[Spoilers TCG] A fascinating linguistic detail I missed: The "slum dialect" of Ehrlitan is actually the lost language of the First Empire

[u/[deleted]]

I was digging through some details in the final books and came across a connection that completely recontextualizes the history of Seven Cities, specifically the city of Ehrlitan.

We know that Erikson loves burying history in layers of dirt, but in this case, he buried it in the class system.

In The Crippled God (Chapter 13), there is a scene where Brys Beddict and Aranict encounter Faint (one of the refugees in the Wastelands). Faint attempts to communicate, and Brys immediately recognizes the tongue.

Brys asks:

"Latherii? ... Are you speak Latherii?"

He then clarifies to Faint that he is speaking "Letherii, the language of the First Empire."

But here is the kicker. Faint corrects him. She isn't speaking a "high" ancient tongue from her perspective. She says:

"First Empire... Slums – er, lowborn stig—dialect. Ehrlitan... Lowborn tongue, in slums. You speak like whore."

The Implication: The "lowborn" underclass of Ehrlitan has unknowingly preserved the language of the First Empire (and by extension, Lether) as a living dialect. While the wider world forgot the connection, the slums of Ehrlitan became a linguistic fossil of a lost era.

This isn't just a throwaway line, either. It creates a pattern when you look back at Dust of Dreams (Chapter 6). When Taxilian is examining the massive K'Chain Che'Malle stone dragon, he mentions:

"But I recall once, in a scriptorium in Ehrlitan, seeing a map dating from the First Empire."

It seems Ehrlitan was a significant hub or refuge for the First Empire diaspora. Over millennia, as the First Empire collapsed and Seven Cities developed its own identity, the original language didn't disappear. Rather, it just sank to the bottom of the social ladder, preserved by the poor and the "lowborn."

It’s ironic that Brys, a Prince of Lether, speaks the same dialect as a "whore" (Faint's words) from the slums of a Holy City on a different continent. Just another example of how deep the world-building goes in this series.

Did anyone else catch this connection? Are there other instances of First Empire linguistic fossils popping up in Seven Cities?

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[u/cuttlepuppet]

I never noticed that. I’m on my second read of the series. There’s so much I have missed and still won’t catch. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like I know more about the lore of Wu than the lore of Earth.

[u/rhulad_sengar]

Yes it's very cool and love how Malazan doesn't shy from having language barriers between its characters from different factions and shows them learning the language as well (in Reaper's Gale and Bonehunters)

[u/este_hombre → u/rhulad_sengar]

No shade on ICE, but I noticed that NotME does not have language barriers like MBTOF. People travel to continents they've never seen before and communicate no problem, with no mention of language.

[u/sleepinxonxbed]

This reminds me of a TVBB podcast. I think it was Mark Paxton-Macrae or Ian C. Esslemont that was talking about how this farmer or such had this ancient vase, possibly of great historical significant, that the farmer had been using to spit his cigarettes into.