Written forms of language reveal kinships that speech alone can hide. The pale-aelvar script, nearest in lineage to the lost ancient civilization, is the most distinct: fluid, continuous strokes that curl and weave like water. Soft, flowing, and, to my eye, undeniably beautiful. High-aelvar script appears to have been devised after the great cataclysm of the Binding; its lines are smoother and more regular, clearly adapted to a language that has shifted significantly from its ancestor, yet it still favors graceful ligatures and long, unbroken strokes. Wood-aelvar script is an outright divergence: angular, rune-like characters interspersed with small pictographic elements. It is built as much for carving into bark and stone as for ink on parchment.
Human scripts, and what little we have reliably observed of dverger markings, show unmistakable influence from wood-aelvar script. The earliest human glyphs mimic those forest runes in their blocky forms, but over time they have been systematically pared down into discrete symbols for individual sounds rather than whole concepts or syllables. In technical terms, the humans moved from a semi-logographic, rune-derived system toward more strictly phonetic alphabets. A practical choice for merchants and bureaucrats if not a particularly elegant one.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
