Older Kraliy

Notes: The preposition is usually pronounced as a syllabic /l/ although should the previous word end in a vowel (including /i/ and /u/), l will behave as a post-clitic: ˈkjəːsə l tuː (the tree of the man) will most likely be pronounced as /ˈkjəːsəl tuː/.

preposition

Possessive, of.

Glosses: POS (p, Of, possessive, marks possession.)

Notes: Followed by the nominative form of the possessor.

Sample usage:

lɨhpɨˈlɐhtə tuː mɨˈəh ˈiːsjən, plɨh mjɐh ˈpɨːmɐ l kuˈnuːn.

a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself.

Alpitalic

A posteriori - Indo-European - Italic

An a posteriori constructed language based on proto-Italic that would have been spoken near the Alpine region in ancient time. The language would have interacted with Ancient Alpin, an a priori conlang playing the role of a pre-Indoeuropean language. As a result from this interaction, Alpitalic may include a number of actually a priori words while Alpin languages incorporate Italic wordstock.

Although Alpitalic can be more conservative than Latin in some regards, it is a highly innovative Italic language in others. For instance, while the language does not display the rhotacism found in Latin, Alpitalic merges most vowels into añ /ʌ̃/ when nasalized.

The language is written in a variant of the Alpin script, based on the Etruscan alphabet.

See more: Alpitalic wordlist (33 words).

Ancient Alpin

A priori - Alpin

An a priori constructed language that would have been spoken in the Alpine region in ancient times, not unlike historical Rhaetic. Although Alpin is a pre-Indoeuropean language, its lexicon includes a number of early Italic borrowings.

Ancient Alpin verbs are marked for their duration through punctual (short), durative (medium) and perdurative (long) aspects.

The language is written in the Alpin script, based on the Etruscan alphabet.

See more: Ancient Alpin wordlist (37 words).

Central Amatlan

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Mulasah languages

An a priori language that would be spoken in the northern region of the fictional island of Rauna.

Central Amatlan descends from Middle Mulasah but is also strongly influenced by Middle Akkum and Middle Lealea, with the Mulasah, the Akkum and the Lealea being the founders of a historical federation in Rauna known as the Amatl (whence the name 'Amatlan').

Central Amatlan is natively written in the 'Amatlan alphabet', based on the North-Eastern Raunan script used by its main ancestor Middle Mulasah.

See more: Central Amatlan wordlist (36 words).

Efenol

A posteriori - Indo-European - Italic - Romance - Spanish-based

An a posteriori language descended from modern Spanish. Its phonology was inspired by JRR Tolkien's Sindarin and real world Celtic languages. Much like those languages, Efenol features consonant and vowel mutation in its morphology. It was created around the year 2010. The language features consonant and vowel mutation in its morphology. It was created around the year 2010. More information can be found in the Linguifex article on Efenol.

See more: Efenol wordlist (26 words).

Lower Sairean

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Saire languages

An a priori language that would be spoken in the south-eastern region of the fictional island of Rauna.

Lower Sairean descends from the Middle Saire language but was also strongly influenced by the Middle Xhuei language. Its morphology is considerably simpler than that of its ancestor although it incorporates nominal classifiers, borrowed from the Xhuei languages. As in Middle Saire, sentences are required to have an argument marked as their focal point which in Lower Sairean is indicated by the clitic 't.

Lower Saire is written in the Southern Raunan script, an abugida it shares with other languages in the southern region of the island.

See more: Lower Sairean wordlist (30 words).

Middle Akkum

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Akkum languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the north-western region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Akkum is unusual among Raunan languages for allowing syllabic consonants. Extrafictionally, the phonology of the language was inspired by the historical Etruscan language. Its purely a priori grammar is head-initial but requires case endings to be moved to the end of a phrase. As a result, a direct object followed by a possessor will have an accusative suffix on the possessor instead. Different verbal paradigms are used depending on whether an action transforms its object or whether it leaves it mostly unchanged.

