History - 1

This is exciting, as I've never actually sat down and written out the history and process that Elessic has gone through.

Due to motor-skill issues, I got a laptop when I was a freshman in High School, which facilitated my entry into writing. At 14, I began writing a series which I would later refer to as The East, which featured the earliest form of Elessic (The East is on an indefinite hiatus for numerous reasons). Fortunately, because I hoard files, I still have some my earliest documents on the language.

Its early form was a word-replacement system, wherein I did little more than swap English words for made-up ones with little regard to phonology or grammar. This was before I had any exposure to the study of Linguistics. My philosophy in this period was to simply think up a word and then that was the word I'd use, without caring how much I actually liked the sound (or how efficient it was).

I named this language "Ralef," even though I didn't care for the name.

Elessic grew out of Ralef in many ways, although they look very different now. In 2010, I discovered Esperanto and immediately put my conlang project on hold while I studied an actual conlang.

Ralef had a developed glossary, due to the ease at which I created words. Many words were two-or-more syllables in length, which was made worse by the fact that all suffixes and verb-endings were at least one syllable in length.

Nouns pluralized with "-los" (which remained Elessic's pluralization system for a long time)
I have a record of "-ir" forming past-tense verbs, but I have no memory of this. What I do remember is "-el" being used for past-tense and "-et" being used for future-tense. This is directly related to Elessic's current endings for Transitive Verbs.

Pronouns had inflected forms, as in English, but oddly, the third-person plural was irregular. Two Pronouns that carried on in some fashion were "rilo" ("I") and "mehen" ("She"). In Elessic's second phase (after my exposure to Esperanto) I began shortening and increasing efficiency wherever I could. "Rilo" became "lo," which eventually became "la" for me liking how it sounded, and because I see it as the most basic sound combination in the language, with "l" and "a" being (possibly) the two most common sounds. "Mehen" became "mehn," then "men," but was batted around until I settled on the current "mey."

There are few words which I've always viewed as being some of the core blocks of the language. "Mehen" and "rilo" were some of these, but another was "boru," which served as the "to be" verb. This got fiddled with, but eventually was dropped altogether.

The name "Elessic" came towards the beginning of the language's second phase, which began sometime in college. It was thought up on a whim and meant to illustrate more of the sound I was looking for in the language. Still, I quickly decided that it wouldn't be the autonym, partially because "-ic" is an English morpheme. I then came up with elestɪl, but I knew that would never serve, either. After I came up with the dava ("Elf"), davrasi fell into place as a nice-sounding and logical autonym.