Verse:Irta/Fêrrith Michaelidh

Aeno 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
  • Latinizes her name, originally of Medh Chêl origin, to Aenō, Aenōnis

Michaelidh's conworld

Michaelidh's conworld is multilevel and full of religious allegories. It resembles Dante in many respects.

Rõktiap is the language of "heaven" in that world; its grammar is based on Michaelidh's idea of what the first full-fledged human language was like (though the actual details were not a reconstruction); Rõktiap doesn't evolve into descendants in its homeland, and neither does its most recent diasporic form, Zinruol. Earth languages in Michaelidh's world are all descendants of Rõktiap as a fictional take on her beliefs, and in her actual writings these are represented by Earth languages in translation LOTR style. Earth languages in Michaelidh's world are specifically descendants of a form of Rõktiap which underwent one major grammatical change that is common to all such languages -- it's a change that both makes the languages human-usable and makes Rõktiap fundamentally unintelligible by incorporating a false friend.

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; a major Remonitionist author and critic 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".