The language is written in the North-Western Raunan script, an alphabet that also came to be borrowed by the Lealea, an ethnic group from the northerly Lealea islands who interacted frequently with the Akkum. The extrafictional romanization uses the Greek letters theta and chi for aspirate stops and the Germanic letter Þ for the sound 'sh' of the similar-looking ancient Bactrian letter sho.

See more: Middle Akkum wordlist (13 words).

Middle Aune

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Raunic languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken during the Middle Period in Engwe, a small island south-west of the fictional land of Rauna. Some efforts to revive the language in the Modern Period also aim to revitalize Middle Aune while others intend to bring back a later form, Early Modern Aune.

The ancestors of the Aune people arrived to their island fleeing the wars and disarray that engulfed much of mainland Rauna after the fall of the Raunan Empire at the end of the Ancient Era. They brought to the island much of the imperial Raunan culture including the Ancient Raunic language which, after centuries of isolation, evolved to become the rather distinct Middle Aune language. Phonological changes include the loss of initial r (which leads to the Raunan demonym Raunah'i evolving to Aunae) and the development of an ergative-absolutive alignment out of the original tripartite alignment of Ancient Raunic.

The language was written in the Western Raunan alphabet, a descendant of the Old Western variant of the Ancient Raunan script. This writing system was also used by the Iyau peoples, the main political and commercial partners of the Aune.

See more: Middle Aune wordlist (4 words).

Middle Irona

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Raunic languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the central region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Irona was one of the few surviving descendants of the Ancient Raunic language after the fall of the Raunan Empire. The language contrasts a relatively large number of places of articulation (labial, dental, alveolar, retroflex, palatal and velar). Nouns decline for case and number, this inflection is fusional and often involves shifts in the location of prosodic stress as well as in pitch (with the language contrasting between two tonal levels: high and low pitch).

The language was usually written in the Eastern Raunan alphabet, descended from the Old Eastern variety of the Ancient Raunan script. Middle Irona may be written either vertically (from top to bottom in columns read left to right) or horizontally (left to right), both styles are common although horizontal seems to prevail. This contrasts with the nearby Middle Saire language which also uses the same Eastern Raunan script in both directions but shows a clear preference for vertical writing.

See more: Middle Irona wordlist (27 words).

Middle Iyau

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Iyau languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in a relatively small area in the north-western region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Iyau, much like the Ancient Iyau language it descended from, was a polysynthetic language with complex words often standing for full sentences in English. Verbs commonly incorporate subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and even tools; key sentence elements typically are only found as standalone nouns if the speaker intends to emphasize them. The language features two groups of consonants (coronal vs peripheral, the latter including both labial and velar consonants) with some amount of consonant-harmony between them as affixes will change to suit the consonant group of a nearby stem.

The Middle Iyau language was written in the Western Raunan alphabet, a descendant of the Old Western variant of the Ancient Raunan script. This writing system was also used by the Aune people, the main political and commercial partners of the Iyau.

See more: Middle Iyau wordlist (22 words).

Middle Lealea

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Lealea languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken during the Middle Period in the Lealea islands, north of the fictional land of Rauna.

The Lealea language features a strict verb-subject-object order. Nouns belong to semantic-driven nominal classes which are marked through a mandatory suffix. In addition to that, a Middle Lealea noun may be marked with prefixes, prepositions and postpositions to indicate number, definiteness and case. Although verbs generally are not conjugated for person, some feature a lexical variation depending on the number of their subject: 'to give' translates as sah if the subject is singular or ahsae if the subject is plural. This variation is irregular and unpredictable but only affects a limited number of verbs.

During most of the Middle Period, the Lealea language was written in the North-Western Raunan script, an alphabet they adapted from the neighbouring Akkum people in northern Rauna. However, by the end of the period Lealea speakers began to use the North-Eastern Raunan script instead, due to Mulasah influence.

See more: Middle Lealea wordlist (20 words).

