Hies Loricoda

Hies Loricoda (Whisper of the First Coming), often referred to across Gaedera as the Archaic Language, is the language spoken by the deities of Gaedera. It was created and evolved amongst deities and later taught to humanity. It is sometimes referred to as Hies for short.

Hies Loricoda in its original form has aspects that are unspeakable by mortals; the version spoken by humans is in fact an attenuated form. Long-standing efforts across millennia have resulted in a wealth of documentation for the language, albeit scattered across the world and its countless disparate countries and institutions.

Due to Hies Loricoda's ubiquity across world history, many modern languages are descended from it. There is a vast family of related languages across the world with roots in Hies Loricoda, sharing many cognate words. As a result of its primordial origins, Hies Loricoda is often viewed as a symbol of the world's common ancestry under the goddess Gaede, and the pact forged in the Red Ring. Many nations and major cities retain their Hies names, such as Aora and its capital, Cisa Aorina. Hies Loricoda is also widely associated with the matters of deities and theology, and is the primary language of communication with deities in every culture. Most religious devotees learn Hies as an aspect of their training.

While an old written script for Hies Loricoda was developed in the Elin era, a standard for script conversion to the Belan writing system has existed for as long as Belan has been standardised, superseding the original script in spread and usage.

Since the New Truth movement that swept the world in 421, Hies Loricoda has come to be seen as a language of

Introduction and dispersal
It is said that in the early decades of the Elin Era, circa 8000 BOG, when humanity first emerged on Gaedera, deities came forth from the Ether to convene with and teach Their language to them.

Though Hies Loricoda has unspeakable aspects--certain features are conveyed through ripples in the Ether--the sounds can be approximated by mortal speech. This attenuated form of the language was imparted unto mortal beings by various deities in waves, both before and after they began to migrate across the world in the Age of Movement. Humans developed a written script for Hies Loricoda at their very first contact, and that script dispersed across the world along with them.

Almost all languages spoken in Gaedera bear some imprint of the archaic language; some of the oldest languages, such as Orbono and Hies Selahada, are part of the language family of Hies Loricoda and feature a large amount of vocabulary derived from it.

Linguistics
Main article: Hies Loricoda language guide

Hies Loricoda is a highly structured language with an inflexible word order. It features subject-object-verb order and is orthographically shallow, with graphemes corresponding almost one-one to phonemes. The language features a significant amount of agglutination, with words inflected largely through suffixes.