Chlouvānem

Chlouvānem, natively Chlouvānaumi dældā ("language of the Chlouvānem people"), is the most spoken language on the planet of Calémere (Lac.: Liloejāmna). It is the official language of the Chlouvānem land (Chlouvānaumi bhælā), and a lingua franca in many areas of the eastern part of the continent of Evandor. Despite the fact that local vernaculars in most of the Chlouvānem lands are in fact daughter languages of Chlouvānem or creoles based on it, the Chlouvānaumi dældā is a fully living language as every Chlouvānem person is bilingual in it and in the local vernacular, and in fact in the last half century the Chlouvānem language itself has been replacing some vernaculars as internal migrations have become more and more common. About 1,4 billion people on the planet define themselves as native Chlouvānem speakers, more than for any other Calémerian language.

Introduction

Chlouvānem is the ninth radically restructured version of Laceyiam; I started creating it in late November 2016 as I found some parts of my conworld which were too unrealistic to work - and as such by changing the whole conworld I had to change the language. I took that opportunity to change some things in the grammar that, while I liked them and they worked well, I wanted to do in some different way — mainly this arises from my love of more complex inflection patterns. As such, compared to Laceyiam, Chlouvānem has much more influences from Sanskrit and Lithuanian (which always were my main influences anyway); other natlangs that influenced me a lot are Danish, Icelandic, Proto-Indo-European, (Biblical) Hebrew, Latin, and Japanese. Still it is an a priori language and, despite having much in common with all of these (particularly with the IE ones), is also strikingly different (the Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment, morphological expression of evidentiality and more broadly the particular emphasis on moods probably being the most noticeable things). Moreover, I tried to create a language very different from my native language (Italian) while keeping many - not so apparent - similarities.
The morphology of Chlouvānem is very different from Laceyiam, though many words are still the same (like smrāṇa (spring), junai (foot), jāyim (girl), saṃhāram (boy)).

As I mentioned before, Chlouvānem is the latest version of the conlang for my main conculture. I started sketching conlangs back when I was 9 or 10 but only started interesting myself into linguistics seven years later - in 2014 - and since then I started doing more "serious" conlangs (the earlier ones were more like relexes of my native language, Italian). Ideally, Chlouvānem is the refined version of all of these languages, but except for a few recurring words (like maila (water) or hulyn (woman)) it is only comparable to those languages I have been creating since July 2015.

Chlouvānem is mainly thought for my conworld, but more than any other conlang of mine it is quite on the border between an art- and a heartlang.

Phonology

Morphology

Nouns

Chlouvānem nouns are highly inflected: they decline for three numbers (singular, dual, plural), and eleven cases (direct, vocative, accusative, ergative, genitive, translative, exessive, essive, dative, ablative, and locative). Nouns also have grammatical gender, being divided in three classes (called dragon, lotus, and parrot based on nouns included in them).

Gender

Genders and declensions are dependent on the form of the noun. Due to the prevailing endings in direct case, dragon nouns are also called the s-class; lotus nouns the m-class; and parrot nouns the h-class: Dragon nouns (kaṃšūlñeis halenī):

• 1s: nouns ending in -as or -ās
• 2s: nouns ending in -us or -ūs
• 3s: nouns ending in -is or -īs
• 4s: nouns ending in -oe /ˈɔə̯/

Lotus nouns (yujamñeis halenī):

• 1m: nouns ending in -am, -em, -ām, -ėm, or any vowel plus -n
• 2m: nouns ending in -um or -ūm
• 3m: nouns ending in -im or -īm
• 4m: nouns ending in -ai

Parrot nouns (geltařñeis halenī):

• 1h: nouns ending in -a, -ah, -ā, or -āh
• 2h: nouns ending in -ė, -eh, or -ėh (and a few exceptions in -oê /ɔˈɛ/)
• 3h: nouns ending in -uh or -ūh
• 4h: nouns ending in -ih or -īh (plus a few exceptional ones in -i)
• 5h: nouns ending in -a which have ablaut-conditioned variations in their stems in different cases

Numerals

Chlouvānem has a decimal numeral system which has however a base-5 sub-base for some numbers (mainly 5 and 11-19) and a base-20 borrowed one for the tens.

Numbers have six different forms: cardinal, ordinal, collective, distributive, adverbial/multiplicative, and fractionary. Cardinal 1, 2, and 3 are adjectives, as are all ordinal and collective ones; 1-4 have separate adverbial forms, while all other ones have an invariable adjective used as multiplicative and a derived adverb used as adverbial. All distributive, fractionary, and cardinal (except 1-3) numbers are invariable.

Syntax