Lodeen

Background

Inspiration

Lodeen is a joking attempt at an auxlang, intended as an experiment to see what would a simple language to learn and speak be like if everyone was like me. But it was quickly boring so I tried to complexify it a little bit.

Setting

The People

Lodeen speakers live somewhere in the East of Africa, no precise location. There are woods and fields, hot country but no desert nor tropical climate. Lodeen people are very dark-skinned, with slanted eyes. They are one minority tribe in a bigger country (I don’t care which one) and the elders are keeping old traditions, while younger people often go to cities to study and look for work. But there’s a strong sense of family and solidarity and young people feel very attached to their homes and traditions too. I think this people is a bit of a cliché but, whatever. There are about 10,000 of them I think (they’re a minority but not too few either). Their religion is Badzhoism, and they like to use timber for their buildings very much.

Phonology

Lodeen's phonemic inventory is comprised of 15 phonemes :

Consonants

Consonantal phonemes

		Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal		m		n
Stop		p		t		k
Fricative			f	s
Approximant		w		l	j

Vowels

Vowel phonemes

		Front	Central	Back
Close		i		u
Mid		e		o
Open			a

Orthography

Lodeen has its own script which is ideally phonemic, with one graph representing one phoneme of the language. However, here will be discussed its romanization, which similarly employs one letter of the Latin alphabet for one phoneme. There are three usual variants, depending on the phonemic analysis one makes.

Official Standard

As can be seen in the Phonology section, there are fifteen phonemes, including ten consonants, with voiceless segments chosen as representing the obstruent phonemes. Accordingly to that analysis, the romanization always employs the following graphs when writing these phonemes :

/p/ = < p > /t/ = < t > /k/ = < k > /f/ = < f > /s/ = < s >

The rest of the Latin alphabet for Lodeen in the official standard is :

/m/ = < m > /n/ = < n >

/w/ = < w > /l/ = < l > /j/ = < y >

/a/ = < a > /e/ = < e > /i/ = < i > /o/ = < o > /u/ = < u >

Alternate Standard

Another analysis of Lodeen phonemic structure has proposed that, synchronically, it makes more sense to consider the underlying representation of the obstruents is that of voiced ones, and thus uses in the romanization the "voiced" counterparts of the official standard. Thus instead of < p >, < t >, < k >, < f >, < s >, we have < b >, < d >, < g >, < v >, < z >, respectively.

Mixed Standard

That last standard tries to give a more "phonetic" romanization of Lodeen, although only the allophony between voiced and voiceless obstruents is actually considered. That standard uses the letters p, t, k, f, s in the beginning and the end of the words (where the obstruents are voiceless) and the letters b, d, g, v, z inside a word (where they are voiced).

However, the official standard is the most widely used and will be the only one used on this page.

A few examples of Lodeen written in Latin alphabet (official standard) :

Lekuan (ne) pankim yemkoyol. "The dog is eating a bone"

Kato tame niwamile. "My cat is grey"