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 əd
Official status
Official language in	Lemobrogia Nerveiík-Iárus-Daláyk Region (Gylias)
Regulated by	Kèŋóľiyó ós Narèňəvó
Language codes
ISO 639-1	kľ
ISO 639-2	kèŋ
ISO 639-3	kèŋ

Common Lemobrogic (þa Muþoluyoös Rixevindeëŋ, [θa muθo̞ˈlujo̞ːs ɹiʃe̞ˈvinde̞ːŋ]) is a Sidurian language of the Lemobrogic branch, spoken by the vast 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 Ŋež tribe. It is a highly isolating, subject–object–verb word order koiné language, that arose as the result of the contact, mixing and simplification of the languages belonging to the Lemobrogic dialect continuum; even though it is easily comprehensible and largely intelligible by the vast majority of Lemobrogia's 43,791,300 inhabitants, up to and including those whose native tongue is not part of the Lemobrogic dialect continuum, most people in the country do not speak it as their first language.

Classification

The Lemobrogic languages form a dialect continuum, in which neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but widely separated varieties are not; Common Lemobrogic is a koiné language, that arose as the result of the contact, mixing and simplification of the languages belonging to the Lemobrogic dialect continuum, and that became the lingua franca of the nation by the early 1500s. The Lemobrogic languages in general, that can be subdivided into central or midland, northern or lowland and southern or highland varieties, share several key features with the Gylic languages in general, especially those spoken by the Yaskans and Zinerans, 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, provisionally named Sidurian - whose dialects and languages are characterized by a highly isolating typology, a SOV sentence structure and a (C)V(C) syllable structure.

History

The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the language, as the Ancient Lemobrogic spoken during the First Community era, dates back to around 3100 BCE, in the country's Bronze Age, when those corporate groups that had clustered near each other in Lemobrogia's first city-states developed the logographic Ancient Script in order to keep track of the exchanges of goods and services that served as the potlatch-like basis of their society, whose main center was the city of Icqu; as soon as the nation began experiencing a cultural and societal decline, from around 1100 BCE, as a result of internecine warfare and resource overexploitation, and the First Community dissolved, Ancient Lemobrogic diverged into several separate dialects, and the Ancient Script diverged into several separate branches, often cursive or syllabic variants of the earlier logographic script. Due to the logographic nature of the Ancient Script, the phonology of Ancient Lemobrogic can not be reconstructed with absolute certainty.

By around 700 BCE, the nation was reunified under the Second Community by the members of a philosophical school founded in 1728 BCE by Ciḱe Leňi, who believed that their founder and precursor had hypothesized or even prophesied the collapse of Lemobrogia's Bronze Age civilization; the script used and the tongue spoken by the members of Ciḱe Leňi's philosophical school, based on those of the city of Ðoleë in which it was located, formed the basis of Classical Lemobrogic and of the Classical Script, a cursive and syllabic descendant of the Ancient Script. As Ciḱe Leňi's philosophy turned into a religion, Virocredia, knowledge of Classical Lemobrogic and of the Classical Script spread to all corners of society; since the prestige and status of the priest-queens that headed the political and religious life of the bands, clans and tribes of Lemobrogia in the Second Community era hinged on their generosity and liberality, they erected schools and hired teachers for their subjects, giving birth to a golden age of literature and science.

By 246 BCE the Second Community had entered a declining phase and, by 843 CE, it had been fully partitioned between the Rideva in the south and Symmeria in the north; Classical Lemobrogic diverged, again, into several separate dialects, influenced in the north by Greek and in the south by Sanskrit, and the Classical Script was replaced in the north by the Greek alphabet and in the south by Devanagari, with characters retained from the Classical Script for those sounds not covered by either of these writing systems. When this era of foreign rule over Lemobrogia came to an end, between 1305 CE and 1333 CE, the dialects that, by then,  were spoken in the country - the Vulgar Lemobrogic languages - had diverged enough from each other that, by the early 1500s, two separate bridge languages had emerged, one closely modeled after Classical Lemobrogic, that is, Formal Lemobrogic, and one born from the contact, mixing and simplification of the languages belonging to the Lemobrogic dialect continuum, that is, Common Lemobrogic.

