Lortho

Introduction

Lortho (IPA:[ˈloɾ·tʰo]) is an a priori constructed language created by Brian Bourque in the beginning of 2003. It originally started as a prop for a strategy board game where only the script was created for aesthetics. Fast forward about 13 years and it has now evolved into a fusional-agglutinative language. The verbs are changed in conjugation; however, suffixes and prefixes are added to nouns to denote case.

Inspiration

A friend was creating a board game similar to Risk; however, instead of taking place on Earth, this new game was to take place on an inter-planetary scale. The game creator wanted to develop an alien theme and requested a fictional script. The name of the race on this game is "Lortho" and thus the seed was planted. The author was unable to work on this piece for quite sometime until he joined the CONLANG mailing list and observed both seasoned and novice conlangers discussing all aspects of linguistics. Since then it was decided to move forward and make Lortho come into fruition.

Another inspirational source is Brian's daughter. Through her development of learning how to make speech sounds, Brian found certain "words" to use in Lortho which help in its phonology.

Phonology

Orthography

Lortho Alphabet

The Lortho alphabet is a pseudo-abjad. All letters are consonants except for one vowel. All other vowels are written as diacritics.

Consonant Inventory

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Plosive	p pʰ b		t tʰ d dʰ					k kʰ			ʔ
Nasal	m		n
Trill
Tap or Flap			ɾ
Fricative	f			s	ʃ						h
Lateral Fricative
Approximant
Lateral Approximant			l lʰ

Vowels and Diphthongs

Vowel Inventory

There are five vowels in Lortho and are strictly pronounced regardless of placement:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Close-mid			o
Open-mid	ɛ
Mid			ɑ

Diphthongs

The following diphthongs exist in Lortho:

• [aɪ], [aʊ], [eɪ], [ɔɪ]

Prosody

Stress

There are a few rules that govern stress (with exceptions):

1. Stress is always on the second to the last syllable of the root or infinitive except:
   • -n verbs will always receive stress on the last syllable of the infinitive or root.
2. If the word is only two syllables long, then the stress is on the first syllable.
3. Stress is never given to prefixes or suffixes.

Intonation

Lortho is still in development and has not enough information to explain the rules of intonation.