Verse:Irta/Fêrrith Michaelidh

Fêrrith Michaelidh, a mystic and comparative linguist; the first conlanger in the Irtan Western world

• • Influenced by her missionary work in Southeast Asia
  • Writes groundbreaking works in historical linguistics (equivalent to our timeline's William Jones) and proposes Proto-Indo-Uralic
    • Unlike William Jones, Michaelidh is not surprised by Sanskrit's relation to Latin and Greek; she expects it and travels to Southeast Asia partly to verify her belief in a common ancestor for all human languages which was close to Church Latin and Koine Greek; she also discovers ancient Indo-Iranian loanwords in her native Medh Chêl
    • She doesn't expect Old Chinese

Linguistic philosophy

Like Tolkien, Michaelidh delighted in and drew a lot of inspiration from the grammars of languages, and as a native speaker of Medh Chêl, a Uralic language, she felt novelty in features of Indo-European languages. As a child she studied Latin and Greek, and considered them mystical and beautiful. Her studies started with the Vulgate Bible and the Greek New Testament, but in addition she broadened her studies to older pagan and philosophical texts in those languages, which she accepted on the basis that the languages' inherent divinity seeped into the texts. She also studied Azalic and English, which she praised for its simplicity, and Riphean, more for practical purposes. Her favorite language in childhood was Irish, and she experimented with various constructed languages in her childhood as well, mostly based on Latin and Greek grammar.

Her first conlangs started as childhood play, but as she studied the Bible her conlanging efforts grew more serious. Her studies of IE morphology had a notable Christian bent to them -- for instance, she connected the early PIE animate and inanimate genders to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the grammaticalization of the collective to the Son.

Her travels in Asia were a defining moment when she discovered two important classical languages: Sanskrit and Old Chinese. ... Sanskrit appealed to her because of its IE origin and Old Chinese because of its telegraphic syntax suggesting the state of humanity before the Fall of Adam. It's after her discovery of Old Chinese that she started sketching Rõktiap.

Influence

Michaelidh is known all over Irta for bridging the worlds of religion and linguistics. Catholics view Rõktiap as perhaps the only accurate analogy for the Trinity, which is no doubt responsible for the popularity of Michaelidh's work. Remonitionists, on the other hand, think of Michaelidh's work as a treasure trove of mystical and occult symbolism as well as paradoxes; major Remonitionist author and critic Jacob Wellwise cited Michaelidh's conlanging as a challenge to her belief in "the original language of humanity" by considering the possibility that societies could make up and pass on new languages that, like Rõktiap, were unrelated to the real original language. This controversy persists to this day in the way Irtan linguists look at pidgins and creoles; historically Remonitionist countries follow the theory that creoles are made ex nihilo and should be grouped into separate language families whereas Catholic countries follow the theory that creoles are descendants of their lexifiers, and the latter is known today in Irta as "the Latzial school of linguistics".

Today, a majority of Irtan Remonitionists reject religious faith but accept the prevailing linguistic theories that arose from Michaelidh's work, which is the main way Remonitionists assert their religious identity. In addition, Michaelidh's translations of Old Chinese texts like the Tao Te Ching directly shaped Remonitionist thought.