While every pony is expected to study some small amount of the history of Equestria, their studies are often limited by language. While modern day writers and scholars simply use the Modern Equestrian dialect, for many centuries the spoken tongue and the written word were quite different.
Before the foundation of Equestria, the three nations of ponies--earth, unicorn, and pegasus—each had their own language, and only the unicorns had a written language. After the nations unified to from the Equestrian Empire, a written language and a spoken language evolved from the three tongues.
The commonly spoken language became known as Low Equestrian. It arose from a melange of the tongues of the unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies. While the language was fairly standard across the empire, one could find differences in dialect in different regions of the empire. For instance, in areas mostly populated by pegasi, the Low Equestrian dialect was heavily influenced by the pegasus tongue; whereas earth ponies and their dialects had very few words that meant “cloud,” the dialects commonly spoken by Pegasi often had more than twenty.
The less commonly spoken language, used only in the written form and in court, became known as Aliansi. Where Low Equestrian showed equal influences from the languages of all three nations, Aliansi was almost exclusively influenced by the language of the Unicorns. As time went on and both pegasi and earth ponies learned to write, the dialect became more mixed while still retaining the formal stylings of the unicorn language. It is from these influences that Aliansi became High Equestrian.
From the rise of High Equestrian (around 200 E.C.) to the mid-Solar Era (around 2300 E.C.) scholarly books were written almost exclusively in High Equestrian, with the only exceptions being “common” books published and marketed to the average individual. By the year 1400 E.C., Low Equestrian had evolved so much as to make High Equestrian, which had remained largely unchanged, an entirely alien tongue to the average pony. The novel The Unycorne and the Seaponie, published in 1432 E.C. by Gilden Reynes, a unicorn who would become well known for her erotic fiction, was the first instance of a mass-marketed novel being recorded in Middle Equestrian. It wasn't until 2057 E.C. that the first instances of Modern Equestrian appeared in print, and it wasn't until 2364 that the first scholarly texts were written in Modern Equestrian. By the end of the Solar Era, almost all texts were written Modern Equestrian.
The histories presented in this volume are translated from texts written in High Equestrian during the early years of the Solar Era. As they were written in an age where only the most educated ponies would be able to understand the text, the volume assumes much knowledge of pre-Equestrian history. While I would recommend anybody planning on reading my translations study basic pre-Equestrian history, most pre-equestrian history has never been translated from Aliansi and Unicorn, and translated texts are very difficult to locate. For this reason, a summary of pre-Equestrian history shall be included after the foreword.
--Polyphonie Modes