Lántun

The Lántun language is a part of a macrofamily of languages generally called Aiwanic, although it is not spoken by a humanoid race. They are characterised by polysynthetic morphology, pitch accent and lack of true labial consonants and vowels.

The Lánunic languages are a contiguous dialectal block, with the exception of some small obscure dialects spoken at the fringes of the known world. The terms “Lántun” and “Lánunic” are often used interchangeably by linguists studying this language, but the former is more typically used to mean the central standardised dialect, while the latter refers to the language continuum as a whole. The name Lántun is the endonym of the language, meaning “a collective of words”. The beings themselves do not have self-designations (autonyms) in their language yet they are called “the Draconids” or “Dragons” in English; they do however frequently have specific names for local groups and their dialects, as the local group was more important culturally than larger relations for this species.

From a synchronic perspective, the Lánunic languages are considered to be dead, as they were spoken during the Second Era of the Universe (while this Era is the Fourth), so there are no any living speakers left. Yet, the language represented a very distant ancestor to all Aiwanic and possibly even some other languages. There is no evidence that would support any relation to the languages of the Fourth Era planet Earth (the Kyrdan languages are confirmed to be Aiwanic, though).

Salishan languages are most commonly represented using the Latin alphabet in a phonetic notation that accounts for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in Latin or English, while some letters have a different designated sound than expected. Many Dragon groups evolved various writing systems for their language, and while technically Lántun is viewed as “standard” in this article, there was no single standard variety of Lánunic.

External history

Lántun (pronounced [ˈɺɑn˥.t̪ɯn꜉]) is a language created by Raistas in 2012. Since that time the language underwent many significant revisions and reworks changing drastically in the process. It is an attempt to create an alien protolanguage for the Aiwanic (“Heaven”) language macrofamily. Its distinctive feature is the lack of a separate noun category, as all nouns can be interpreted as stative verbs. In Lántun, relationships between the noun phrases making up the sentence are expressed by either stative or eventive verbs. However, the semantic content found in verbs, can also be found in Lántun's sentence-final particles, which are not conjugated themselves, yet can be used as copulas or factual markers. Despite its complex verbal morphology, Lántun is an expressive and intelligible language even though it is not meant to be spoken by humans.

Phonology

Since the Draconid vocal tract has a different composition and structure, than the human one, the phonology of Lántun is thus constrained and defined by this structure, such a lack of true lips and nose. Still, a Dragon may have been able to pronounce most sounds that would somewhat correspond to the modern IPA system, even though the medium through which the sound propagated, was not air but instead plasma, so the actual values of the sounds represented in the article are very different from these approximations.

Vowels

Lántun has the seven monophthongs, which are distinguished by their height and backness. Vowel length is a distinctive feature, which doubles the total amount of vowel phonemes. Some dialects also use a central short monophthong [ə], which is called a neutralised vowel in environments, where vowel reduction occurs. In Lántun itself vowel reduction evolved into syncopation instead.

	Short			Long
	Front	Centralised	Back	Front	Centralised	Back
Close	i [i]	y [ɪ]	u [ɯ]	ī [iː]	ȳ [ɪː]	ū [ɯː]
Mid	e [e̞]	ø [ɘ̞]	o [o̞]	ē [e̞ː]	ø̄ [ɘ̞ː]	ō [o̞ː]
Open	a [a~ɑ]			ā [ɑː]

Although there are several diphothongs, such as ei [eɪ] or au [ɑʊ], they are not considered to be separate phonemes, since they typically occur in morphologically predicted environments.

Consonants

Látun does not distinguish plosives from fricatives, existing fricatives are analysed as aspirated plosives and likely originated from them. There is no labial series, instead a similar-sounding series is called "frontal", and the nasal consonant category is substituted with a similar "postmaxillar" place of articulation (which is basically a cleft palate leading to a closed cavity right under the brain).

