Lemobrogian language

Lemobrogian
Kèŋóľiyó
Pronunciation	[kɛˈŋoʎijo]
Native to	Lemobrogia
Native speakers	L1 ~ 76,000,000 (2024) L2 ~ 25,000,000
Language family	Sidurian Lemobrogic Lemobrogian
Early forms	Kəyòkóľiyó Maèsóľiyó Rèňəvóľiyó Aènóľiyó Kælsóľiyó
Dialects	Central Lemobrogic Northern Lemobrogic Southern Lemobrogic
Writing system	Lemobrogian alphabet Lemobrogian Braille
Signed forms	Kèŋóľiyó Maŋósivə ak
Official status
Official language in	Lemobrogia Nerveiík-Iárus-Daláyk Region (Gylias)
Regulated by	Kèŋóľiyó ós Nòvòhužó
Language codes
ISO 639-1	kľ
ISO 639-2	kèŋ
ISO 639-3	kèŋ

Lemobrogian (Kèŋóľiyó, [kɛˈŋoʎijo]) is a Siduric language of the Lemobrogic branch, spoken by the majority of the population of Lemobrogia and by ethnic Lemobrogians outside of the country; it is the official language of Lemobrogia, and it is also official in the Nerveiík-Iárus-Daláyk Region of Gylias - the heart of the historical Nerveiík Kingdom, itself the last incarnation of Xevden, a state founded in present-day Gylias by the ethnically Lemobrogian Ŋéžé people. It is a chiefly isolating, object–subject–verb word order language, whose standard variety, that serves as the lingua franca of Lemobrogia, is based on a conservative and literary register of the tongue, used first by the courtly and priestly class, and then by the country's chroniclers and troubadours. Today, it is spoken natively by around 76,000,000 people, counting those dialects whose speakers can readily understand it and, as a second language, by around 25,000,000 people.

Classification

The Lemobrogic languages form a dialect continuum, in which neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but widely separated varieties are not; Lemobrogian is a conservative and literary register of these languages, and it serves as the lingua franca of Lemobrogia. Even though most people in the country do not speak it as their first language, it is easily comprehensible and largely intelligible not only for average and ordinary speakers of the Lemobrogic languages, but also for cultured and educated speakers of the Gylic languages, and especially of the Yaskan and Zineran languages. The Lemobrogic languages share several key features with the Gylic languages in general, and with reconstructed Proto-Gylic in particular; for this reason, several linguists have postulated the existence of a language family that would include all Gylic languages and all Lemobrogic languages, named Sidurian. Moreover, the gap between local vernacular and national standard is filled by 12 regional varieties that first arose as trade languages during the Syaran and Tennaiite occupation.

History

The Lemobrogic languages are the descendants of a proto-language called Proto-Lemobrogic or, in present-day Lemobrogian, Kəyòkóľiyó, "the old speech"; this language is itself a descendant of a hypothesized shared ancestor of Proto-Gylic and Proto-Lemobrogic. An early logographic variant of the Lemobrogic script was used as early as 6000 BCE to record not only religious precepts and taboos, but also practical concerns related to foraging and horticulture - especially since there was not a clear divide between these concerns and precepts. By around 5000 BCE, the polities of Lemobrogia had unified under a pacifist theocracy; those polities gradually adopted the script and speech used by the chief priesthood, based in the city of Maèsóňisó. The resulting lingua franca or, in present-day Lemobrogian, Maèsóľiyó, "the unified speech", flourished until around 2000 BCE, when Erani-Eracuran expansion drove a significant percentage of Lemobrogia's inhabitants east, to Gylias.

The sudden drop in population resulted in the priesthood losing a significant degree of influence and power; the Lemobrogic script became first syllabic and then alphabetical, spreading to the people as a whole, and Maèsóľiyó turned into Rèňəvóľiyó, "the people's speech". Even as ancient Lemobrogia became an unusually literate society for its day, it was quite isolated and nearly unreachable, and it stagnated socially and technologically until it was partitioned between those foreign dynasties based in Syara and Tennai; the north of the country adopted the script of the former, and the south of the country adopted the script of the latter, with both polities influencing the vocabulary of the local vernacular, that split into Aènóľiyó and Kælsóľiyó, "the northern speech" and "the southern speech", respectively. When Northern Lemobrogia regained its independence as a Hellenized, Zobethian state in 1305 CE, and southern Lemobrogia as an Indianized, Hahtta state in 1333 CE, both polities standardized their respective varieties.