For the next several centuries, a language conflict ensued; even though, in 1333 CE, the Third Community adopted Formal Lemobrogic - as codified by the scholars of the university of  the city of Buþir - as the country's new written standard, it was a compromise measure made necessary by the pluricentric nature of Common Lemobrogic, a pluricentrism that extended to the kind of script used by the language: even though the central varieties of the vernacular had retained the use of the syllabic Classical Script, its northern varieties had adopted the Greek alphabet, while its southern varieties had adopted the Devanagari abugida. The gulf between Common Lemobrogic and Formal Lemobrogic became even greater from 1504 CE onwards - as the nation became a protectorate of Acrea in exchange for Acrea's help in defeating the Xevdenite threat, the influence of Acrea's several languages on Common Lemobrogic's disparate varieties made the vernacular drift even further apart from the literary and stately register of Formal Lemobrogic.

By the early 20th century, however, these disparate varieties had converged upon a single standard, easily comprehensible and largely intelligible by the vast majority of Lemobrogia's inhabitants, regardless of their native dialect or language, as the end result of the contact, mixing and simplification of the languages belonging to the Lemobrogic dialect continuum over the course of the previous centuries; in 1920, the Futurist party made Common Lemobrogic the new official language of the country, with a written standard heavily based on Acrean spelling conventions. This decision proved to be popular enough that, even after the end of Futurist rule in 1968, it was not reversed during Ðovu Žuro's tenure, even though the establishment of the Fourth Community was marked by several breaks with the old government - such as the relocation of the nation's capital to the city of Gevaõn; the only change to the written standard was a spelling reform, that simplified its orthography in order to make it more phonemic.

Despite the obvious influence that the Gylian languages reform of 1958–1959 had on this development, there were no further changes to the written standard; even though several other reforms modeled after Gylias' own were proposed, none of them were approved by the Assembly of Delegates; to this day, Common Lemobrogic, unlike the Gylic languages, retains the use of grammatical gender and a T–V distinction, as well as the use of several words of Acrean, Syaran and Tennaiite origin that are often associated with monotheistic religions - in fact, the urban slang of the northern or lowland varieties of the Lemobrogic dialect continuum in general, and of those spoken in the Ŋežvin country in particular, has absorbed plenty of Salvationist and Xevdenite influences over the course of the last half century. The Classical Script has recently seen a revival for calligraphic and decorative purposes; there have been several proposals to modernize the syllabary, in order to make writing Common Lemobrogic words easier.

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] or in a consonant, 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	èc	òc

Verb particles

	Non-future	Future
Infinitive	-	-
Indicative	əc	æc
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.

Personal pronouns

	1st person		2nd person		3rd person
	Familiar	Formal	Familiar	Formal	Familiar	Formal
	ňi	ňeí	ľu	ľoú	žè	žaè
Reciprocal	ňi vés	ňeí veís	ľu vés	ľoú veís	žè vès	žaè veís
Reflexive	ňi xók	ňeí xoúk	ľu xók	ľoú xoúk	žè xók	žaè xoúk
Possessive	ňi dac	ňeí daèc	ľu dac	ľoú daèc	žè dac	žaè daèc

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
Xòr-eí rèňəv-i na-bés-i þaèn-ə, kèrnév-ó suŋdal-ó òn yéb-eí. Aŋéx-u óþék-u òc ž-aè haèy-ə. Biqəy-ó ós ciňak-ó òn ž-aè veís èc, oúna ž-aè aèz-ə əx.
IPA
ˈʃɔɹei̯ ˈɹɛnəvi ˈnabesi ˈθaɛ̯nə, ˈkɛrnevo ˈsuŋdalo ˈɔn ˈjebei̯. ˈaŋeʃu ˈoθeku ˈɔʧ ˈʒaɛ̯ ˈhaɛ̯jə. ˈbiʔəjo ˈos ˈʧiɲako ˈɔn ˈʒaɛ̯ ˈvei̯s ˈɛʧ, ˈou̯na ˈʒaɛ̯ ˈaɛ̯zə ˈəʃ.
Gloss
free-AN human-AN COL-number-AN birth-NFUT.INF, dignity-INAN right-INAN ACC.INAN equal-AN. reason-INAN conscience-INAN INS.INAN 3.FOR.AN endow-NFUT.INF brotherhood-INAN GEN.INAN spirit ACC.INAN 3.FOR.RECP.AN INS.AN, therefore 3.FOR.AN act-NFUT.IMP.