Lemizh

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Lemizh
lemỳzh.
Pronunciation[lɛmˈɯ̀ʒ]
Created byAnypodetos
Date1985
SettingAlt-history Europe
Native toLemaria
Indo-European
  • Lemizh
    • Lemizh
Early form
Proto-Lemizh
Lemizh alphabet
SourcesProto-Indo-European
Official status
Official language in
Lemaria
Map of Lemaria.png
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Lemizh ([lεmˈiʒ], 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 of simplification I discovered, 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 slowly 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 register tonal language with strict verb–subject–object (VSO) word order and head-first phrases. It had verbs, nominals (a combined noun/adjective/participle part of speech), pronouns and particles.

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.

The last three millennia

While Middle Lemizh as spoken after the Ghean occupation already had a non-Indo-European and unusually regular grammar, this trend was to continue over the following millennia. The factive case was innovated to express verbal nouns, which eventually supplanted verbs altogether. (At least part of the blame goes to the Tlöngö̀l, an epic novel published in 1351, which popularized the use of verbal nouns.) The tonal system was simplified to the present two-way pitch-accent system. Pronouns lost their status as a separate part of speech. The last particles died out a few hundred years ago, leaving the language with a single part of speech which is often called a "verb" but, historically speaking, is really a nominal. This means that the concept of parts of speech does not make sense in Modern Lemizh.

Orthography and phonology

The alphabet is phonetic: each letter corresponds to a certain sound, and each sound is represented by a single letter. The direction of writing is left to right. This article uses the standard transcription of the native Lemizh alphabet as given in the following table:

Letters of the Lemizh alphabet
Lemizh alphabet.png
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

Consonants

bilabial dental alveolar postalveolar velar
nasals m [m] ng [ŋ]
plosives (voiceless • voiced) p [p] • b [b] t [t] • d [d] k [k] • g [g]
fricatives (voiceless • voiced) 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]

The plosive-fricative combinations pf, ts, tsh, kx and their voiced couterparts only occur at word boundaries and in compound words. They are not pronounced as affricates but as separate sounds. The same applies for other combinations of a plosive plus another consonant (pm, tl etc.), as well as for two identical plosives (kk etc.): the release of the first plosive is always audible.

Vowels

front back
unrounded rounded unrounded rounded
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 accented mora is always the ultimate or penultimate of a word. The vowel at the centre of a low-pitch accented mora is transcribed with a grave accent, the vowel at the centre of a high-pitch accented mora with an acute accent.

Accented vowel letters
Lemizh accented vowels.png
à è ì ò ö̀ ù ǜ
á é ý í ó ö́ ú ǘ

Phonotactics

Phonotactics is rather permissive in Lemizh. A mora has the following structure, where the bracketed parts are optional:

  • (O)(N)(L)V(L)(N)(O)

V is the mora's vowel, L a liquid, N a nasal, and O an obstruent that can be either a P(losive), a F(ricative), FP, PF, FF, FFP, FPF, or PFF. Word-initial consonant clusters cannot contain more than three sounds. No geminate consonants (*ff etc.) occur within a mora. Consecutive plosive-fricative or fricative-plosive combinations within the same mora must have the same sonority – either both are voiced, or both are voiceless. A plosive cannot have the same place of articulation as a following consonant with the exception of rh and r. *dzh, *ddh and their voiceless counterparts are also prohibited within a mora.

Word boundaries, including those within compound words, are always mora boundaries. Where mora boundaries would still be ambiguous, liquids and nasals are assigned to the earliest possible mora (as the m in lem·ỳzh.), and obstruents to the latest possible mora.

Morphology

All words are composed of the following parts:

  • Prestem + inner case + poststem + outer case

Prestem and poststem form the stem, or the lexical part, of the word. The division of the stem into two portions is similar to English verbs such as sing/sang/sung, where the lexical part is s–ng while the vowels i/a/u convey grammatical information. The stem always denotes an action (but never a state, a person, a thing, a property, etc.) and thus resembles our verbs. The prestem can contain any sounds, or it can be zero (i.e. consisting of zero sounds). The poststem can only contain fricatives and plosives, or it can be zero as well.

The inner case is represented by one of the eight vowels, optionally followed by a liquid (the primary case suffix) and/or a nasal (the secondary case suffix). The outer case has the same structure. For the first word in each sentence, the main predicate, the outer case is missing.

