Encyclopedia Ayleidoone: concerning Light

From the Encyclopedia Ayleidoone: Ayleidoon and its Etymologies by Alexandre Provanc of Jehanna

On the Subject of Light

The Ayleidoon had at least two words that meant light:

Alata and Latta

Many scholars would tell you that this difference is minuscule and that the words can be used interchangeably in any Ayleidoon conversation.

I disagree completely.

The Ayleidoon peoples (not to be confused with the Ayleidoon language since these phrases are used interchangeably) held light in high regards, many of their city-states giving praises to a pantheon known as "The Nine Coruscations": nine of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky. Since the Ayleidoon valued starlight as the most sacred and holy of light, this makes sense. As such, they would likely have devised a linguistic mean to differentiate between "holy" light and "mundane" light, hence the words Alata and Latta

Consider the following word Alasil, meaning vision. Scholars have noted that the Ayleidoon people quite enjoyed taking words and compounding them to make other words: Adabal comes from Ada (God) and Bal (stone), Malada comes from Mal[a] (High;likely taken from Malatu meaning Truth) and Ada (again, God), Welkynd comes from Welke (Sky) and Kynd (child), and so on and so forth. Those of learning understand that the -sil of Alasil likely comes from the word Sila, meaning "shines". An -a suffix lends itself to plurals, so taking this away leaves us with the word Sil, or "shine". Since Alasil as a whole means "Vision" and Sil means "shine", then the Ala is likely to mean "eyes" to make "eye-shine".

That helps explain the Ala of Alata, but what of the Ta? Scholars from Firsthold to Gwylim are not entirely sure, but we must look to the word Tam-Rielle for a partial answer. Even the common folk know that Tamriel comes from words meaning "Dawn's Beauty", and Tam-Rielle are such words. Rielle is the Ayleidoon word for Beauty, and Tam is the word for Dawn (not the dawn that rises with Magnus, but the Dawn Era where the gods walked the world). Sometimes, when the pronunciation of a compound would be muddled, consonants and vowels (See Malada) would be dropped. Ala-ta(m) can be taken to mean literally "Eyes of Dawn" or "Dawn Light".

While a case could be made where Latta is similar (one scholar of Alinor once proposed it to mean Dawn of Time. How erroneous!), the most likely means of its origin is a corruption of the word Lattia (another word meaning 'shines'.) during one of the shifts in Ayleidoon linguistic patterns between the Late Merethic Era and the founding of the Camoran Dynasty. Alata seems to have been an established word, it appearing frequently in transcriptions in the walls in ruins under Cyrodiil City, one of the earliest Ayleid ruins on all Tamriel: Latta is apparently absent, but Lattia is not. Latta is however present in carvings on the walls of the ruins of Bisnensel, one of the youngest Ayleid ruins in the land, thought to be built sometime in the 1E400s.

These are normally intuitive leaps that scholars should not make, but our lack of knowledge into the Ayleidoon as a people and culture force me to make some such leaps. Latta is most like to simply mean 'shine', or better 'shimmer', a mere glimmer in comparison to the Light of the Dawn: Magnus and his Ge.

Maybe once more money is poured into the excavation or maybe even restoration of a couple of these glorious ruins chock full of history and potential cultural findings, answers may well 'come to the light'.