Leshing

A free language
Hei bu!

This project began in summer 2021, after many languages which I never completed cause there wasn’t the time to create enough words. Said that, this language is still in progress.

Leshing is mostly derived from English, many words are in fact a kind of english Verlan or anagrams of english words, some words have other origins and many other have no similarities with any language. It is designed to be simple to learn and to have many short words. Everything in the way I like it to be, and I hope other people would like it too.

Alphabet
The names of the consonants are represented by the consonant sound plus a schwa, while the vowel are represented by their respective sound preceded by a glottal stop. For the letters Cc, Qq and Xx they're called respectively /ʧə/, /kwe/ and /iks/.

Consonants
Consonants are pretty similar to english ones, the major difference in this language is that any consonant phoneme correspond to one letter and don't change with position or anything.


 * W and Y can only occur word initially or between two vowel.
 * digraphs TS and NG can appear initially but there are fewer words than with other sounds.

Vowels
Vowels are quite different from the english ones and probably speakers of other languages would have less challenges than english speakers.


 * Letter A it's preferably open-front but can be pronounced closer or more in the back.
 * Letters E and O can be pronounced either close-mid or open-mid (/ɛ/, /ɔ/) depending on the speaker or the word, and I don't exclude a mid pronunciations (/e̞/, /o̞/).
 * The letters I and U differently from other letters, do have to change in pronunciation, they can become semiconsonants (/j/, /w/), it happens whenever they are preceded or followed by another vowel in the word or in the sentence. Alternatively the sound can change into /ɪ/ and /ʊ/, which are easier for some speakers.
 * The schwa sound it's not represented by any letter, instead it appears between consonant sounds that doesn't go well together, for example: "I don't like him" which is mo k kel hu /mo kə kelə hu/. The appearance of this sound avoid the elision of final consonants or the fusion of sounds (between the two words) and should appear naturally between words, more natural it is, the better. The same can happen between consonants forming clusters, but again it is done for fluidity or because of speaker capacities. Words without vowels like single consonant words (16 of them), or the word sh can take this sound more often, for example, when final in the sentence, which doesn't happen with longer words. The schwa sound can even appear at the beginning of a word (really rare), one notable case is the interjection mm /əm/.

Glottal Stop appearance
Vowels different from the ones in diphthongs don't occur together, so when a word beginning with a vowel is preceded by a word ending with a vowel (if the two vowels don't form any of the diphthongs) a glottal stop appear at the beginning of the second word. This sound appearance is reflected in the text (differently from the schwa sound) by adding an apostrophe (ʻokina), for example: "I love you" which is mo ʻaim o. That's the reason because there are no words starting with an apostrophe at the beginning of any sentence, so none has to worry on how to capitalize an apostrophe, but just in case you wonder: is the vowel to become a capital letter.

Nouns
Leshing nouns do not decline for gender, number or cases. Definiteness too is not marked, this language is in fact ambiguous on whether a noun is definite or indefinite. In the case you really need to specify it, you can use respectively the demonstrative be (that) and the number eno (one).

Number
Leshing can be ambiguous on number too, you don't need to specify if something is singular or plural, moreover, many times is understandable by the context. Plurality can be easily expressed by numbers or by the determiner n, which stands for "many", "much" or "a lot" depending on the noun it's referring to. Another determiner indicating plurality is p, which means "some", "few" or "a few".

Male and Female Determiners
Leshing nouns do not have gender, but there are two adjectives/determiners to express feminine and masculine nouns, those are f and m. These determiners are used to specify the sex of living things and can be easily left out, especially when the gender is understandable by the context.

Adjectives
Adjectives in Leshing go before the noun they're referring to, just like in English, so you would have: doli f nam which means "a beautiful woman".

Comparatives and superlatives
Adjectives don't change to create comparative and superlative forms, so you use the words en (more) and eu (than) to form the comparatives, like in Hu en lo ʻeu o "he is older than you". You can also compare to a lesser degree using the word ef (less). Comparative sentences can be also formed in an alternative way using wa "as for", like in the sentence Wa mo lo ʻenu o which literally translates as "as for me old more-than you" and means: "I'm older than you".

