History of Lemre

The most detailed history of a language that I have recorded is that if Lemre, one of the most archaic Sumric languages. I apologise in advance about the wall of text but I'll tell the history of Lemre as well as I can:

Lemre is spoken in the northern continent Malomanan, more specifically on a large island that hugs the coast. On the mainland they speak a variety of related languages that form the Sumric language family. Although they are indigenous to Malomanan the history begins elsewhere. The Sumric people originate in Prehistoric Northern Makūtevnag. There the people spoke *Proto-Sumro-Naukl* and lived in a city that lay inside a huge ginormous cave. This city was very unlike Malomanan as Northern Makūtevnag is quite tropical and warm while Malomanan is frozen and mountainous. But humans in Makūtevnag weren't alone as also in Makūtevnag a super-pack of wolves roamed. These weren't any ordinary wolves. These were the pack of the dark spirit Múyo (with whom the image of a wolf is associated to). The alpha male of this pack was in fact Múyo's son from Múyo took the form of a wolf and impregnated a bitch). One day this super-pack happened upon the cave city and attacked it. A great battle between men and wolf ensued. In the battle one man slain Múyo's wolf son. The humans were driven from their city however and fled north. Múyo was enraged at his sons death and vowed to scorn the people of the man and his descendants for all time. The man was brave and taunted Múyo by singing to him to come down and fight him himself:

"come down Múyo,

and strike your favoured hand,

your dark shadow,

now you must disband."

When the people fled north some of them stayed in the new area but others decided to keep moving north and travelled by boat across the unexplored sea. The people weren't seaworthy so they hugged the coast of a chain of islands until they found a great land to the North...Malomanan...

There the people were met by a bird spirit named Sulal. Sulal welcomed the people and taught them how to live on the land. The people couldn't farm like they used to as the permafrost made it difficult to plough and the weather was to fierce for domestic crops. In spite of the stinging cold and rough terrain the land had not known humans before and so was rich in resources with no one to compete with Sulal showed the people how to hunt the wild herds and how to follow them on their migrations, because of this the people became nomads and started to call themselves as such with the name Sumnë (travel people). Soon after their arrival to Malomanan the sea levels rose and submerged the island chain underwater. Also the place where the others stayed behind was cut off from Makūtevnag and became a great island. This island then became Naukav and the people became the Naukl.

This all happened in prehistoric times so the Modern Sumric people and Naukl forgot the other even existed until modern times. Although traces of their origins can be found in the mythologies as the Sumric people believe that they came from another world in the sky that was made of rock and dirt and had giant tunnels and caverns throughout. They believe that they came from a town in one of these caverns (Which is a memory of the city in the cave) and how they fled after a giant black hound named Bugal attacked them.

After a time longer than tongue could tell had passed the Sumnë were as native to the land as the deer and the fowl but Múyo still hated the Sumric people so later he sent Olñam Yaron, a giant wolf spirit to ravage the land (continuing the wolf theme) and gorge on the deer population. It ate so much deer that there was hardly any left for the Sumnë to hunt causing a famine. But all was saved when another spirit called Mâwatar Ra came and fought Olñam Yaron. After 12 epic battles the evil wolf was defeated. But the deer population took a long time to recover, in fact it never did recover to its previous numbers. This caused many Sumnë to leave the nomadic life and settle in small villages. The first to do this settled on a nearby island called Mäląlą Lemnen and lived by fishing. They were known as the ''Lemne. ''Over time the speech grew apart from those on the mainland becoming Lemre but the Antagan Empire invaded that island and imposed their own language in the natives causing the extinction of Lemre, the Island was renamed by the empire to Lem Pars (Lem Island in the Tynes tongue.) Lemre has since been "revived" due to nationalist sentiment against the Antagan Empire which outlawed the language. it was recorded by Antagan scholars before its death. The record they created founded the base of Lemre's revival many generations later.

