Lemizh: Difference between revisions

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'''Lemizh''' (<span style="font-family:Gentium,'DejaVu Sans','Segoe UI',sans-serif">[[Help:IPA|[lεmˈiʒ]]]</span>, <small>native pronunciation:</small> <span style="font-family:Gentium,'DejaVu Sans','Segoe UI',sans-serif">[[Help:IPA|[lɛmˈɯ̀ʒ]]]</span>) is a language I invented with the aim of creating a grammar as regular and simple as possible. It was originally intended as an [[w:international auxiliary language|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 [[w:Indo-European|Indo-European]] and probably all other familiar language structures. Expecting anyone to learn Lemizh, at this point, would be completely unrealistic.

''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&nbsp;BC. ''Old Lemizh'', by contrast, is fairly well attested. It had predominantly [[w:subject–verb–object|subject–verb–object]] (SVO) word order and was a quite typical old Indo-European language, but with a couple of interesting quirks:

''Ghean'' (<span style="font-family:Gentium,'DejaVu Sans','Segoe UI',sans-serif">[[Help:IPA|[ˈɣɛən]]]</span>) 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&nbsp;BC and ruled for infamous three generations. Ghean was an [[w:inflected|inflected]] language with strict [[w:verb–subject–object|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 [[w:creole language|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 [[w:Mbugu|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 alphabet is [[w:phonetic orthography|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.

Two consecutive different vowels are pronounced as a [[w:diphthong|diphthong]]; two consecutive identical vowels as a long one. Single vowels are always short.

Lemizh uses [[w:mora (linguistics)|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.

Lemizh has got a two-way [[w:pitch-accent language|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, the vowel at the centre of a high-pitch accented mora with an acute accent.