LotM - Sep 16: Lonish: view article

First things first, Lonish has 28 phonemes: 18 consonants and 10 vowels. 4 of those phonemes have allophones: /n/ can appear as /nˠ/ or /ŋ/, /t/ can appear as /tl/ or /c/, /s/ can appear as /ʃ/, and /ɪ/ can appear as /j/. Lonish has both voiced and voiceless stops and voiced and voiceless fricatives. Interestingly, while Lonish has a palatal nasal, /ɲ/, and a velar stop, /k/, it lacks a non-allophonic velar nasal or palatal stop. And, of course, one can't forget Lonish's uvular trill, /ʀ/. Apparently 8.2% of all CWS languages have /ʀ/, so it's not as uncommon as I thought. Bonus kudos to all you /ʀ/ users.

As for vowels, Lonish has loads of those. Close, mid, open-mid, and open front vowels and the same in the back. There's even a near-close near-front roundedness distinction, with both /ɪ/ and /ʏ/.

There's even a lovely conscript. I'm no conscriptologist, but it has a very simple and clean feeling, with smooth curves and basic shapes. It looks pretty good when written out, too, and not quite like anything else I've seen.

[edit] [top]Grammar and Morphology

Lonish is a synthetic nom-acc OSV language with three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. It has a rich article system that blends smoothly into its adjective system, with the êv and the adjective suffix -êv being identical. This has some potentially interesting repercussions. The Lonish adjective botôv has some rather negative implications, and when paired with other adjectives it spreads its -ôv ending. Since most adjectives end in -êv, just changing an adjective's ending to -ôv can make it negative. Can you use ôv as an article to convey the same negative meaning? I have no idea! Send me a PM, Pimpossible, and I'll edit it in.

Lonish also has a rather interesting mood system. Instead of verbs being marked for each possible mood, a single infix, -î-, is inserted right after the verb stem. This infixed verb is then preceded by a mood particle which indicates just what mood is in play. There are 16 moods, too, including some particularly interesting ones like pur "Used to indicate the agent is through their rank required to do something." and ug "Used to indicate an action that is not entirely certainly happening."

[edit] [top]More on Lonish

Crave more? Check out its articles, translations, phrasebook, grammar test, grammar tables, or Namebase.

[edit] [top]A Note on LotM

Got suggestions for how the next LotM should be written? See something in Lonish that wasn't covered and you wish it had been? Hate my guts and want to tell me? Feel free to shoot us (either phi2dao or argyle) a PM with your thoughts, suggestions, and hate mail. Also feel free to drop by the LotM clan if you have other feedback, want to join in the voting process, or nominate a language! ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article

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