Middle Mulasah

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Mulasah languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the northern region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Although Middle Mulasah did not have a phonemic vowel length contrast, the rhythm of the language was characterised by a noticeable lengthening of all stress vowels. Middle Mulasah grammar was fusional and its nouns declined for six cases and three numbers: singular, paucal and plural, the latter of which was formed by reduplication except for a limited number of nouns with a suppletive plural form. Verbs are required to agree with their subject in number although not by person: all singular pronouns share the same verbforms as do all their plural equivalents.

The language was written in the North-Eastern Raunan script, an alphabet the Mulasah people borrowed from the Voh. Traditionally, this script was written in boustrophedon style (alternating writing direction) but by the end of the Middle Period writing exclusively from left to right became the norm, a trend that seems to have started with Middle Mulasah and later extended to Middle Voh. The Middle Lealea language was also written in this script late into the Middle Period due to Mulasah influence.

See more: Middle Mulasah wordlist (32 words).

Middle Nau

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Nau languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the eastern region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period. Due to the fertile plains along the Selauhi river in Nau territory, the Nau grew to be the most populous people in Rauna and, as such, their Middle Nau language bacame the main language in the region by number of speakers.

The language features implosives (also found in the Middle Smia language from southern Rauna) and pitch accent, usually alternating high and low-pitched syllables within a word. Middle Nau verbs often conjugate through vowel alternations (as in bhai, bhie, bhii for 'to see', 'saw' and 'seeing') and often require auxiliary verbs to indicate aspect or to form negatives. Unlike other Raunan languages that typically allow pronoun-dropping, the Middle Nau language uses pronouns extensively. Although the language is not related to Ancient Raunic, a significant part of its vocabulary can be tracked to the language of the Raunan Empire, particularly when it comes to toponyms such as the name of the Selauhi river, from Ancient Raunan Səlwah'hya.

The Middle Nau language was written in the Central Raunan alphabet or 'Ru script' which the Nau adopted under the influence of the nearby Ru Kingdom.

See more: Middle Nau wordlist (16 words).

Middle Nheam

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Nheam languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken during the Middle Period in the islands of Mewha Inhum and Rumundea, located east of the fictional land of Rauna.

The Middle Nheam language differs in many ways from its ancestor, the Ancient Nheam language. Innovations include some of Middle Nheam's more notorious features such as the development of voiceless nasals (as found in the word ñheam itself) and the usage of consonant mutation and vowel ablaut, in the morphology of the language, responsible for alternations such as funda (the present-tense stem for the verb 'to give') to fean ('gave', the past-tense stem for the same verb) or for the change of the initial f in either stem to wh if affected by a negative particle. Nouns decline through prefixes and prepositions descended from Ancient Nheam articles.

The language was written in the Middle Nheam script, also used by the unrelated Nimbe language from northern Rumundea and northeastern Rauna. This writing system is cursive and often requires letters to change form depending on their context.

See more: Middle Nheam wordlist (19 words).

Middle Nimbe

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Nimbe languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the north-eastern region of the fictional island of Rauna as well as the northern half of the nearby Rumundea island during the Middle Period.

The language features nasal harmony both on its consonants and vowels. Middle Nimbe has an agglutinative morphology which allows noun incorporation of direct objects. Verbs are conjugated for tense, aspect, evidentiality (distinguishing between directly experienced knowledge and indirect knowledge or hearsay) and person. The latter is marked through polypersonal agreement, requiring a transitive verb to agree both with its subject and its object in person and number. Intransitive verbs on the other hand are required to have a 'dummy' person marking for one of those categories while reflecting their theme (subject) in the other. Intransitive themes might be treated as subjects or objects depending on whether the action was intentional or not. Thus, Middle Nimbe can be said to have had a Fluid S syntactical alignment.

The language was typically written in the script of the Middle Nheam language. The North-Eastern script typically used for the Middle Voh language might be used as well.

See more: Middle Nimbe wordlist (11 words).

