Lortho: An Artistic Language

[bbbourq]

Lortho (Part I)

Hello fellow conlangers!

I wanted to take the opportunity to give you all a proper introduction of my artistic constructed language, Lortho. I've been quasi-participating in this community, but now I have mustered the courage to step into the limelight.

First off, how is Lortho pronounced? Anglicized, it is pronounced [ˈloɹ·θo]; however, the true pronunciation is [ˈloɾ·tʰo]. The adjectival form in English when describing its people or culture is Lorthoan.

My inspiration predominantly comes from the Indo-European language family with a sprinkle of traits from the Koreanic and Uralic families. The writing system is inspired by Devanagari, Tibetan, and Tengwar.

Introduction

Lortho is an artlang which takes its roots in 2003. A friend of mine was creating a board game similar to Risk with an inter-galactic setting. Knowing my background in neography, he asked if I could make a unique writing system for one of the nations in this game, called Lortho. I made the writing system (at the time it was heavily based on Hangul) and saved it on my Dell™ laptop which crashed with all my data. Fast forward to 2016. I decided it was time to revive this writing system and create a language to go with it. I had to recreate many of the glyphs and became even better than my first attempt 10-fold.

As with most first-time languages, Lortho is agglutinating. Its syntactic alignment is Nominative-Accusative. The basic word order is Verb-Subject-Object.

Phonology

Consonants

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 			Bilabial	Labiodental	Aveolar	Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal			m-1				n-2			
Plosive (voiceless)	p pʰ				t tʰ			k kʰ	
Plosive (voiced)	b				d dʰ			
Fricative				f		s	ʃ			h
Lateral Approximant					l lʰ-3			
Tap or Flap						ɾ

^{1, 2} these two consonants are the only ones that can be geminated and are also expressed as such in the writing system
³ the aspirated /l/ is a tricky one since it pretty much is already aspirated. So this can also be expressed as [lh], especially when it precedes a vowel.

The consonants were largely inspired by Hindi. Both /g/ and [bʰ] are absent for the sake of uniqueness.

Vowels (Monophthongs)

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 		Front	Back
Close		i	u
Close-Mid		o
Open-Mid	ɛ	
Open		a	

The vowels are largely inspired by Persian (of which I am a fluent speaker). I originally wanted to have an open-back unrounded vowel [ɑ]; however, when I pronounced the words for the #Lextreme2018 challenge, I often defaulted on the [a]. Thus, it was so.

Vowels (Diphthongs)

There are four diphthongs: [eɪ] [aɪ] [ɔɪ] [au] which are influenced by both Persian and English (with the omission of [ow] and [oʊ]).

Syllable Structure

The syllable structure is (C)(C)V(V)(C). Mostly the syllables are CV or CVC.

Consonant clusters are still somewhat a mystery, but so far this is what I have discovered:

Onset
/pr/
/kr/

Coda
none

Adjacent syllables:
/nd/
/nt/
/nk~ŋk/
/np~mp/
/ns/
/pt/
/rn/
/rt/
/sk/
/ʃt/

Prosody

Stress is maintained in the verb stem or noun root. Below are a few examples of how stress is maintained or moved depending on the conjugation/declension.

-n verb infinitives are stressed on the ultimate syllable and the stress remains in place when conjugated.

Example:

bolan [bo·ˈlan]
v. to plow, till; (informal) to procrastinate
1MSG PST:
bolanikhin [bo·ˈla·ni·kʰin]

-t and -o verb infinitives are stressed on the penultimate syllable and remain stressed on the ultimate syllable of the stem when conjugated.

Example:

konpharo [kon·ˈpʰa·ɾo]
v. to speak (stem: konphar-)
1MSG PST:
konpharikhin [kon·ˈpʰa·ɾi·kʰin]

Pluralized nouns will move the stress to the penultimate syllable.

