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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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