Middle Ru

A priori - Undersky languages - Ru-Hulam languages - Ru languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the western region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Ru features a rather complex phonology distinguishing 37 consonants and 8 vowels. Nouns belong to one of four nominal classes or genders. Although the class of a given noun is not fully predictable from neither its form or meaning; the classes mostly correspond to human beings and human groups (I), resources including edible plants and animals, fuels and materials such as wool (II), non-edible soft or non-solid materials (III) and non-edible hard materials and man-made tools (IV). While number marking is optional, nouns must be declined for case using suffix which depend on the nominal class and on the final vowel of the nominal stem due to a front-vs-back vowel harmony. Verbs are polysynthetic and feature polypersonal agreement and noun incorporation for tools or generic direct objects.

The language was written in the Central Raunan script, also known as Ru script. This writing system would later be adopted by other cultures such as the Nau due to the prominence of the Ru-speaking Cadarmeni Kingdom early in Middle Period Rauna.

See more: Middle Ru wordlist (156 words).

Middle Saire

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Saire languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the south-eastern region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Saire is an agglutinative language. Many of its consonants feature a fortis-lenis contrast which, aside from providing a very subtle aspiration to fortis stops and fricatives, may affect the length of a preceding vowel. This, combined with Middle Saire distinguishing between short and long vowel, results in a fourfold vowel length distinction contrasting extra-short vowels (if short and followed by a fortis consonant), regular short vowels, mid-long vowels (long but reduced by a following fortis consonant) and regular long consonants. Middle Saire grammar was unique among Raunan languages in marking verbs for telicity. Although the language cannot be classified as having a topic-comment structure, all sentences are required to have a marked focal element.

The language was usually written in the Eastern Raunan alphabet, descended from the Old Eastern variety of the Ancient Raunan script. While the neighbouring Middle Irona language used the same script both horizontally (left to right) or vertically (from top to bottom in columns read left to right), the Middle Saire language was mostly written vertically.

See more: Middle Saire wordlist (22 words).

Middle Smia

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Smia languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the southern region of the fictional island of Rauna and in the neighbouring Mewha Inhum island during the Middle Period.

Middle Smia descends from the Ancient Smia language and preserves many of its features such as sesquisyllabic words (although these are far less frequent than in the ancient language) and relatively complicated phonotactics. Middle Smia differs from its ancestor in the development of a tonal system, contrasting two pitches for short vowels and four contour tones for long vowels and diphthongs. Its grammar remains mostly isolating and, although topic-comment sentence structure is still permitted, it was far less frequent than subject-predicate structures in most Smia-speaking regions during the Middle Period (with the exception of the Smia colony in Mewha Inhum).

The language was written in the Southern Raunan alphabet, a script also used by the Middle Xhuei language which was influenced both by the Ru script (used by the Ru and Nau languages) and from the Old Southern variant of the Ancient Raunan script typically found in Ancient Smia texts.

See more: Middle Smia wordlist (30 words).

Middle Voh

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Voh languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the north-eastern region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Voh might be considering the most challenging language in its region when it comes to pronunciation due to its heavy use of click consonants (featuring 15 such phonemes), ejectives and its contrast between five different tone contours, not unlike those of real-world Mandarin. The language has an ergative-absolutive alignment and features a topic-comment structure, sentences always begin with a focal element. Number marking is optional even in personal pronouns, although those do distinguish other categories such as formality and animation.

The language was written in the North-Eastern Raunan script, an alphabet derived from the Old Northern script used to write Ancient Voh. Although the Middle Period script is no longer logographic, Ancient Voh logograms see some extra-linguistic use as symbols. The North-Eastern Raunan alphabet was also adopted for the Mulasah and Lealea languages. The script was traditionally written in boustrophedon style although writing left-to-right became standard by the end of the Middle Period under the influence of other languages and scripts.

See more: Middle Voh wordlist (13 words).

Middle Xhuei

A priori - Undersky languages - Languages of Rauna - Xhuei languages

An a priori language that would have been spoken in the south-western region of the fictional island of Rauna during the Middle Period.

Middle Xhuei is a topic-comment language. Its phonology features six ejectives, including an ejective fricative s' and an ejective affricate ts'. One unusual feature of the language is that all Middle Xhuei nouns have an associated noun-class particle which usually can be predicted from their meaning. This particle is used as a suffix on nouns to form their plural form and also as a mandatory clitic on verbs to mark their theme (mostly corresponding to their direct object).

