Proto CLT
The Eldspraecha — the elder speech — is what this wiki calls Proto CLT: the first layer of the language, spoken by the survivors and by everybody who came through in the first generations, because it was simply the language and there was no other. See Lexicon:Proto for its words.
Nobody speaks it now. It went the way any language goes: the people who had it first grew old, the people who learned it from them spoke a version already worn, and one day the last person who had spoken it before the count of years began was dead and nobody noticed at the time. Its words sit under the modern ones the way foundations sit under a house. A modern speaker says Byoef for death and Glufri for bread and does not know where either came from.
The survivors wrote it down for the first time, which is when it acquired letters at all. That century gave the language the one sound nobody chose: a soft exhale the writers had no letter for and invented one for, ĥ, which wore away entirely over the nine centuries that followed.
The Proto dictionary preserves the usage notes of the tongue's first speakers, who talked of it as something used on "brain-net chats"; nobody in Teraell has ever known what that meant.