Lortho

Lortho is an a priori constructed language created by bbbourq in the beginning of 2003. It originally started as a prop for a strategy board game where only the script was created for aesthetics. It is an agglutinating language with some minor fusional aspects.

The people (Kalanune) who speak Lortho live on Dhamashi, a circumbinary plant which has two natural satellites. The planet's surface has many similarities to Earth where it has oceans, mountains, deserts, and forests. The planet has three major continents: Mashonu, Kashti, and Lamona. The Kalanune live on Lamona.

Inspiration
A friend was creating a board game similar to Risk; however, instead of taking place on Earth, this new game was to take place on an inter-planetary scale. The game creator wanted to develop an extraterrestrial theme and requested a fictional script. The name of the race on this game is "Lortho" and thus the seed was planted. Brian was unable to work on this piece for quite sometime until he joined the CONLANG mailing list and observed both seasoned and novice conlangers discussing all aspects of linguistics. Since then he decided to move forward and bring Lortho into fruition.

Another inspirational source is Brian's daughter. Through her development of learning how to make speech sounds leading to coherent speech, Brian found certain "words" to use in Lortho which he used to develop its phonology.

Etymology of Lortho
Lortho is a combination of Lor, the god from which their story of life stems, and -tho, the archaic form for the genitive case. It has since become a noun and can take other case endings (e.g. konpharin lorthome - I speak Lortho-ACC).

The mountain whence Lor is said to originate is called Malhi Dharakhi, "Great Mountain," and is located in the coastal mountain range on the west coast of Lamona.

Goals
The goal is to create the gradual progression of Lortho which will lead to the development of daughter languages and, eventually, create sister languages which have developed on different parts of the planet.

Vowels
Monophthongs

Phonotactics
Syllable Structure


 * (C)(C)V(V)(C)

Stress
Stress is handled fairly regularly with occasional shifts depending on the morphology.
 * Nouns (singular and plural) and adjectives, the stress is on the penult, or the first syllable for two-syllable words
 * Verbs are slightly different:
 * Stress is fixed on the penult of -t and -o verbs in the infinitive and verb stem
 * Stress is fixed on the final syllable of -n verbs both in the infinitive and verb stem
 * Grammatical case and verb conjugations suffixes are never stressed