Examples:

somina [so·ˈmi·na]
n. neut siren; beauty which cannot be seen but understood through emotion
plural:
sominane [so·mi·ˈna·nɛ]

morashi [mo·ˈɾa·ʃi]
n. masc stag, male deer
plural:
morasheni [mo·ɾa·ˈʃɛ·ni]

Morphology

Nouns

Introduction:

Nouns in Lortho have three distinct features:

1. They are one of three genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter
2. All nouns are modified for case
3. All nouns end in a vowel

The gender in Lortho is governed by the final vowel:

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Masculine	Feminine	Neuter
-i		-u		-a
dharaki		dhammu		hadikha
mountain	chair		country

There are only two exceptions thus far. There are sure to be more:

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Masculine	Feminine	Neuter
tapa				dhi
pasta				water

Grammatical Case:

Lortho has ten (10) cases. The following word will be used throughout the table:

kansaptha [kan·ˈsap·tʰa]
n. neut forest, woods

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Case		Affix		Meaning			Example
Nominative	Ø		subject			kansaptha
Accusative	-me		object			kansapthame
Dative		-mela		indirect object		kansapthamela
Genitive1	-nau-1		of or possession	kansapthanau
Lative-2	-ina/ena-3, 4	motion in/into		kansapthaina
Ablative	-nat		motion out of/away from	kansapthanat
Allative	-dan		motion to/towards	kansapthadan
Prolative	-dar		motion through/via	kansapthadar
Instrumental	-len		use of/using		kansapthalen
Vocative	fa(l)-		address or invocation	fakansaptha

¹ -nau is the alienable genitive whereas -tho is the inalienable genitive (archaic) as seen in the endonym Lortho.
² The lative case also doubles as the locative case.
³ -ina is added to feminine and neuter nouns and -ena is added to masculine nouns.
⁴ When -ina is added to a feminine noun, the final u changes to o creating the diphthong oi. e.g. kansapu tree -> kansapoina in the tree.

Personal Possession:

The personal possessive is formed using a prefix which is gender and number specific.

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 		1SG	2SG	3SG	1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	ni-	lin-	li-	nima-	nani-	limi-
Feminine	nu-	lun-	lu-	numa-	nanu-	limu-
Neuter				la-			lima-

Pluralization:

Each noun is pluralized by adding a suffix:

Feminine and neuter nouns are pluralized by adding the suffix -ne.

Examples:

1. kansaphu n. fem tree; plural kansaphune
2. hadikha n. neut country, land; plural hadikhane

Masculine nouns:

1. regular masculine nouns will add the infix -en- before the final -i.
2. the infix will change to -em- if the noun ends with -ni.

Examples:

• olakhi n. masc boat; plural olakheni
• phorenni n. masc peak, summit; plural phorennemi

Indefinite Article:

All nouns in Lortho are inherently definite (like Persian). The indefinite article is the numeral one (1) which is ikhi [ˈi·kʰi].

Personal Pronouns:

Lortho is a pro-drop language. In some languages, a certain class of pronouns is omitted due to context or can be grammatically inferred. In Lortho the latter is true with personal pronouns since they can be inferred through verb conjugation. Below is the table of the personal pronouns. These can also use case endings as the nouns.

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 		1SG	2SG	3SG	1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	hin	manni	i	minan	namin	nimi
Feminine	hun	mannu	u	munan	namun	nimu
Neuter				a		naman-1	nima

¹ the 2nd person plural neuter (2NPL) is meant for addressing the general public.

Verbs

Introduction:

Verbs are conjugated in gender and in number, which are governed by the subject (implicit or implied). For the most part, the conjugations are strictly agglutinative; however, there are slight fusional changes.

Conjugation:

First, let’s go over the three types of verbs. Each verb class can be recognized by the infinitives. The classes seem to be largely arbitrary, albeit there are noted patterns which indicate the types of action each class carries. This is speculation at the moment since there is not enough data to make an accurate conclusion. The verbs are conjugated by adding the personal suffixes to their respective stem.

The conjugation table below shows the personal endings (present tense) that are added to the stem.

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 		1SG	2SG	3SG	1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	-in	-anni	-i	-inan	-amin	-imi
Feminine	-un	-annu	-u	-unan	-amun	-imu
Neuter				-a		-ima

-n verbs

All verbs in this class end with -n in the infinitive and is the only class in which the infinitive doubles as its stem.

Example:

shailan [ʃaɪ·ˈlan]
v. to sit
stem: shailan-

-o verbs:

All verbs in this class end with -o in the infinitive. The stem is obtained by removing the final -o and adding the personal suffixes.

Example:

konpharo [kon·ˈpʰa·ɾo]
v. to speak
stem: konphar-

-t verbs:

All verbs in this class end with -t in the infinitive. The stem is obtained by changing the -t to -d.

Example:

namet [ˈnamɛt]
v. to opine
stem: named-

Irregular Stems:

Verbs are very regular and all verbs (so far) are conjugated the same way. There are a few verbs that have irregular stems.