After the ruinous war that put both polities against the absolutist, theocratic Xevdenite proto-state in the east forced the southern and northern states to unite, to counter the depopulation of several areas, a shared standard, Kèŋóľiyó, "the realm's speech", was developed, based on the spoken word of the chroniclers and singers that had plied their trade in the country until then; their conservative and literary register, understood by the greater part of the populace due to the popularity of these itinerant entertainers, is the basis of present-day Lemobrogian. At first written using the later incarnation of the Lemobrogic script, or the Hellenic and Indic scripts favoured by ancient Syara and Tennai, the Latin script was adopted for Kèŋóľiyó not long after the start of Acrea's protectorate over Lemobrogia, in 1659 CE; however, it is only with the end of the protectorate, in 1992 CE, that the current spelling, based on that of the Gylic alphabet, was adopted, replacing an older, Nordic-influenced spelling.

Geographic distribution

Most of the population of Lemobrogia is natively fluent in at least one Lemobrogic language, with the notable exception of certain ethnic groups in the far north and the far south of the country, that were invited by the Crown inside Lemobrogia's borders to try and recoup the losses incurred during the war against the Xevdenite proto-state; even those ethnic groups, however, speak standard Lemobrogian as a second language, with it being the lingua franca of virtually the entire nation. The Lemobrogic languages can be subdivided into three groups: central or midland vernaculars, spoken in the country's heartland and direct descendants of the earliest varieties of the tongue; northern or lowland vernaculars, notable for their Erani-Eracuran influences; southern or highland vernaculars, notable for their Dravidian influences. The Ŋéžó language, spoken by the Xevdenites' descendants, is a lowland tongue, the closest of all Lemobrogic languages to the Gylic languages in general, and to the Yaskan and Zineran languages in particular.

Phonology

The phonology and phonotactics of Lemobrogian are fairly plain and regular, sharing several key characteristics with the Gylic languages: the language consists of 27 consonant phonemes and 9 vowel phonemes; they are usually paired in CV syllables, but the language's phonotactics also allow for word-initial vowels and word-final consonants, as well as for sonorant consonants as syllable codas, that allow for word-medial consonant clusters consisting of a sonorant and another consonant. There are also 6 diphthongs, three of which are closing (and quite frequent), and three of which are opening (and less frequent). Stress usually falls on the first syllable of a word, as in the Gylic languages; longer words, often the result of agglutination or compounding, are stressed on the third to last syllable instead. Southern or highland vernaculars are notable for contrasting ejective and pulmonic plosives in stead of standard Lemobrogian's contrasting of voiced and voiceless plosives.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m			n		ɲ	ŋ
Plosive	p b			t d			k g	ʔ
Sibilant affricate					ʧ ʤ
Sibilant fricative				s z	ʃ ʒ
Non-sibilant fricative		f v	θ ð					h
Approximant				ɹ		j	w
Lateral approximant				l		ʎ

Vowels

	Close	Central	Back
Front	i		u
Close-mid	e		o
Mid		ə
Open-mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open	a	ä

In addition to the above, there are also 6 diphthongs: [ei̯], [ou̯] and [aɛ̯] are closing (and quite frequent); [ɛ̯a], [i̯e] and [u̯o] are opening (and less frequent). Northern or lowland vernaculars are notable for either the presence of additional [ä̯ə] and [əä̯] diphthongs, especially northeastern vernaculars such as the Ŋéžó language, or for the presence of vowel length in stead of diphthongs, especially northwestern vernaculars; this trait is not an archaic, conservative one, even though Proto-Lemobrogic did have vowel length, but a trait developed under Erani-Eracuran influence first, and Hellenic influence later on. The nine-vowel system of the Lemobrogic languages is closely related to the six-vowel system of the Gylic languages: the latter collapsed [e] and [ɛ], [o] and [ɔ], [a] and [ä] into [e], [o] and [a], with [ə] turning into [ɨ] everywhere but in certain, very specific instances. On the other hand, a few Gylic languages have a rare, peripheral [æ] vowel that is entirely absent in most Lemobrogic languages.

