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

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 John 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.