Lemobrogian language

Lemobrogian
Loŋku Takidanθu
Pronunciation	[ˈlɔŋku taˈkidanθu]
Native to	Lemobrogia
Ethnicity	Lemobrogians
Native speakers	~ 43,791,300 (2024)
Language family	Sidurian Lemobrogic Lemobrogian
Early forms	Old Lemobrogian Classical Lemobrogian Vulgar Lemobrogian
Dialects	Central Lemobrogic Northern Lemobrogic Southern Lemobrogic
Writing system	Lemobrogian alphabet Lemobrogian Braille
Signed forms	Loŋku Kayna
Official status
Official language in	Lemobrogia Nerveiík-Iárus-Daláyk Region (Gylias)
Regulated by	Selo us lei Loŋku
Language codes
ISO 639-1	lk
ISO 639-2	lk
ISO 639-3	lok

Lemobrogian (Loŋku Takidanθu, [ˈlɔŋku taˈkidanθu]) is a Siduric 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 an analytic, subject–verb–object 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; Lemobrogian is a koiné language, that arose as the result of the contact, mixing and simplification of the languages belonging to this 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 Siduric, whose dialects and languages are characterized by an analytic typology and a SVO sentence structure.

History

The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the language, as the Old Lemobrogian spoken during the First Confederation 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 a pidgin language in order to facilitate the exchanges of goods and services that served as the potlatch-like basis of their society; 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 Confederation dissolved, Old Lemobrogian - by then, a creole language rather than a pidgin language, and the native language of a significant part of the populace - diverged into several separate dialects. However, due to the logographic nature of the script with which Old Lemobrogian was written, its phonology can not be reconstructed with absolute certainty.

By around 700 BCE, the nation was reunified under the Second Confederation by the members of a philosophical school founded in 1728 BCE by Kaje Danθu, who believed that their founder and precursor had hypothesized or even prophesied the collapse of Lemobrogia's Bronze Age civilization; the language spoken by the members of Kaje Danθu's philosophical school formed the basis of Classical Lemobrogian. As Kaje Danθu's philosophy turned into a religion, Virocredia, knowledge of Classical Lemobrogian 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 Confederation 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. Moreover, during this period, the ancient logographic script was replaced by a syllabic script; certain extensively used logographic characters were however retained.

By 246 BCE the Second Confederation 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 Lemobrogian diverged, again, into several separate dialects, influenced in the north by Greek and in the south by Sanskrit, and the syllabic script with which it was written was replaced by the scripts used in said countries. 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 had diverged enough from each other that, by the early 1500s, while neighboring varieties of this Vulgar Lemobrogian register were mutually intelligible, widely separated varieties were not; while Classical Lemobrogian continued to serve as the language of the faith and of the state, itinerant workers, traveling merchants and wandering entertainers developed a koiné language of their own.

For the next several centuries, a language conflict ensued; even though, in 1333 CE, the Third Federation re-adopted Classical Lemobrogian as the country's official language, it was a compromise measure made necessary by the pluricentric nature of Vulgar Lemobrogian. The gulf between Classical Lemobrogian and Vulgar Lemobrogian 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 Vulgar Lemobrogian's disparate varieties made the vernacular drift even further apart from the literary and stately register of Classical Lemobrogian. However, by the early 20th century 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, also due to the influence of several leading figures in the country's 19th century popular culture.

This register, 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, was declared to be the official language of the country by the Futurist leadership in the 1920s, 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 Šein Taki's tenure, even though the establishment of the Fourth Confederation was marked by several breaks with the old government - up to and including the relocation of the nation's capital; the only change to the written standard was a spelling reform, based on the one that took place in Gylias during the Gylian languages reform of 1958–1959, that simplified its orthography, in order to make it more phonemic. The old syllabic script has recently seen a revival for calligraphic and decorative purposes, and there have been several proposals to modernize it for daily use.

Geographic distribution

Even though most people in the country do not speak Lemobrogian as their first language, and speak either one of the languages belonging to the Lemobrogic dialect continuum (72% of the population) or a language that does not belong to the Lemobrogic dialect continuum, often an Acrean, Syaran or Tennaiite dialect (28% of the population), Lemobrogian is easily comprehensible and largely intelligible by the vast majority of the nation's inhabitants; therefore, it serves as Lemobrogia's lingua franca, used in the country's chief institutions and official documents. Traditionally, the Lemobrogic languages have been subdivided into central or midland, northern or lowland and southern or highland varieties; the status of the Gylic dialect spoken by those Ŋež that left Gylias for Lemobrogia, and their descendants, is a subject of debate: scholars are divided on whether it's a Gylic dialect with a North Lemobrogic substrate, a Lemobrogic dialect with a South Gylic superstrate, or a transitional dialect.

Phonology

The phonotactics of Lemobrogian - a language that has preserved certain Siduric consonant clusters, that were lost in related vernaculars - follow a (C)(C)V(C)(C) syllable structure; the nucleus of the syllable is always a short vowel, that can be preceded by an onset of 1 or 2 consonants (in the latter case, the only allowed cluster is that of a fricative or stop, and a homorganic approximant) or followed by a coda of 1 or 2 consonants (in the latter case, the only allowed cluster is that of a nasal and a homorganic fricative or stop); in polysyllabic words, double consonants can also occur, but sequences of more than 2 consonants are still forbidden. There are no diphthongs or long vowels: while vowel sequences of up to 2 vowels (always consisting of one vowel and an identical vowel, or of a vowel and another vowel with the same backness or height as the first one) can and do occur, these vowels are always counted as nuclei of separate syllables, rather than as part of a single syllable.