Grammar

Lemobrogian's basic word order is object-subject-verb; it is a chiefly isolating language: beyond adhering to a very basic grammatical gender system (animate gender nouns end in [ɛ], [e] or [i], inanimate gender nouns end in [ɔ], [o] or [u]), nouns are not subject to declension, and verbs are not subject to conjugation - instead, particles follow nouns and verbs to convey additional information about them. A not insignificant number of proper nouns, ending in a consonant preceded by [a], are the result of noun/particle fusion: in fact, this characteristic ending is so widespread, that it has turned into a de facto third gender, with adjectives (in Lemobrogian, they follow the nouns they depend on, and take on their grammatical gender suffix) agreeing with this ending as with any other grammatical gender suffix. Verbs, on the other hand, end in [ə]; the basic form of the verb, when not followed by a particle, acts as a non-future or future infinitive, depending on context.

Noun particles

	Animate	Inanimate
Nominative	-	-
Accusative	èn	òn
Genitive	és	ós
Dative	ir	ur
Locative	éþ	óþ
Instrumental	èk	òk

Verb particles

	Non-future	Future
Infinitive	-	-
Indicative	ək	æk
Imperative	əx	æx
Subjunctive	ər	ær
Gerund	əŋ	æŋ
Participle	əd	æd

In addition to the very basic grammatical gender system detailed above, that provides a fusional feature to the Lemobrogian language's chiefly isolating nature, the tongue's penchant for compounding provides an agglutinative feature to it; unlike adjectives, that follow the nouns they depend on, the compounded or composited parts of speech that are added to a root word in order to create a new lexeme precede the nouns they depend on, whatever their nature. The native endonym for Lemobrogia - Daènókèŋó - is, itself, a compound in which the Lemobrogian term for "country", kèŋó, is preceded by the Lemobrogian term for "elm tree", daèné, whose inflectional suffix has been made to agree in grammatical gender and vowel height with the former term by the rules detailed above. This also extends to those foreign loanwords that behave as compounds in their tongue of origin, such as Futóbaľó - a word borrowed from the Nordic fotball, in which the term ball was appropriately given an inanimate gender suffix.

The rare object-subject-verb word order of the Lemobrogic languages, and of Lemobrogian, is believed to be a characteristic of ancient courtly and priestly speech that, over the course of several centuries, was popularized by the ballads and epics of the country's itinerant entertainers, whose conservative and literary register served as a lingua franca even before it was standardized as present-day Lemobrogian; proper nouns being treated as a de facto third gender is yet another quirk of poetry that was adopted by the vernacular of the people, often in an ironic, sarcastic fashion. Unlike the Gylic languages, the Lemobrogic languages have preserved a T-V distinction in their oral and written varieties alike, but they lack an inflected plural, the Gylic languages' plural inflection in [oi̯] having been developed under the influence of Gylias' own Hellenic populace. That said, the spoken register of urban youth often makes use of several characteristics of the Gylic languages that the Lemobrogic languages lack.

Vocabulary

Most of the vocabulary of Lemobrogian is of Proto-Lemobrogic origin; however, while reconstructed Proto-Gylic and reconstructed Proto-Lemobrogic are mutually intelligible, modern Gylic languages and modern Lemobrogic languages are not, cultured and educated speakers of either tongue being the exception. While the standardized Kèŋóľiyó register was purged of foreign influence, chiefly Hellenic and Indic, several words of Erani-Eracuran origin had been borrowed at a very early phase of the development of the Lemobrogic languages as a whole, to such an extent they were perceived as native by the 16th century scholars tasked with the development of that literary standard, and kept as they were. Moreover, even this conservative and literary register was influenced by the Nordic tongue during Acrea's protectorate over Lemobrogia; in recent years, words of English, French and Italian origin have entered the vernacular through the cultural influence of Gylias and Megelan.