If you want to say two things are equal you can use za (as), one example can be Waʻo tuke za maʻo which means "dogs are as cute as cats", but notice that you use it just once.

Superlatives are formed using in "the most" or in ef "the least", for example A bi ʻin di lani which means "it is the biggest animal".

Order
English has an order to put adjectives in sequence, which, if not respected, can create strange sounding sentences, in Leshing however there is not such thing as a correct order to put sequential adjectives, probably the best way is the one sounding better to the speaker.

Verbs
Leshing verbs don't conjugate, this means pronouns has to be specified. You can avoid it when the subject is obvious.

Copula
The verb "to be" doesn't exist as in English. When you want to relate adjectives to nouns, like for example to say "this water is cold", you don't use any verb, you say: Ar lu lok "this water cold".

When you want to use "to be" to express the position of something you use g, this word can also translate as the preposition "at" when it indicates the state in place of the subject, for example: Reng g bu "people are there".

When "to be" expresses the fact that two things are identical, equal or that something is included in a group, you use the verb bi as in the example sentence for the superlative.

When "to be" is used for existence there's the verb ai, as in Ai ʻi k ai "to be or not to be". This verb is also used to say "there to be". While to express the state of something you use the verb lef "to feel" as in Bob lef do "Bob is good".

Tenses
Verbs in Leshing don't change to express time on their own, instead time can be expressed by adverbs present in the sentence or be understood by the context. The sentence Mo yu ba can be translated as "I go home (usually)" or "I went home" or "I'm going home", this last one can mean that it will happen in the near future, it only depends on the context. Using adverbs permits you to be more specific on the time it happens, so you can say: Mo yu ba yan "I usually go home", Mo yu ba japa "Yesterday, I went home", Mo yu ba nus "I'll go home soon". Near future can also be formed using gon "going to" as in Mo gon wam "I'm going to eat". Moreover there are some particles and other verbs expressing time, together with aspects and moods.

Progressive/Particle ING
Progressive aspect is used to express incomplete action or state, if the action is also happening in the present time you can simply use ge "now" as in Hu ge shau "He now wash". The particle ing express this aspect and can easily do it in the past and future too, for example Hu ing shau japa "He was washing yesterday".

Imperfect/Particle UN
Habitual and repeated actions in the present don't need any particle, but some adverbs can help specify the frequency of the action. The imperfect is only in the past and it can be expressed by the particle un, which can be translated as something like "used to", for example Mo ʻun yu bu "I used to go there".

Perfect/Particle S
Perfect indicates a completed action, adverbs like imi "already" or verbs like shin "to end/finish" can alone give a verb a perfect aspect. Another possibility is the usage of the particle s. Perfect express both the english simple past and present perfect, so that "I made dinner" and "I have made dinner" are both translated in Leshing as Mo s has nika.

Past perfect/Particle TSE
Past perfect is used for completed action in relation to an action that occurred prior in the past. It can be formed using the particle tse, for example: Fu mo s vera bu hu tse yu ba "When I arrived there he had gone home".

Modal verbs
Some verbs can express the modality of an action, those are the modal verbs:


 * ru means "can" and is used for "will", "can", "could" and "shall", it is the most common way to express future in a quite certain modality, note that "will" can also be translated as nau when it means "to want".
 * ve means "would", it is used for imagined situations and other conditional meanings.
 * yem means "may", it is used for hypothetical events (with certainty).
 * him means "might", it is used for hypothetical events (less certain).
 * dul means "should", it is used to express responsibilities and duties.
 * sum means "must", it is used to express unavoidable requirement or obligation.

In addition to these verbs there's the word resh, which means "sure", to express that an event is certain to happen, you simply use it as an adverb.

Conditional
The conditional mood is formed using the particle l meaning "if", this particle is sometimes accompanied by the already mentioned ve, as in Mo ve ke ʻen, l mo t meis "I would have done more, if I had the time".

