Heronbaht Language

Heronbaht, also called Tekeheron, is the historic language of the Principality of Antyok and the former Kingdom of Heronbar.

Heronbaht was once thought to be a language isolate, unrelated to the two major languages families in the region, Asokway and Aralsic. Various writers have claimed Heronbaht to have been either one of the many languages of the ancient Godmen, or that the Heronbaht people were amongst some of the first migrants to have left (or been ejected from) the ancient Realm of the Godmen. The most convincing of these theories is by the Hartheran linguist Storbler, who wrote a treatise linking Heronbaht as a the only surviving language in the Ahngrit language family. This theory is now accepted by the majority of modern linguists and historians.

After the Battle of Four Kingdoms and the downfall of the Kingdom of Heronbar, its Sann'ali conquerors made a concerted effort to eradicate all traces of the Heronbaht language and culture, destroying the royal libraries and many literary treasures. Yet the language survived on the sole remaining outpost of the old kingdom, Antyok, and in the southern isles of The Spines.

The history of the Heronbaht people is much obscured by later historical prejudice, describing them as a peculiar, perverse and insular people. Certainly their culture developed in isolation, possibly in lands long sunk by interglacial floods. Consensus amongst historians is that they arrived on Besoa quite late, but it is possible they arrived much earlier and were already resident when later Aralsic migrants settled and created the later kingdoms.

At its height the language had a great poetic and literary tradition, and was much influenced by loan words from other languages. The Heronbaht were well travelled, and gathered terms and references from far afield that may well have seemed peculiar to Besoan ears. Spelling became both pedantic and varied.

After the crushing of the mother kingdom, the scholars of Antyoq, being the sole repositors and promoters of their native tongue, made great strides to reform and simplify the language, and their results were elegant and successful, taking the language somewhat back to its roots.

On the islands of the southern Spines, the language split into several local dialects, mutually intelligible but barely comprehensible to visitors from Antyok. Sann'ali influence led to the gradual rise of Sann'alese as the dominant language of the islands, but the local dialect is still littered with words from Old Antyok.

• a – hat
• e – bet (Note Heronbaht a/e are changeable due to inflection)
• ah - car
• i- hit
• o – hob
• u – put

• b
• ch – as in loch, ch is an antiquated sound generally superceded by Heronbaht ‘k’.
• g – only ever hard
• h
• k – pronounced somewhere between k and g
• m
• n
• q – like a k, but in the throat, and with following aspiration
• r
• s
• t
• y – only ever a consonant, and relatively rare
• l – usually at the end of words

The writing system is not alphabet but indicates consonants. Words are assembled from several of these, and complex terms can be lengthy, up to ten ‘letters’. Old Heronbaht often adopted the contractions used by foreigners, but modern Antyoqan uses abbreviations.

• he
• hi
• ka
• ke
• mi
• mu
• na
• ne
• qu
• qi
• ra
• sa
• te

• bar
• ron
• sen
• sib
• met
• sul
• min
• seq

In these, the vowel pairs a/e and i/o are must agree with the a/e of the proceeding vowel. (eg, Hiseneb is correct, Hisenab is not)

• geb
• nab
• naq
• qeb
• rab
• yeb

[teb – irregular, inflects i/e]