Lænc (Hesperdian language)

Lænc (LAH-ink or laenk, also known as Cleban in Huitcan) is the language of the Krævan people who settled in the Hesperdin. It is part of the Huitco-Clebano language family and as such is distantly related to the Huitcan Language.

Descended from the ancient Proto-Huitco-Clebano, Lænc began diverging as a language in the Migratory Period when the ancestors of the Krævan continued their migration west to Ummarnu while the Huitca settled in the Phagosian Sea. over the years this western dialect to Proto-Huitco-Clebano would develop first in isolation, and upon the Krævan settling in the Hesperdin Northeast, important influences from the other Hesperdian languages led to its divergence into Old Lænc. Old Lænc became codified in the Shopantxa Ærcan (Imperial Summer) Period by Atxas in his Grammaticus Clebanus, though this text has since been lost.

Over the Txashikan Period, Old Lænc underwent gradual changes, such as the dropping of grammatical cases, giving way to Early Modern Lænc at the beginning of the Republican Period. In the time to the present, Early Modern Lænc has since undergone subtle evolutions to become the mutually-intelligible Modern Lænc, or simply Lænc.

Lænc is the lingua franca of the Hesperdin, though some heathfolk communities and jungle kingdoms preserve their linguistic traditions, generally bilingually with Lænc. In Rathnir, Lænc is primarily spoken in Krævan enclaves mainly made up of refugees from the Krævan Crisis.

Etymology
The word lænc itself means "tongue" or "language" and as such is the Krævan endonym for their language. It has also been referred to as Krævan as a reference to the ethnic group which primarily speaks it. The Huitcan name for Lænc, Cleban, is simply the Huitcan word for the Krævan people.

Phonology
Lænc has four vowels native to the language a, æ, e, o along with two additional vowels used primarily for loanwords i and u. The vowels are pronunced like those in the following English words: Lænc also has two semi-vowels y and w, as in yogurt and award in American English.

Below is a chart of the consonants in Lænc and their corresponding sound from English:

Morphology
The morphology of Modern Lænc is vastly different from that of Old Lænc, as millennia of influence from other Hesperdian languages led to important morphological and syntactical shifts. Modern Lænc, for instance, does not inflect grammatical cases as in older forms, instead depending on prepositions and descriptive modifiers to clarify grammatical function. Lænc is a fusional language, meaning that it features significant verbal conjugations, although the modern tongue is notably more regular than its ancient predecessor. Modern Lænc also conjugates the indicative and subjunctive moods in the same way, although the imperative is conjugated differently.

In Lænc, adjectives and adverbs usually follow what they modify, rather than coming before; thus, a phrase such as "imperial summer" is translated as shopantxa ærcan (lit. "summer imperial") rather than ærcan shopantxa. An interesting quirk of Lænc is in its frequent use of gerunds and past participles as primary nouns. Perhaps the most characteristic example of this in in the word Encan ("Shining") which is the primary identifier for the divine in the Cult of the Encan. Other examples include sentxen ("castle," lit. "fortified"), wegnæn ("adult", lit. "grown"), and enmotxan ("orange", lit. "sun-kissed").