Sylvan Writing

The Sylvan system of writing is a complex and magical script that is primarily characterized by its artistry and magic. It is logo-syllabic, and often written non-linearly, for example with the most important concepts in the center of a work and other concepts radiating outward or spiraling from the central concepts. It is also magical: all Sylvan writing depends on magical determinatives to distinguish meaning. These determinatives are not visually indicated, but are a magical layer that provides a sense of feeling or emotion to the reader. These emotional determinatives, if written by a powerful enough fey, can even cause a change in emotions or thoughts to the reader (although the words must be read and understood for this to occur, a mere glance, nor an uneducated one, is never sufficient).

In this way, for example, a fey story about a man on a journey might be written with a description of the man at the center, and then spirals of glyphs emanating from the man. The chronology of the story depends on the magical determinatives, which tell the reader which aspects of the story come first. Or a glyph may mean both birth and death, with the emotional determinative determining which meaning to apply. This form of writing is both almost impossible for non-fey to write, and also somewhat fraught to read, for it exposes you to the feelings and charms of the writer. A very powerful fey, writing a poem of rage, or a story of love, can imbue the words with sufficient enchantment that the reader may well feel the rage as their own, or fall in love with the subject of the poem.

And so, over time, as the fey begin to interact with other people (non-fey), an orthography for writing the Sylvan tongue in Elvish was developed, originally by the elves, but later by the fey themselves, as they saw the uses of less magically fraught ways of writing. In the modern era, several different orthographies exist, but the most common is the Elvish, which was popularized amongst humans by the Drankorian Empire, and the Tyrwinghan, which is rarely used outside of Tyrwingha.