Imperative
The imperative can be expressed just using the verb without the pronoun, that's particularly the case with second person singular, like in the sentence k shuo mo! "Don't touch me!". When the English sentence use "let"/"let's" in Leshing there's the word pu, usually put at the beginning of the sentence, like in Pu yu! "Let's go!", in which case the subject can be omitted or specified depending on situations.

Passive voice
The passive of a verb is formed using the particle b, this particle can either be put before or after the verb, the latter when there's an agent specified, while it is put before when there's no agent. For example Waʻo b def weja "the dog is fed everyday" and Waʻo def b mo "the dog is fed by me".

Reflexive/Pronoun ZU
The word zu function like a reflexive pronoun, it means "self" and it is particularly important with some verbs, one example can be Ita shau zu "We wash ourselves". When you want to say "my own", "your own" and so on, instead, you use nuo as in Hu s ek nuo ʻada "He took his own things".

Witness/First hand Particle
The particle v is used to indicate that the information source was obtained through direct observation by the speaker, it's like when you say "I see" or "I hear". For example the sentence V ing lar means "(I see) it's raining".

Inferential Particle
The particle j is used to indicate that the information was not personally experienced but was inferred from indirect evidence, like when you say "It seems" or "Apparently". One example is the sentence J ing lar means "(It seems) it's raining".

Reportative Particle
The particle r is used to indicate that the information was reported to the speaker by another person, it can be translated as "I'm told". For example the sentence R ing lar means "(I'm told) it's raining".

Formation
Many of the most used adverbs in Leshing are basic words, some other are the same as adjectives. Most adverbs derived from adjectives don't change, instead there's a particle that goes before or after the adjective, that's an. An example can be luf an "fully".

Position and Order
Adverbs in Leshing don't have to be put in a precise position in the sentence, that's why "He run very fast" can be translated as Hu nur han wiki/Hu han wiki nur/Han wiki hu nur depending on where you decide to put it. When you have words indicating time, location and manner, there are two rules about order and position to follow:


 * the first rule is that time indicating words goes before the other two (while location and manner can be interchangeable).
 * the second rule is that time, location and manner words go in different positions in the sentence (if they are in the same sentence).
 * Example 1: Ar nimo mo g ba dis han dah English literally "This morning I at home studied very hard English".
 * Example 2: Ar nimo mo han dah dis g ba English literally "This morning I very hard studied at home English".

Words from English
Around 70% of the vocabulary is somehow derived from English, but most basic words aren't, so that the language doesn't seem just an English copy. From the examples already seen we can see words like: nur (from run), nimo (from morning), luf (from full), meis (from time), resh (from sure) and def (from feed). Some words are not easy to get from the original, others are. There are many ways by which a word can be formed, sometimes is the exact reverse of the original, ex. nam (from man), sometimes some letter change, ex. shau (from wash), sometimes letters are removed, ex. refo (from forest), keep in mind that most of the time is not pronunciation what has to be consider, but letters, ex. veha (from heavy), so that at the end English-derived words are mostly anagrams of the original. It's also important to say that many times the original meaning can change, like for the word nam, which means human being, not man, the latter would be m nam.

Pronouns
Some pronouns can make confusion like the formal pronouns or the two different translation for "we", which are used to differentiate when the listener is part of the subject or not. Possessive determiners and pronouns are formed with the preposition d. Another pronoun is zu which I talked about before.

Demonstratives
In this language there are three demonstrative, the one not used in English indicates that the thing you're referring to is near the listener. These three words are used both as adjectives and pronouns, so they can also be used for "this one" and "that one".

Numbers
These are the numbers, which are quite useful in many situation. The numbers from eleven to nineteen are formed by the ak- stem followed by the numers from 1 to 9. In the series from 20 to 90 numbers are formed by the first number (2,3,4) followed by -ro (from zero), while numbers like 21 are not "twenty-one" but more like "twone", same goes for 101 and similar ones. To notice is the presence of a number for 10000, which means 100000 is technically "ten-tenthousand". All the ordinal numbers are formed adding -m, except for the billions. Words like "once" are just "one time". Last the words "single", "double" and "triple" are formed with the prefix po- followed by the second syllable of each of the three numbers.