		Frontal	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Laryngeal
Postmaxillar		m [ɱ]	n [n̪]			ŋ [ŋ]
Plosive– Fricative	tenuis		t [t̪]	c [t̺͡s̺]		k [k]
	aspirated	f [ɱ̥]	th [t̪ʰ]	s [s̺]		kh [kʰ]	ḥ [ħ]
Approximant		v [ʋ]	d [ð̞]	l [ɺ]	j [j]	g [ʟ]	h [ɦ]
Trill				r [r~r̥]

In addition, most consonants, except approximants and the trill, can be geminated, for instance, nn /n:/, kk /k:/ Fricatives may sometimes become affricates in this position, such as ss being pronounced [t̺͡s̺ʰː], in this instance the aspiration is lengthened instead of the onset, unlike tenuis geminates.

Syllable structure

The most typical syllable structure is CV and CVC (where C is any consonant, and V is any vowel). However, ecause of the vowel syncope, consonant clusters can occur within a syllable, such as in the word sve [s̺ʋe̞꜊] “to exist”. In dialects [ə] may usually break these clusters – [s̺ə.ʋe̞꜊].

Prosody

There is no agreed number of prosodic variables in Lántun. Various elements, such as intonation and stress position, may reflect features of the speaker or the utterance: their emotional state; the form of utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus. For this function a wide range of pitch is used, while at other times a narrow range is needed (such as in formal situations). Látun makes use of changes in key; shifting one's intonation into the higher or lower part of one's pitch range is meaningful in certain contexts. Stress is not phonemic in Látun, long and/or accented vowels usually receive stress. Polysyllabic words often have a secondary stress, which is also not phonemic.

Látun is a pitch-accent language, meaning that the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch (or tone) and vowel length, rather than by loudness, as in stressed languages. Some words are “accentless”, they instead receive a neutral pitch, which assimilates to the pitch of the neighbouring words. Short vowels can have one of the two marked pitches (or three if considering the neutral pitch as distinct): high (há [ɦɑ˥]) and low (hà [ɦɑ˩]). The accent on a long vowel or diphthong could be on either half of the vowel, making a contrast possible between a rising accent (hǎ [ɦɑː˧˥]) and a falling one (hâ [ɦɑː˧˩]); compare itaî [i꜊.täɪ˧˩] “at home” vs. itǎi [i꜊.täɪ˧˥] “homes”. Other vowels are considered unaccented, yet they actually receive the tone of the preceding accented syllables.

Phonotactics

The consonants g, ŋ and ḥ centralise the preceding front vowels, so that *iŋ, for example, would become yŋ [ɪŋ]. Two vowels in hiatus often form diphthongs, when in word stems, but otherwise the preceeding vowel becomes elided by the following one: néŋi “we (incl.) see him” becomes néŋū “we (incl.) see them”, where -i (inclusive marker) is elided by by -ū (3rd plural marker). In this example the morpheme is not deleted, it instead becomes its zero allomorph, which happens quite frequently. The phoneme /s/ becomes [r̥] after a voiceless consonant, the preceeding consonant then becomes aspirated.

Morphology

Lántun is a polysynthetic language, meaning words have a root verb basis to which information is added; that is, morphemes (affixes) are added to verb roots. These words may contain subjects, objects, indirect objects, possession and location. Thus, surprisingly complex ideas can be communicated with as little as one word, for example:

No·feimilt·alókkîskulus	el
nok-feimil-t-ida-lóm-ki-á-os-kuv-l-us	e-l
IO.Pl-entertain-ABST-TRNS-good-very-REPRT-but-always-IRR-3Ag	be-IRR
“However, they will say that he is a great entertainer anyway”.

Nouns are simpler in their structure, than verbs, as most information is included as part of the verb. Lántun also does not distinguish between genders, considering that Dragons also lack biological sex/gender. Sentence structure is quite fluid, with words being organised according to importance or novelty. Often the main verb is placed initially.

Syntax