Cànain

Cànain belongs to no language family. The general survey of the tongues of Erôth gives its usual speakers as gnomes, Ustos and Sil, and holds that it is written as well as spoken.

It is also the hand that magic is written in. The Arcane Congress was founded in Ustos and its first members were all gnomes, and its spell scrolls are lettered in Cànain. Four of them turned up in a bed-leg compartment at an estate sale in Loshev, worth enough on their own to cover the books they were stolen alongside. Anything with Congress training behind it tends to come out the same way: a rotted satchel of some eighteen potions, shoved into a Mól nook at some point in the past couple of centuries and left there, carried Cànain labels on every vial. A thing summoned off a gnome-written scroll took its orders in Cànain, because that was the tongue the scroll was written in.

Mikhail Kethrel speaks it fluently. When Voler Bria greeted him in Cànain at the Color Stay and bid him farewell in it, and Mikhail answered without hesitating, he had quietly told the gnome he was educated.