The Empire is quite intolerant of foreign cultures and languages of its subjects and has a one nation, one language policy which is strictly enforced to varying degrees across the Empire, any language that wasn't Tåns (the language of the Jašawn) was to be exterminated. Mäląlą Lemnen got the worst treatment as even its name was changed into Tåns as Lem Pars albeit preserving the root 'lem'. Any native Lemne caught speaking the language was marked as open game, which meant anyone could murder him, raid his home or do anything against him and not be punished by the overreaching laws of Antagan. This was a frequent occorance in the early days of colonisation as the living conditions for the natives worsened, driving many into desperation, waiting with a listening ear for someone to slip a word of Lemre so that they can take his possessions as spoil to feed their families. This treatment caused the Lemre language to decline rapidly. As the language was in its dying breath a new law was passed that anyone caught speaking the language was to have their tongue cut out and branded on the cheek with the words enka prå meaning 'bad speech' in Tynes. Not long after this the Lemre language was dead and forgotten to the natives, beyond even the memories of the eldest natives. Though the language lingered on in notes of Antagan scholars, for throughout the Antagan Empire there is open schools which teach free education and act independently of the Empire, meaning that they can do as they wish even if the Empire is actively against it, just as long as the school's activities don't directly interfeer with Imperial busines. The open school has a band of advanced scholars who travel and collect knowledge of foreign cultures. They often accompany Imperial forces when they set foot on fresh land, the purpose being to record the culture and language of the lands before the Empire destroys them. It is thanks to these scholars recording the Lemre language before its complete death that revival of the language was made possible many, many, generations later. Imperial involvement in Lem Pars loosened its grip when the Wasgar Confederacy, among other forces, started to put pressure on the ever expanding Empire. This extra pressure forced the Empire to source any spare troops in Lem Pars for the war in Henda. This gave the island life to the long simmering revolutionary sentiment and revival of Lemne culture, and also revival of the Lemre language. This situation made Lemre quite unique among other Sumric languages as by this time, many centuries after the original oppression, the Sumric tribes on the mainland had settled into villages and the language Old Sumrë had diverged into 11 other languages. The great amount of time meant that these languages had changed in many ways from Old Sumrë, some being unrecognisable to its ancestor. But Lemre was preserved as it was many centuries ago in the notes of scholars, and as it wasn't spoken the whole time no changes in grammar or sound had affected it, it was essentialy frozen in time, making the revived language closest to Old Sumrë in terms of vocabulary and morphology (except from the many Tåns loanwords).

Delor is the Lemne man who was at the forefront of reviving the native Lemre language. From a young age Delor took an interest in languages which he picked up while attending the open school. He was always interested to know what the Lemre language of his ancestors was like, as by his time the language had been dead for many many centuries. The closest glimpse he had was the surviving Sumric languages but even those were vastly different and unintelligible to each other as they had been evolving in their own separate ways. In his late teens Delor travelled to Mainland Malomanan where he studied Moicha at Cùlèrnoume Ỳrjémua (Universtity of Ỳrjému) and travelled north to learn the little known Nümmezse languages. In his time in Mémoicha (a mainland territory on the east coast) he heard of the rivalry with the Foranía from Müforia, mostly he heard about how the Foranía spoke a weird slant dialect of Moicha. Curious to this claim he met the Foranía linguist Ğüglëfer and learned that the Foranía spoke a seperate yet related language to Moicha. He returned to Lem Pars now with a firm knowledge of languages but with a thirst to discover Lemre, how did it work? How similar was it to the other Sumric languages? What did it even sound like? These questions buzzed in Delor's head. The answer wasn't an easy one to get for details of the language are to be found in ancient records written by Antagan scholars when the language was alive and well (which was a very long time ago), these records lay far across the ocean on the Henda continent in the imperial city Antagan, stored away in vast libraries belonging to the open school, so not the most accessible...or affordable. However Delor couldn't have picked a better time to access these records for he saw the beginning of a new Lemne revolution, albeit at that time it was no more than public speeches and people flying flags with the infamous Lemne phrase *tere möcebją mö mâląmäm* meaning 'do not temper us'. It was also a time when people were trying to claim back their own culture, and what better way to do that than to speak the Lemne language once again! Delor convinced people to donate money and supplies for a trip to Antagan to access the only records of Lemre and to bring the information back and ultimately to restore the language to its former glory. With thanks to the current sentiment regarding Lemne culture he found no shortage of donors and was soon on a ship to Antagan. When he arrived he met with the open school of Antagan to gain permission to access the records. His only condition to enter was that he had to make copies of the originals instead of taking them. Delor was happy enough with the arrangement and after a few months of slaving over old records and copying them he returned to Lem Pars with the long awaited language. He began to teach it to children at the open schools but his work caught so much attention that adults attended his lessons to hear the language. To encourage its usage Delor created posters that he put up around the island, each poster had delora lenonre (Delor's Guidance) about usage of the language which are as follows:

* 1. If you know the Lemre word for something, use that word only

 

''2. *If someone speaks to you in Lemre, it is only courteous to reply in Lemre. Replying in another language or not at all is an offence against the person''

 

3. *Do not chastise another for speaking Lemre

 

4. *If you bear a child, grace its ears with only Lemre

 

This campaign was incredibly successful. So much so that the language went from being forgotten to the last word to being widely understood, and by the next generation even gained native speakers, the generation after that had some monolingual Lemre speakers.

The Lemre language wasn't the first to be spoken on the island however and it the language that came before Lemre, called Hajec, has left some traces of itself in Lemre. In their anger of being colonised by the foreign race the Lemne rationalise their sentiment by proclaiming that they were on the island long, long before the Jašawn set foot there and that they were there first. However this statement is not entirely true, of course the Lemne lived on the island before the Jašawn..but they were not the first people to live there..strictly speaking. The various Sumric peoples each have their own cultures and languages distinct from each other though they do recognise that they all descend from the same group of people. If you try to distinguish the Sumric peoples genetically you will find that they are all the one race with little genetic differences amongst the various populations. So here we must define the word 'people' to refer to a cultural group. With this definition of 'people' we can say that the Lemne as a cultural group were not the first to inhabit the island, they they do in part descend from the first inhabitants of Lem Pars genetically speaking.