Examples:

harlan [haɾ·ˈlan]
v. to be
stem: harl-

mauran [mau·ˈɾan]
v. to stand
stem: maur-

tumet [ˈtu·mɛt]
v. to be able
stem: tum-

Tenses and Aspects:

As of right now, there are three tenses and two aspects documented. The tenses are present, past, and future. The aspects are perfective and progressive. Each tense and aspect have their own suffix and are placed in a specific order.

Tenses (Present Tense):

The present tense is signified by the personal endings with no other suffixes.

Tenses (Past Tense):

The past tense is obtained by adding the suffix -ikh before the personal ending.

Example:

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konphar-ikh-in  
speak  -PST-1MSG

I spoke.

Tenses (Future Tense):

The future tense is obtained by adding the suffix -ain before the personal endings.

Example:

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konphar-ain-in  
speak  -FUT-1MSG  

I will speak.

Aspects (Progressive):

The progressive aspect is a bit more fusional. This is best understood through the following table which is the present progressive:

phramit [ˈpʰɾa·mit]
v. to push; progress
stem: phramid-

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 		1SG		2SG		3SG
Masculine	phramidian	phramidianni	phramidie
Feminine	phramidiun	phramidiannu	phramidiu
Neuter						phramidia
 		1PL		2PL		3PL
Masculine	phramidinian	phramidiamin	phramidiami
Feminine	phramidunian	phramidiamun	phramidiamu
Neuter						phramidiama

Aspects (Perfective):

The perfective aspect is attained with the suffix -in before the personal endings, but after the tense suffix.

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 		1SG	2SG	3SG
Masculine	-inin	-inanni	-ini
Feminine	-inun	-inannu	-inu
Neuter				-ina
 		1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	-ininan	-inamin	-inimi
Feminine	-inunan	-inamun	-inimu
Neuter				-inima

Negation:

To negate a verb in Lortho, the prefix dha- is added before the stem. If the verb begins with a vowel, the prefix is dhak-. If the verb begins with an h-, the prefix will still be dhak-, however the k will then become aspirated and will be rendered as [kʰ] in the orthography.

____________________________________________

If you have reached this point, either you scrolled all the way down to see how far it goes or you truly read all the content. If the latter is true, I have a few questions which should produce some discussion and provide valuable feedback for my own self-improvement:

1. What feature(s) present in this post are the most interesting and why?
2. What feature(s) are banal and why?
3. What feature(s) do you find the most realistic and why?
4. What feature(s) do you find the most ridiculous or unrealistic and why?
5. Anything else that strikes you as worth mentioning?

tl;dr: This post explains how Lortho is an agglutinating, nominative-accusative, verb-subject-object artistic constructed language and focuses on its nouns and verbs. There are ten cases, three noun classes, and three verb classes. Each topic is explained in relative detail. If you are looking for Lortho’s orthography, Dhadakha, you can peruse my posts in instagram or twitter.

The follow-up to this post will delve into: adjectives, adverbs, questions, and moods.

[Tropylium]

Looking quite lorthy

Vowels (Diphthongs)

I'd probably put in here /e oɪ/ rather than /eɪ ɔɪ/.

Consonant clusters are still somewhat a mystery, but so far this is what I have discovered:

It would seem that you are additionally going to get a full scale of /nC/ clusters from the 2PS possessive suffixes, e.g. lindhammu 'y♂ur chair'? Or maybe you mean just clusters within a morpheme here?

The personal possessive is formed using a prefix which is gender and number specific.

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 		1SG	2SG	3SG	1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	ni-	lin-	li-	nima-	nani-	limi-
Feminine	nu-	lun-	lu-	numa-	nanu-	limu-
Neuter				la-			lima-

The 3PP ones are an interesting divergence from predictability; going by the apparent segmentation in 1PP (1PS + -ma-) and 2PP (na- + 2PS) I would have expected masc. limi- to be followed by fem. lumi- and n. lami-.

Conjugation:

Are verbs ending in -no, -do possible, or are the n- and t-verbs treatable as simply positional absense of the infinitive ending?

[Xwtek]

I think your conjugation is unrealistic. Instead of gender marking on every person, you should restrict it to third person.
As of phonology, I'm not a fan of Eurasian-like conlang. But it looks good enough. However, I would like to use ejective instead of aspiration. After all, you can consider spaceship to be low pressure environment.

[akam chinjir]

I think your conjugation is unrealistic. Instead of gender marking on every person, you should restrict it to third person.