Those are some of the most common number words to use in everyday life to say your age or how much does it cost, but there are other things you can use numbers for, like saying dates or phone numbers, for the latter you can just say the numbers one after the other, or you can group them, for example "333848900" can be: ere ʻere ʻere ʻehi ofu ʻehi ase zero zero, if you say them seperately; can be: erere ʻerehi ʻofehi ʻasedu (thirtythree-thirtyeight-fortyeight-ninehundred); or it can be: ererere ʻehofehi ʻasedu (threehundredthirtythree-eighthundredfortyeight-ninehundred). What about dates, well they are formed like the numbers grouped in the phone number, so "1997" is enasasepe (grouped by four); different are dates with a lot of zeros, like "2008", which is utazehi (2thousand8). Dates with 4 digits can also be grouped by two, in the first case it would be: akase ʻasepe (19-97), while "2008" would be utoro ʻehi (20-8).

Swadesh List *
* pronouns, demonstratives and numbers not reported

Denominal Verbs
Taking words from English means Leshing has many similarities with it. Like English there are many denominal verbs, many times using the same word for noun and action. Another possibility is to have the verb as a separate word, here the -e ending is really common.

Morphological Derivation
Not every word is taken from English, some words aren't, some are not directly from English, mostly because, many times, derivational words can be longer than is preferable, so from a first word taken from English can be generated other ones just changing the last vowel, this is done trying to consider how the original word is derivated from the stem. For example the word for "commodity" is moko, from this word you also get moke for "accomodate", moka for "accomodation" and moki for "accomodating". This process is a bit like Esperanto creates words, but it is not at all standardize, so that sometimes you can see a certain vowel for that derivation, and other times it will be different.

Compounds
Leshing is a language with a lot of short words, but still some longer words exist, many of them are compound words. In most cases compound words are fused into two, many times unrecognisable, stems. This words take the first letters of a word and the last ones of another, one example can be the word for "mathematics": manis, a compound of man (number) and dis (study); another example is "centipede": edufo, formed by the words edu (a hundred) and ofo (foot).

Reduplication to form new words
New words can be created by reduplication of words, when it's partial it creates a word with a different meaning. One example can be "the day after tomorrow" which is translated as jojotu "tomorrow-tomorrow". Similarly your "grandma's grandma" would be nanana, to notice that one of the nouns maintain only one syllable. With this process can be created frequentative verbs, verbs acted repeatedly, examples are: titif "hit multiple times" and shashau "do the dishes/wash different times or things".

Examples and Sentences
Leshing sentences can be kinda word for word with English translations, but some sentences can be pretty different and not directly translatable. The word order is SVO, so that's not difficult, as already said adjectives goes before nouns while adverbs are quite free. I'll explain some sentences wich are different from English equivalents and do some examples.

Greetings
* 1)halo! can be used for responding to the telephone; 2)literally: again we will meet!; 3)literally: not so bad; 4)can also be used to say "good night".

Questions
When asking a question in Leshing surely you need to structure it well, in order to do that you should use interrogative words correctly and you need to know some differences with English. Interrogative words can be divided into determiners, pronouns and adverbs to better understand where to put them. Interrogative determiners are adjectives so they go before the nouns they're referring to, for example "which painting is that?" is be bi ga tias? In the last sentence the interrogative word wasn't at the beginnig of the sentence and that's because it doesn't need to be so, for a better exemple just take an interrogative pronouns like "who" in "who are you?", that is o bi cha?, literally "you are who?", that's because "you" is the subject and the language prefer to stay in the SVO order even in questions. When the interrogative pronoun is the subject than it goes at the beginning, an example can be: "what is better to do?" which translate as ma ʻen do ke? Last the interrogative adverbs like when, where, how, why as other adverbs can be put freely in the question.

Yes/No questions
Polar questions in Leshing need a particle to be expressed, that particle is ka, which also means "no", but in this case it translates more as "or not", this particle should be put at the end of the question. Knowing that, a question such as "are you hungry?" translates to o gahi ka?, another example is "does she read many books?" which is he dair n bati ka?, to notice that the verb remains in the same position as in normal sentences and doesn't use the verb "to do" as auxiliary.