The language was written in the Southern Raunan alphabet, a script also used by the Middle Smia language which was influenced both by the Ru script (used by the Ru and Nau languages) and from the Old Southern variant of the Ancient Raunan script typically found in Ancient Smia texts. Some Middle Xhuei speakers were also known to use other scripts such as the Central Raunan script from their northern Ru-speaking neighbours or the Eastern Raunan script from their northern neighbours the Saire.

See more: Middle Xhuei wordlist (11 words).

Modern Latin

A posteriori - Indo-European - Italic - Romance

Modern Latin is an a posteriori language based on Classical Latin, although inspired by Modern Greek. It would be spoken in an alternate history world were Greek-based 'Romanic' languages replace the actual Latin-based Romance languages, leaving Modern Latin as the only national language based on historical Latin, much like how Modern Greek is the only major language that descends from Ancient Greek in our world.

The conlang is intended to resemble Modern Greek in its phonology, sound changes and, to some extent, its grammar. For instance, Latin /u/ and /eː/ are merged with /i/, much like how Ancient Greek ypsilon/upsilon and eta merged with iota.

The language would be natively written in a version of the Latin alphabet that would have evolved differently than in our world. Lowercase glyphs are supposed to resemble Modern Greek lowercase (as found in our world), although letters also draw inspiration on Old Roman Cursive. Much as in real-life Modern Greek, Modern Latin orthography is a hyper-conservative nightmare. A phonetic romanization (in our version of the Latin alphabet) is used instead in the dictionary.

See more: Modern Latin wordlist (100 words).

Older Kraliy

A priori - Kraliy

An a priori constructed language which would be the ancestor to other Kraliy languages.

The language features three vowels, /ɐ/, /ə/ and /ɨ/, although /i/ and /u/ appear as syllabic allophones of the glides /j/ and /w/, otherwise considered consonants. Verbs agree with their subject but also may agree in number and animacy with their direct object.

The language would have been spoken somewhere in Siberia or Central Asia. Older Kraliy may be transcribed in either Latin (with a mostly IPA-based orthography) or Cyrillic, although those would be modern conventions for an originally unwritten language.

See more: Older Kraliy wordlist (81 words).

Proto Ru-Hulam

A priori - Undersky languages - Ru-Hulam languages

An ancient language once spoken in the north-east of Drysia, one of the continents of a fictional world, As its name shows, Proto Ru-Hulam (also abbreviated as 'PRH') is the ancestor of the Ru languages (spoken by the distant island of Rauna) and the Hulam languages (still spoken in northeastern Drysia). The conlang is, for all purposes, identical to Ancient Hulamic, the language of an empire established by the ancestors of the Hulam (and Ru) peoples around two thousand years ago.

One notable feature of PRH is its contrast between labialized and non-labialized consonants, as in /tʷ/ vs /t/. Although this contrast was lost in all its descendants, its influence can still be observed, for instance in the development of a larger vocalic inventory in Middle Ru.

Ancient Hulamic (believed to closely correspond to the ancestor of the modern Ru and Hulam languages, and thus considered to be nearly identical to PRH) was written in its own writing system; originally an abjad although diacritics for vowels became ubiquitous later.

See more: Proto Ru-Hulam wordlist (111 words).

Spaele

Other

An a posteriori language with an a priori grammar. Spaele mostly draws its vocabulary from European natural languages such as English, Spanish, German, Latin and Old English, but its lexicon also includes a number of terms from Japanese and even from other constructed languages.

Esperanto is a major influence in the language, both in concept and vocabulary-wise, although Spaele is emphatically not meant to be an auxlang.

Grammarwise, Spaele has little in common with its main lexical sources, being mostly agglutinative and featuring polypersonal agreement and a wide usage of grammatical gender.

Different writing systems have been used for Spaele, including a constructed alphabet known as Piumafonte.

See more: Spaele wordlist (66 words).