If a language has gender distinctions in pronouns at all, it's reasonably common for it to have them in first- and second-person. (WALS.)

[Moose-tache]

I think your conjugation is unrealistic. Instead of gender marking on every person, you should restrict it to third person.

If a language has gender distinctions in pronouns at all, it's reasonably common for it to have them in first- and second-person. (WALS.)

Akangka was referring to the verbal paradigm, not the pronouns.

It's hard to judge Lortho without knowing the purpose. Lortho is only a very tiny hair away from the default Fantasy Tongue. If this is something to be used in the background of a novel for normal people, it's probably ideal. They'll have fun tracking the -in and -un verbs once they notice the pattern, and everything else is so standard you won't even need to explain it to them. If you give the Lorthians togas or something as a hint you won't even need to tell them what the verb is doing; they'll just know it's optional negative - stem - TAM infix - subject person and number by instinct.

If Lortho is supposed to be something interesting on its own, as a piece of conlang art, then I don't know if the standardness works in its favor or against it. I don't think it's unfair to say it's basically a re-lex of Latin with Finnish noun cases and gender marking on verbs thrown in (by the way, what was "Koreanic" about Lortho?). It's subjective whether that's your thing or not, and it could definitely work if it's a very, very deep dive into the language and setting. I just don't like it personally.

That said, the script is beautiful. I would love to see some longer texts in it.

[akam chinjir]

Akangka was referring to the verbal paradigm, not the pronouns.

Ah, dumb of me.

I read something recently that seemed to imply that you never get gender agreement on verbs (in any person) if adjectives precede nouns. In other words, agreement still mystifies me.

[Moose-tache]

Akangka was referring to the verbal paradigm, not the pronouns.

Ah, dumb of me.

I read something recently that seemed to imply that you never get gender agreement on verbs (in any person) if adjectives precede nouns. In other words, agreement still mystifies me.

Gender agreement on verbs is so rare that you could find any number of coincidences and call it a rule. Maybe no verb-gender-marking language has indefinite articles too? In any case, there are some languages that have head-final order and mark gender on the verb. The Northeast Caucasian languages, for example, are generally head-final, and while their genders sometimes don't really match semantic gender (i.e. they're just arbitrary noun classes), sometimes they clearly do, as in Archi, a Lezgian language of southern Dagestan.

[bbbourq]

Thank you for the input!

More: show

Looking quite lorthy

I hoped it would be so!

More: show

Vowels (Diphthongs)

I'd probably put in here /e oɪ/ rather than /eɪ ɔɪ/.

Ok. I hadn't put too much emphasis on the the diphthongs and this might work much better than what I have.

More: show

Consonant clusters are still somewhat a mystery, but so far this is what I have discovered:

It would seem that you are additionally going to get a full scale of /nC/ clusters from the 2PS possessive suffixes, e.g. lindhammu 'y♂ur chair'? Or maybe you mean just clusters within a morpheme here?

How interesting. I was sure I covered the spectrum, but it seems I missed a whole section. Thank you for pointing it out!

More: show

The personal possessive is formed using a prefix which is gender and number specific.

Code: Select all

 		1SG	2SG	3SG	1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	ni-	lin-	li-	nima-	nani-	limi-
Feminine	nu-	lun-	lu-	numa-	nanu-	limu-
Neuter				la-			lima-

The 3PP ones are an interesting divergence from predictability; going by the apparent segmentation in 1PP (1PS + -ma-) and 2PP (na- + 2PS) I would have expected masc. limi- to be followed by fem. lumi- and n. lami-.

I focused strictly on the final vowel to differentiate the genders.

More: show

Conjugation:

Are verbs ending in -no, -do possible, or are the n- and t-verbs treatable as simply positional absense of the infinitive ending?

I can say that the endings -no and -do at this point do not exist; however I don't understand what you mean by positional absense of the infinitive ending. Can you explain this further?

[bbbourq]

More: show

I think your conjugation is unrealistic. Instead of gender marking on every person, you should restrict it to third person.

Why should I restrict it to the third person? What would be the advantage (or realism) by implementing this restriction?

More: show

As of phonology, I'm not a fan of Eurasian-like conlang. But it looks good enough. However, I would like to use ejective instead of aspiration. After all, you can consider spaceship to be low pressure environment.

To each their own, I guess . I never considered a spaceship environment as part of the back story.