Negative sentences
Negative sentences are pretty simple, to negate a sentence you just use the particle k precedently mentioned, but in this case you put it between subject and verb. So to say "he's not here already" you say imi hu k aru (the adverbs are free). Double negation also works like in English, that means it correspond to an affirmative sentence, example: kano k ru ye ʻo "nobody can't see you"="everybody can see you".

Genitive
In Leshing there are no cases, anyway you have to assert possession. As already said differences in syntax are important to Leshing in order to have its own identity. One difference with English is in the lack of using the preposition "of" to assert genitive. Instead Leshing prefer to use the possessed noun as an adjective and put it before the possessor noun. Examples are omu ron, naho nam, Janet eda; respectively "cow horn", "man of honour" and "Janet's drink".

Serial Verbs and Incorporation
Leshing sentences can be pretty different from English, an example is the sentence: mo k yu bas fi ʻama, "I am not going to talk with my mother", here the verb yu (to go) and bas (to talk) are stacked together in a single clause. A construction like this is also in the sentence: mo s yu ʻibu ada "I went buy things", in this particular case is not sure the buying happened, but if you put a conjunction "and" between the verbs as in mo s yu ʻu ʻibu ada, than you get two completed actions. This feature is essential to mantain short sentences and can create more complex meanings. Incorporation is another feature that creates new meanings, this is a common thing in English, particularly between nouns and verbs. It creates compound words with a more precise meaning, one exemple is lala-beti "song-write", another is the sentence gaur s tebi-nal Zhang, which translates as "a tiger did bite-die Zhang", intending the tiger bit to death the poor Zhang.

Double Object Construction
How to say a sentence like "he gave the meat to the dog" if not using the minimum words possible, the double object construction permits to do just that, as long as it doesn't create problems of interpretation. The sentence thus translates to hu vei waʻo taim, literally "he gave dog meat", simple as that.

Reduplication to form new sentences
Partial reduplication creates new words, full reduplication of a word can create sentences with different meanings. Let's start with the reduplication of an adjective, if you double an adjective is like saying really and than that adjective, for example saying ar dare ʻuki-uki is the same as saying "this bread is really tasty". When instead you double the verb of a sentence, you specify that the action occurred at different times or places, as in the sentence: mo nez-nez sa, literally "I sent-sent them". Last, if you double the object of a sentence you can be less ambiguous, as in wer nam bas e dise-dise, which means "every person talked to a different student", while without the reduplication it could be that every person talked to the same student.

Pronoun Avoidance
Leshing having no conjugations means that it technically needs pronouns to understand the subject of an action. However the use of pronouns can be avoided in two cases:


 * 1) with impersonal verbs, like in the examples on evidentiality particles using the verb "to rain".
 * 2) when the pronoun is clear from the context, for example the answer to:

-Hu s ye he ka? (Did he saw her?)

can be:

-S ye. (literally "saw")

Relative Clauses
A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase, in English it is usually introduced by a relative pronoun. In Leshing however you avoid the use of such pronouns for that. So the sentence: "the girl whom I like went to visit" is translated as wai mo kel s eko zivi. In such a case the relative pronoun can be omitted in English as well, but take the sentence: "that's the woman who ran away", here you can't omit it. This sentence in Leshing uses the relative clause like an adjective, so you have be s nur ngo nam, literally "that ran away woman". This rule is used when the relative clause is in the position of subject.

Prepositions and Usage
Leshing prepositions are quite different in meaning from the English ones. They are somewhat more precise, but they're also a lot (64), clearly they are an important part of the language, but they need some time to practise on. It's also important to say that many times where in English you have a preposition, in Leshing you can have a verb, for example ho "to use" can be used when a preposition means "by mean of" or "using". Other verbs like "to do", "to have", "to work", "to touch", "to cover" can do as well. Same goes for some adjectives, adverbs and nouns. There are other cases where the preposition is lacked in Leshing, like with "of" to assert genitive or with some phrasal verbs.