Lemizh

Lemizh
lemỳzh.
Pronunciation	[lɛmˈɯ̀ʒ]
Created by	Anypodetos
Date	1985
Setting	Alt-history Europe
Native to	Lemaria
Language family	Indo-European Lemizh Lemizh
Early form	Proto-Lemizh
Writing system	Lemizh alphabet
Sources	Proto-Indo-European
Official status
Official language in	Lemaria

Lemizh ([lεˈmiʒ], native pronunciation: [lɛmˈɯ̀ʒ]) is a language I invented with the aim of creating a grammar as regular and simple as possible. It was originally intended as an international auxiliary language. However, it turned out that a simple grammar is not necessarily a grammar that is easy to learn: the more ways I discovered to simplify the grammar, the further away it moved from Indo-European and probably all other familiar language structures. Expecting anyone to learn Lemizh, at this point, would be completely unrealistic.

So I needed a new justification for the language: enter the Lemizh, a people living to the west and north of the Black Sea in an alternate history that drifted away from ours between two and eight millennia ago. Of course, it is extremely unlikely that they would speak a language that was completely without exceptions. To be precise, the chances are two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and nine to one against. But they say that everything has to happen somewhere in the Multiverse. And everything happens only once.

History

Early stages

Lemizh is an Indo-European language and, together with Volgan, constitutes one of the ten recognised branches of the Indo-European language family. This branch is also called Lemizh, to the disgruntlement of Volgan linguists.

Proto-Lemizh, the ancestor of Lemizh and Volgan, is very poorly attested in form of some papyri found near the northwestern shore of the Black Sea, to the north of the Dniester Liman, dated about 2700 BC. Old Lemizh, by contrast, is fairly well attested. It had predominantly subject–verb–object (SVO) word order and was a quite typical old Indo-European language, but with a couple of interesting quirks:

• Adjectives were lost as a separate part of speech, being replaced with participles ("white" > "being white").
• Finite subordinate clauses had their subject in the case of the clause: the subject of a local clause was in the locative case without having a local meaning in itself.

The earliest known documents from this stage of Lemizh were probably written around 2100 BC along the northern and western shores of the Back Sea.

Ghean and Middle Lemizh

Ghean ([ˈɣɛən]) is a language with no known genetic relationships. It was spoken by a people of unknown origin, who subdued the Lemizh tribes in around 1000 BC and ruled for infamous three generations. Ghean was an inflected language with strict verb–subject–object (VSO) word order and head-first phrases.

The Gheans discouraged the use of the natives' language, but obviously tolerated Lemizh words (or rather word stems) to stand in for unfamiliar Ghean ones. The grammar of simple sentences was easy enough to learn for the Lemizh, as they were used to inflection and head-first phrases, and likely still knew VSO sentences from poetry. After two or three generations, the natives must have spoken a creole with a more or less Ghean grammar but an abundance of Lemizh words, especially outside the core vocabulary. This is a quite unusual development as most creoles draw their lexicon mainly from the dominant group, and tend to be grammatically more innovative. (The Tanzanian language Mbugu might have had a somewhat similar development with more or less analogous outcomes.) After the disappearance of the Gheans, Lemizh patriots tried to revive their old language, which failed spectacularly for the grammar but reintroduced many Lemizh words of the core vocabulary.

Orthography and phonology

The alphabet is phonetic: each letter corresponds to a certain sound, and each sound is represented by a single letter. This article uses the standard transcription of the native Lemizh alphabet.

Letters of the Lemizh alphabet (Latin transcription)
a	e	y	i	o	ö	u	ü	l	rh	r	ng	m	g	d	b	k	t	p	gh	zh	z	dh	w	x	sh	s	th	f

The direction of writing is left to right.

Consonants

		bilabial	dental	alveolar	postalveolar	velar
nasals		m [m]				ng [ŋ]
plosives		p [p] • b [b]		t [t] • d [d]		k [k] • g [g]
fricatives		f [ɸ] • w [β]	th [θ] • dh [ð]	s [s] • z [z]	sh [ʃ] • zh [ʒ]	x [x] • gh [ɣ]
liquids	lateral approximant			l [l]
	approximant			rh [ɹ]
	trill			r [r]

Vowels

	front	back
close	i [i] • ü [y]	y [ɯ] • u [u]
open-mid	e [ɛ] • ö [œ]	a [ʌ] • o [ɔ]

Two consecutive different vowels are pronounced as a diphthong; two consecutive identical vowels as a long one. Single vowels are always short.

Lemizh uses moræ for structuring words: a short syllable equals one mora, and a long syllable equals two. In Lemizh, every vowel is the centre of a mora; consequently, two consecutive vowels result in two moræ or one long syllable.

Accent

Lemizh has got a two-way pitch-accent system, in that accented moræ are not only spoken louder (as in English), but also have either a lower or a higher pitch than the surrounding unaccented ones. The vowel at the centre of a low-pitch accented mora is transcribed with a grave accent: à è etc. The vowel at the centre of a high-pitch accented mora is transcribed with an acute accent: á é etc.

Sample text

Sample of a Lemizh text in native script: The Legend of the Seventh Planet

External links

• Lemizh homepage

This article includes material from the Lemizh homepage, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.