[bbbourq]

It's hard to judge Lortho without knowing the purpose. Lortho is only a very tiny hair away from the default Fantasy Tongue.

I do not understand what Fantasy Tongue means here. As far as the purpose... I don't really have a purpose other than to enjoy the process of making the language. I want it to feel like a discovery, a wonder of sorts; though I feel this goal was not met based on your later assessment. However, I have been toying with the idea of writing a novel

If this is something to be used in the background of a novel for normal people, it's probably ideal. They'll have fun tracking the -in and -un verbs once they notice the pattern, and everything else is so standard you won't even need to explain it to them. If you give the Lorthians togas or something as a hint you won't even need to tell them what the verb is doing; they'll just know it's optional negative - stem - TAM infix - subject person and number by instinct.

I admit, this is a highly regular language.

If Lortho is supposed to be something interesting on its own, as a piece of conlang art, then I don't know if the standardness works in its favor or against it. I don't think it's unfair to say it's basically a re-lex of Latin with Finnish noun cases and gender marking on verbs thrown in (by the way, what was "Koreanic" about Lortho?). It's subjective whether that's your thing or not, and it could definitely work if it's a very, very deep dive into the language and setting.

Latin was not even an afterthought when creating this language; I wanted to avoid re-lexing anything, but as Master Oogway said: "One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it." The "Koreanic" reference is to point out the inspiration for the agglutinating aspect of Lortho. It wasn't until later that I learned Hungarian was also an agglutinating language.

I just don't like it personally.

Awww.

That said, the script is beautiful. I would love to see some longer texts in it.

Yay! I plan on making more artistic representations (e.g. fables, folk stories, etc).

[Tropylium]

The personal possessive is formed using a prefix which is gender and number specific.

Code: Select all

 		1SG	2SG	3SG	1PL	2PL	3PL
Masculine	ni-	lin-	li-	nima-	nani-	limi-
Feminine	nu-	lun-	lu-	numa-	nanu-	limu-
Neuter				la-			lima-

The 3PP ones are an interesting divergence from predictability; going by the apparent segmentation in 1PP (1PS + -ma-) and 2PP (na- + 2PS) I would have expected masc. limi- to be followed by fem. lumi- and n. lami-.

I focused strictly on the final vowel to differentiate the genders.

That seems like an immediate source of analogy if we wanted to internally reanalyze this system, yes. Though you still have the 1PP prefixes where it is the 1st syllable that marks person/gender.

(Alternately: maybe only 3rd person used to distinguish gender, and then 1PS *nV-, 2PS *lVn-, 1PP *nVma-, 2PP *nanV- (where *V was in each case an *i or *u that does not mark gender) were analogically split into M/F doublets. You could leverage this to generate also dialectal neuter prefixes such as 1PS na-, 2PS lan-.)

Conjugation:

Are verbs ending in -no, -do possible, or are the n- and t-verbs treatable as simply positional absense of the infinitive ending?

I can say that the endings -no and -do at this point do not exist; however I don't understand what you mean by positional absense of the infinitive ending. Can you explain this further?

Let's put it this way: suppose a verb has a stem such as banan-, dod-. By the normal agglutivative rule we would expect these to have the infinitives ˣbanano and ˣdodo, but by the exception class rules they'd probably instead end up as banan and dot. Essentially this looks like the typical ending -o is then absent for whatever reason after /n d/ (followed by a rule turning final d to t).

A speculative internal reconstruction: suppose the ending was originally *-Do (with some so far unspecified voiced coronal consonant; maybe *n or *d or *ð), but *nD and *dD simplify to *n and *d, then final *o is lost after an open syllable, so that *-n-Do > *-no > -n and *-d-Do > *-do > *-d > -t; and only after this other clusters such as *-mDo, *-pʰDo, *-lDo simplify to -mo, -pho, -lo etc. Maybe this also explains the inflection of mauran: maur- is the original stem, but the original infinitive *maurDo turns first into *maurno, then this overheavy syllable is broken by vowel epenthesis to *maurano, and then the *o is again lost after a light syllable.

By the way, have you considered extending the -t : -d- rule into a wider pattern of final devoicing? It would not have to be universal, but you could for a dash of additional realistic irregularity easily e.g. declare that some particular consonants devoice finally, or that some particular words have an irregular inflection showing similar alternation, such as some nouns that have no gender marker in the nominative. Or some adverbs etc. if you don't want to upset your nice noun system with the stem vowel marking gender.