Another quirk of Lemobrogian, and of Lemobrogic languages as a whole, is how often its vocabulary has been expanded by attaching an affix to a pre-existing word, or by switching the grammatical gender of a pre-existing word: for example, while the animate gender word deíné is used to refer to a country in its geographical or natural sense, its inanimate gender counterpart deínó is used to refer to a province or subdivision, and used to refer to a country as an organized nation or state until it was displaced by kèŋó - a word that derives from a metathesized rendition of the Nordic word konge, that is, "king", a semantic shift happened relatively recently in Lemobrogia's history, with he name of Xevden preserving the older meaning of the word. Additionally, the prefix na, that indicates entirety or totality, is present in the word naþòsu, or "eternal" (literally, "all-time"), and the word nabési, or "everyone" (literally, "all-beings").

Writing system

While the Kəyòkóľiyó, Maèsóľiyó and Rèňəvóľiyó varieties of the standardized Lemobrogian language were written using a native script that started as logographic, only to turn into a syllabic and then alphabetical script over the course of several thousand years, Aènóľiyó and Kælsóľiyó were written using the Greek alphabet and the Brahmi script, respectively. While the Kèŋóľiyó standard briefly reverted to said native script in its early days, it eventually adopted the Latin alphabet, using Nordic-influenced spelling rules, under the influence of Acrea. The variant of the Latin alphabet used to write present-day Lemobrogian, based on the Gylic one, was adopted only as late as 1992 CE, with the end of Acrea's protectorate over Lemobrogia. This alphabet is highly phonetic, and each letter represents exactly one sound; while there are, in fact, instances in which the present-day Lemobrogian alphabet does not fully align with how it is spoken, these instances follow very specific and predictable rules.

Alphabet

Letter	IPA	Letter	IPA	Letter	IPA
A a	[a]	I i	[i]	Q q	[ʔ]
Æ æ	[ä]	J j	[ʤ]	R r	[ɹ]
B b	[b]	K k	[k]	S s	[s]
C c	[ʧ]	L l	[l]	T t	[t]
D d	[d]	Ľ ľ	[ʎ]	Þ þ	[θ]
Ð ð	[ð]	M m	[m]	U u	[u]
È è	[ɛ]	N n	[n]	V v	[v]
É é	[e]	Ň ň	[ɲ]	W w	[w]
Ə ə	[ə]	Ŋ ŋ	[ŋ]	X x	[ʃ]
F f	[f]	Ò ò	[ɔ]	Y y	[j]
G g	[g]	Ó ó	[o]	Z z	[z]
H h	[h]	P p	[p]	Ž ž	[ʒ]

Examples

The following is a sample text in Lemobrogian of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

English
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience. Therefore, they should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Lemobrogian
Xòreí vòhuži nabési þaènə, boúyésó xeíyésó òk yébeí. Aŋéxu óþéku òk neí haèyə. Biqəyó ós ciňakó òk isóneí èn, oúna neí aèzə əx.
IPA
ˈʃɔɹei̯ ˈvɔhuʒi ˈnabesi ˈθaɛ̯nə, ˈbou̯jeso ˈʃei̯jeso ˈɔk ˈjebei̯. ˈaŋeʃu ˈoθeku ˈɔk ˈnei̯ ˈhaɛ̯jə. ˈbiʔəjo ˈos ˈʧiɲako ˈɔk ˈisonei̯ ˈɛn, ˈou̯na ˈnei̯ ˈaɛ̯zə ˈəʃ.
Gloss
free human beings all be born-NFUT.INF, dignity right-INS.INAN equal. reason conscience-INS.INAN 3.AN endow-NFUT.INF. brotherhood-GEN.INAN spirit-INS.INAN one another-ACC.AN, therefore 3.AN act-NFUT.IMP.