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I’ve technically been working on this conlang since December 1st – after all, I am using it for Lexember – but surprisingly, I’ve had very little time to work on it. All I’ve created so far are the phonology, orthography, and noun cases. I thought I’d have the opposite problem – that I’d speed through the conlanging process and be “done” in just a few weeks. Looks like this will be a longer series of blog posts after all.

I decided yesterday that this conlang would be called soleisu. What does soleisu mean? Uh…at the moment, I have no idea. I made the word, but I haven’t assigned a meaning to it yet. And it definitely can’t mean “language”, since the word for that is kala.

Consonants

Soleisu has a rather small (for me) consonant inventory. Three stops with no voicing distinction, two fricatives, and two approximants. It doesn’t have /r/ or /w/, which most of my languages include.

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n
Stop	p	t		k
Fricative		s			h
Approximant		l	j

It took me a while to figure out what kind of consonants I wanted. I eventually decided on a smaller consonant inventory because it would make the initial consonant mutations (something I had in mind from the very beginning) much more regular. Those consonant mutations will be explained in the noun case section.

Vowels

The vowels here are nothing special. I deliberated for a while with whether or not I wanted /y/, but then threw it in anyway because…I don’t actually remember the reason. It’s just there now.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i y		u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

Soleisu also has a few diphthongs: /ai/, /ei/, /ou/, and /oi/. If I remember correctly, I added these because I wanted the language to look more like Ancient Greek. I don’t think I succeeded in that regard.

Syllable Structure

Syllable structure is CV, with two finals – /n/ and /l/. They can only exist mid-word, never at the end of a word.

I considered having more final consonants, but then decided against it for a reason I don’t remember. This may change in the future. I think I want /s/ as a final as well.

Orthography

I deliberated for a while how I wanted to represent /y/ and /j/. /j/ was originally represented with <j> and /y/ with <y>, but I thought that might make the language look a little too much like Finnish.

Letter	a	e	h	i	k
Sound	/a/	/e/	/h/	/i/	/k/
Letter	l	m	n	o	p
Sound	/l/	/m/	/n/	/o/	/p/
Letter	s	t	u	ü	y
Sound	/s/	/t/	/u/	/y/	/j/

Noun Cases

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to use initial consonant mutations, but not in what way. I eventually decided on using consonant mutations to indicate case. This meant that there could only be a few cases, so I decided on three: nominative, genitive, and dative.

It didn’t take me very long to figure out how to create the genitive case through consonant mutations: every consonant became a fricative. The dative case took a lot more thought. I eventually decided on making each initial consonant “harder” – they shifted to stops.

In the genitive case:

• Initial consonants become fricatives
• /h/ is deleted
• /s/ becomes [ʃ]
• Initial vowels are prefixed with /h/.

In the dative case:

• Nasals are prefixed with /t/
• Stops are unchanged
• /s/ becomes [ts] and /h/ becomes [t]
• /j/ becomes [dʒ]
• /l/ becomes [tl]
• Initial vowels are prefixed with /t/

Nominative	Genitive	Dative
/h/	–	[t]
/j/	[ʒ]	[dʒ]
/k/	[x]	–
/l/	[ɬ]	[tl]
/m/	[v]	[tm]
/n/	[h]	[tn]
/p/	[f]	–
/s/	[ʃ]	[ts]
/t/	[θ]	–
/a/	[ha]	[ta]
/e/	[he]	[te]
/i/	[hi]	[ti]
/o/	[ho]	[to]
/u/	[hu]	[tu]
/y/	[hy]	[ty]

Here are some examples:

Nominative	Meaning	Genitive
hali	ali	t-ali
kala	khala	kala
laati	lhaati	t-laati
mailke	mhailke	t-mailke
palha	phalha	palha
tolko	tholko	tolko
yene	yhene	t-yene

Words Created This Week

Included here are all the words I created since December 1st.

• hali /ha.li/ n. star
• kala /ka.la/ n. language
• kannai /kan.nai/ n. person
• laati /la.a.ti/ n. memory
• lunta /lun.ta/ n. secret
• lü /ly/ n. fish
• mailke / mail.ke/ n. dirt, earth
• nalai /na.lai/ n. thought
• palha /pal.ha/ n. fire
• selio /se.li.o/ n. water
• tolko /tol.ko/ n. moon
• yene /je.ne/ n. sun

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