Each case is defined by its descriptor: for example, the factive case denotes an action, the nominative a sender, the locative a place. The stem and the inner case's descriptor determine a word's meaning.

Examples
  • wàx. w–x is the stem for "speak", -a- denotes the inner factive, so this word means "the action of speaking", loosely translated as the verb "to speak" or the gerund "speaking".
  • wèx. -e- denotes the inner nominative, so this word means "the sender of speaking" or "a/the speaker".
  • àrdh. ∅–dh (having a zero prestem) is the stem for "eat", -ar- denotes the inner locative: "the place of eating".
Primary cases and their descriptors
Case vowel Primary case suffix
none l rh r
Plot cases Causal cases Temporal cases Spatial cases
1 a factive (fact):
action
affirmative (aff):
fact (point in causal chain)
temporal (temp):
time
locative (loc):
place/region
2 e nominative (nom):
source, sender
causative (caus):
direct cause
ingressive (ing):
starting time
elative (ela):
starting point/region
3 y accusative (acc):
content
contextual (ctx):
causal context
durative (dur):
duration
extensive (ext):
spatial extent
4 i dative (dat):
sink, recipient
consecutive (cons):
direct consequence, effect
egressive (egr):
closing time
illative (ill):
end point / ending region
5 o tentive (ten):
intention
intentive (int):
intention (intended point in causal chain)
episodic (eps):
episode, "act"
scenic (sce):
scene, "stage"
6 ö comitative (com):
company
persuasive (psu):
reason
digressive (dig):
time away from which
ablative (abl):
place/region away from which
7 u instrumental (ins):
means, tool
motivational (mot):
motivational context
progressive (prog):
time that is passed
prolative (prol):
crossing point/region
8 ü benefactive (ben):
beneficiary
final (fin):
purpose, aim
aggressive (agg):
time towards which, temporal aim
allative (all):
place/region towards which, spatial aim

Each primary case has two corresponding secondary cases: a partitive case formed by adding ng (such as -ing- for the partitive dative or -erng- for the partitive elative) and a corresponding qualitative case formed by adding m.

Nominative, accusative and dative

Nouns

Adjectives

Syntax

Level of words

There is only one more grammatical category: the level of words, which is the main building block of Lemizh syntax. A word can be of first level (the highest), of second level (the next highest), of third level (still one level lower) and so on; there is no limit for the number of levels, but non-positive word levels (zero, −1, etc.) are forbidden.

The first word in a sentence (the main predicate) is of first level by definition. The level of the next word is determined by the main predicate's accent and by the type of pause between the two words, the level of the third word is determined by the accent of the second and the pause between these two, and so on.

Here is the complete list of pause/accent combinations. (The meaning of an agentive level will be explained later.)

Following pause Accented vowel Type of accent The level of the next word is …
in speech in writing
barely audible space inner case low lower by 1
high lower by 1, and agentive (A)
outer case low equal
high higher by 1
a bit longer comma (·) inner case low higher by 2
high higher by 3
outer case low higher by 4
high higher by 5
the longest full stop () inner case low none; end of sentence

Constituent order

Noun phrases

Verb phrases

Sentence phrases

Dependent clauses

Example texts

The Legend of the Seventh Planet

The Legend of the Seventh Planet in native script

A long time ago there was a tribe of nomads. They possessed neither writing nor houses nor horses. But they were truly human. They were curious; this means, above all, that they took interest in the useless, for the celestial objects were of no use to them yet. They looked at the Sun and the Moon. They had named the constellations and the six planets moving across the sky like the humans across the earth. They knew dim Mercury, who liked to hide in the glare of the Sun; Venus, the brightest of all; reddish and angry Mars; majestic father Jupiter; Saturn, who seemed to stand still for weeks; and even Uranus had been caught by their keen eyes. Six planets, and the legend of a seventh. Maybe it had been the minor planet Vesta, or a comet centuries or millennia earlier. Maybe it was the attraction of the number seven. For Neptune is invisible to the naked eye.

One youngster thought to himself that he could not live without seeing the seventh planet. He lay awake searching the sky for many nights, neglected his duties, and became thinner and thinner. And one night, lying with the Earth behind his back, and with the looping planets and the stars above him, he saw the depth of the sky and the planets circling the Sun, and among them the Earth.

External links

Copyleft1.png This article includes material from the Lemizh homepage, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.