The first inhabitants of the Island were there before it was even an island. The people were Sumric nomads like everyone else and just so happened to be on the island when the rising sea levels submerged the low lying lands around Lem Pars which cut it off from the mainland creating an island. The water rose very quick as at the same time a tsunami came across the ocean from the south east and flooded the low lying areas within the space of a few days. The now higher sea level stopped the water from draining away. Any unfortunate soul who happened to be on the island at the time was now stuck there for good much to their woe. Some deer were trapped on the island too but there wasn't enough to survive on by hunting so the islanders domesticated the deer population and led the herds to grazing areas. The first islanders were now shepherds. With domestic deer the people could now milk the does, eat the meat of a portion of the herd and have a greater control over the deer population as opposed to following wild deer herds. The shepherds lived a nomadic life as they had to herd the deer onto fresh pastures after several weeks of staying in one area. The language these people spoke was an ancient one that was even older than Old Sumrë (which is itself the ancestor of all the modern Sumric languages) as all of the Sumnë of this time spoke the parent language of Old Sumrë known today by linguists only as *Proto-Sumric* (itself the daughter of Proto-Sumro-Naukl). There is absolutely no record left of Proto-Sumric so linguists look to Old Sumrë to determine what Proto-Sumric may have been like. So the very first individuals to be trapped on the island spoke Proto-Sumric though over time the island language changed though only slightly for the few records of the ancient island language, scant as they are, show that it was very similar to Proto-Sumric in its grammar and phonology while Old Sumrë deviated quite a bit. The scant records of the island language are to be found carved on raised slabs of rock throughout the island, the script the language is written in is much like the Rësora script of the mainland, though it has more straight and jagged lines as it is hard to carve round lines on rock. What these carvings actually said remained a mystery for a long time as no one knew the language. It was only until recently after linguists reconstructed Proto-Sumric that the writing on the rocks beared some similarity to Proto-Sumric. This then allowed some clever souls to reconstruct the original island language based on the scant attestations for intellectual purposes and also to decider the carvings. The old standing stones shed their mystery and shown themselves to have a dual purpose for the first islanders. One purpose was a practical one written on one side of the slab that told the shepherds how long they should graze their deer in the surrounding areas and to warn of any potential danger. The second purpose was a religious one. The opposite side of the slab had a religious purpose with carvings telling of the people's devotion to the animal spirits and ancestors, this devotion to the gods is somewhat unusual as Sumric people tend to be lax on actively worshipping their gods. These slabs indicate that after being trapped on the island the first islanders felt that they had to rely more on their gods. Modern linguists have named the old island language Hajec which comes from the Lemre hąjec meaning 'whisked away'. From the carvings we can see that they called themselves the Onxiibhöne /ɔnxiːβonɛ/ (The latinised spelling was created by modern linguists) which means 'trapped' (or to translate literally on 'still xii 'force' -bhöne 'by').

Once trace of Hajec can be seen in Lemre in the word 'ąsätlä. 'When the Lemne settlers first arrived on the island they interacted with the Onxiibhöne by trading the fish they caught in return for deer's milk, meat and fur. After some time of co-habitating the island the two peoples began to interbreed and intermingle with Lemne culture dominating. Eventually the Onxiibhöne fully and peacefully assimilated into Lemne culture and language. The herds of deer were left to become feral and graze free unto their own wild will. As a cultural group the Onxiibhöne had died out, though they bred with the Lemne so the blood of the first islanders survives in the modern population. One feature of Onxiibhöne culture was passed down and that was riding on the backs of deer. With no horses the Onxiibhöne would select a number of deer from the herd to ride upon their backs, this made it easier to manage larger herds which spread out over longer distances. These select deer were called æshätle in Hajec meaning 'carrier'. Any deer chosen to be an æshätle, usually muscular individuals strong enough to bear a person, was not to be eaten or milked and was even revered, even after death it was frowned upon to eat one as they were seen as family. When an æshätle died its body would be painted with words in Hajec for good luck on its journey beyond life, then a death song would be sung as is done for humans, then the body would be left as carrion as the permfrost ground is too difficult to dig to dig a grave. After generations of riding deer the Onxiibhöne started to breed the æshätle only with other æshätle in order to breed deer specifically for riding, this created a sub-breed of deer with distinguishing features such as stocky and enduring legs and large backs. This tradition survived with the Lemne even after the deer herds were left to be feral. The Lemre may capture a wild deer and tame it for to ride on its back, this is only done by few individuals in rural areas where there is greater distances between settlements, a distance easier covered on deerback. But mostly such deer are kept as pets nowadays rather than for purely practical purposes. The Lemre call these tame deer ąsätlä which is one of the few direct loanwords from Hajec, stemming from the word æshätle. The Lemne dye the hair of a tame ąsätlä to distinguish it from wild deer, so that a hunter knows not to kill it (it is common courtesy that ąsätlä are not to be hunted).