp, Estonian, and the Samoyed-type Siberian languages). And the grammar of Tibetan. Because really, if you're not going to have an elvish language be ergative-absolutive—like Basque—why bother? And, since the names of the elvish pantheon from D&D don't follow those phonetic rules, nor have meanings in proto-Uralic, I simply come up with new versions of them. Most of them have a title—Corellon Larethian is "Creator of Life", Sehanine "Moonbow", Rillifane Rallathil is "Leaflord", Lolth is "Queen of the Demon Web Pits". Yeah, I only bothered to convert the main two, plus the special patrons of grey and wood elves. Anyway:

Corellon Larethian: Sê’is Êleleshe
Sehanine Moonbow: Kungêiongsø
Lolth: Koliaketzevonkeasuru (Drow simply call her Ketzevonkeasuru)
Rillifane Rallathil: Lêstêasuru

So yes, Asuru is just "ruler in general", and I spelled some of the Uralic roots more congenially—I decided to avoid the ambiguity of J and Y by writing an initial IPA j sound with I, like in "iongsø", for instance.

I figure Tolkien set the precedent, making Sindarin and Quenya sound like Finnish. In my own fantasy book, elves can't actually talk, though they can make humans understand them and it seems like talking. But this only took me like two days, and it's a very serviceable RPG conlang.