Consonants

	Labial	Coronal	Dorsal	Laryngeal
Stop	pʼ p b ɓ	tʼ t d ɗ	kʼ k g ɠ	ʔ
Nasal	m	n	ŋ
Fricative	ɸ β	θ ð s z ʃ ʒ	x ɣ	h
Approximant	w	l	j

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	ɛ	ə	ɔ
Open		a

The phonotactics of Lemobrogian follow a (C)(C)V(C)(C) syllable structure; the nucleus of the syllable is always a short vowel, that can be preceded by an onset of 1 or 2 consonants (in the latter case, the only allowed cluster is that of a stop and a homorganic approximant) or followed by a coda of 1 or 2 consonants (in the latter case, the only allowed cluster is that of a nasal and a homorganic stop); in polysyllabic words, double consonants and clusters consisting of a fricative and a homorganic approximant, or of a nasal and a homorganic fricative, can also occur, but sequences of more than 2 consonants are still forbidden. There are no diphthongs or long vowels: while vowel sequences of up to 2 vowels (always consisting of one vowel and an identical vowel, or of a back, central or front vowel and the other back, central or front vowel) can and do occur, these vowels are always counted as nuclei of separate syllables, rather than as part of a single syllable.

Grammar

Lemobrogian is an analytic, subject–verb–object word order language: content words can be nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs depending on their position in a sentence, and they are not inflected in any way; to express grammatical relationships between these, Lemobrogian utilizes derivational affixes and function words. Gender and T-V distinctions became obsolete in the Lemobrogic branch of the Siduric language family quite earlier than in the Gylic branch of said language family, that began to phase those distinctions out - by decree - only after the Gylian languages reform of 1958–1959; as is typical for subject–verb–object word order languages, Lemobrogian uses prepositions rather than postpositions, while adjectives, demonstratives, genitives, numerals, possessives and relative clauses follow the nouns they modify. Moreover, Lemobrogian places auxiliary verbs before action verbs, proper names after titles and honorifics, and uses a place–manner–time ordering of adpositional phrases.

Vocabulary

72% of the vocabulary of Lemobrogian is of native origin, with most of said native vocabulary consisting of words that have cognates in at least one Gylic language, often a Yaskan or Zineran dialect; that said, while reconstructed Proto-Gylic and reconstructed Proto-Lemobrogic are mutually intelligible, modern Gylic languages and modern Lemobrogic languages are not, due to divergent semantic changes and sound shifts, and neither are Lemobrogian and the Gylic koiné. The remaining 28% of the language's vocabulary largely consists of words taken from Proto-Erani-Eracuran during the Bronze Age, or of words of Greek, Nordic or Sanskrit descent adopted due to the influence of Syara, Acrea or the Rideva much later on; an even higher percentage of words of Greek, Nordic or Sanskrit descent is characteristic of the dialects spoken in, respectively, the lowland north, the midland center or the highland south of the country, while Lemobrogian favours words of native origin that are shared by most of the country's languages.

Writing system

While Old Lemobrogian was written in a logographic script, and Classical Lemobrogian was written in a syllabic descendant of the previous script - that nonetheless retained certain extensively used logographic characters - the Vulgar Lemobrogian dialects eventually adopted the Devanagari abugida (in the south) and the Greek alphabet (in the north). While the earlier syllabic script was brought back into use after the re-adoption of Classical Lemobrogian as the country's official language in 1333 CE, by then the gulf between spelling and pronunciation had grown, and it would widen even further over the course of the following centuries; because of this, a version of the Latin alphabet heavily based on Acrean spelling conventions was eventually adopted in the 1920s, when the current register of the Lemobrogian language was adopted as the official standard. A further spelling reform took place in 1968, that simplified the orthography of the above version of the Latin alphabet, in order to make it more phonemic.

Alphabet

Letter	IPA	Letter	IPA	Letter	IPA
A a	[a]	I i	[i]	S s	[s]
B b	[b]	J j	[j]	Š š	[ʃ]
Ḅ ḅ	[ɓ]	K k	[k]	T t	[t]
D d	[d]	Kʼ kʼ	[kʼ]	Tʼ tʼ	[tʼ]
Ḍ ḍ	[ɗ]	L l	[l]	ϴ θ	[θ]
Ð ð	[ð]	M m	[m]	U u	[u]
E e	[ɛ]	N n	[n]	V v	[β]
F f	[ɸ]	Ŋ ŋ	[ŋ]	W w	[w]
G g	[g]	O o	[ɔ]	X x	[x]
G̣ g̣	[ɠ]	P p	[p]	Y y	[ə]
Ɣ ɣ	[ɣ]	Pʼ pʼ	[pʼ]	Z z	[z]
H h	[h]	Q q	[ʔ]	Ž ž	[ʒ]

Examples

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

Lemobrogian	Kisu 1: Lei manobas se pouno liut aθ hius on keži aθ ḍeli. Nybas se taysa voku aθ honu, aθ meite seiðe eŋ sybas on hou θemi us kemi.
IPA	ˈkisu ˈtiku: ˈlɛi ˈmanɔbas sɛ ˈpɔunɔ ˈliut aθ ˈhius ɔn ˈkɛʒi aθ ˈɗɛli. ˈnəbas sɛ ˈtaəsa ˈβɔku aθ ˈhɔnu, aθ ˈmɛitɛ ˈsɛiðɛ ɛŋ ˈsəbas ɔn ˈhɔu ˈθɛmi us ˈkɛmi.
Gloss	piece 1: DEF human-all PASS born free and same in worth and law. 3-all PASS give reason and soul, and ACT need act among REFL-all in INDEF spirit of friend.
English	Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience, and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.