Loca

Loca /loka/ is an Indo-European language spoken by a people who came to be known as the Cabene. It is currently the only language spoken in their world, though it will likely diversify in the centuries to come.

Loca is a (mostly) naturalistic artlang created primarily as a language that's aesthetically pleasing (to the creator). It has a historically implausible (but kind of cool) origin and an interesting cultural scenario. It was inspired primarily by Kajiurago, but it is a fully fleshed language. Indo-European was chosen due to the the fact that its reconstructions are well-documented, and the creator isn't very good at coming up with a lexicon whole cloth. Loca resembles Italic languages phonetically, but its deep structure is likely closer to Vedic Sanskrit or Greek, with significantly eroded verb conjugation.

History
The people who later called the themselves once lived on the small, Balkan island known as Drvenik Veli much later. They had arrived as the result of a small, early migration of Indo-European speakers, not closely related to the Ilryians who later settled most of the islands in the Balkans. The inhabitants were at the level of subsistence farmers, raising a small amount of crops and animals, and they were illiterate. Strangely, the island was left completely unconquered, though there was occasional contact with Ilryian traders. These traders provided the inhabitants primarily with most metal tools and weapons.

In the year 557 BCE, everything except the land vanished within a sphere twenty kilometers in radius, centering approximately on the island. Humans, animals, plants, all water including the ocean, and any man-made objects not made of the island's stone or sand vanished as well. The vanishing was noted by a small number of Ilryian traders, and legends began to spread in the area. However, this legend was eventually lost to history, and while plants and sea birds would recolonize the island, it would not be inhabited by humans again until the fifteenth century.

All of the island's 167 inhabitants, along with three visiting Ilryian traders who had been caught within the sphere, had survived. They, and the animals and plants they brought with them, found themselves in a new world.

The inhabitants of the island were shocked to find themselves instantaneously on an island that resembled their own in geography, but was covered in completely unknown flora. The gravity of the situation would eventually be discovered by the Ilryian traders, when they attempted to return to the mainland. Soon after they left, they returned to the island to report that the mainland was just as unrecognizable, covered with a vast canopy of plants and trees as far as they could see, with no sign of humans or even any animal life.

600 years later, the population resulting from this event call themselves the Cabene, meaning "the taken ones." Their population has become 350 times larger than its initial state, at about 63,000 people. They have colonized the coasts and developed a new religion around the vanishing. Though there had certainly been struggles prior, their society is also in the midst of its first large-scale war. This, along with the introduction of animal life to the world they find themselves in, is having drastic effects on their newly forged society. Nevertheless, they still speak a single language, though different dialects are just beginning to find each other more and more unintelligible.

Consonants
The consonant system of Loca is small from a cross-linguistic standpoint. There are some instances of allophony:


 * /d/ and /b/ tend to be realized as voiced fricatives [β] and [ð] intervocally. They are sometimes realized this way word-initially as well, though this is not as consistent as the intervocalic realization.
 * The phoneme /k/ is romanized as ⟨c⟩ in all environments. This is because it coincidentally behaves similarly to ancestral /k/ in the Italic languages: before front vowels it is realized allophonically as [c] or even [tʃ], and before non-front vowels it is [k].
 * /r/ is most typically a tap [ɾ] rather than a trill, though a trilled realization can be used in free variation to communicate emphasis.

It should be noted that the phoneme /ɸ/ is marginal, as it occurs almost exclusively before /i/. Nevertheless, it is realized as a bilabial fricative consistently, and there are minimal pairs with /b/ and other similar consonants. Therefore /ɸ/ must be analyzed as a somewhat marginal phoneme rather than an allophone.

Contrastive gemination does occur intervocally, but only in a small set of consonants: /m/, /n/, /t/, /s/, and /l/ can all be geminated, while /k/, /b/, /d/, /ɸ/, and /r/ cannot.

Vowels
Loka contrasts four vowel qualities, each with a long and short versions.

The primary phonological unit of Cabene vowels is the mora, and all possible bimoraic sequences are allowed, including doubled versions of the main vowel qualities, though some only occur in grammatical inflections and do not occur in roots:

The long vowels are romanized with macrons: ā ē ī ō, but morphological evidence suggests that the long vowels are, underlying, bimoraic sequences of the same vowel in sequence. Sequences longer than two vowels do not occur, and as a result a long vowel cannot be part of a vowel sequence that includes more than itself. Most non-identical sequences occur word-finally.

Phonotactics
Loca has relatively strict phonotactics. The maximal syllable structure CVC. Word-initially, all consonants except /r/ and /b/ are permitted. Words also do not end in a consonant: there is always a final vowel. Word-medially, only a small set of consonant clusters are permitted. Geminates seem to be considered clusters on a phonological level, as geminates never occur in clusters. Aside from geminates, the following word-medial clusters are permitted:


 * /s/ + C: /st/, /sk/
 * /n/ + C: /nt/, /nd/
 * /r/ + C: /rt/, /rd/, /rb/, /rs/

There are many grammatical morphemes which induce gemination in the preceding consonant. The following consonants have special forms:


 * /k/ -> /sk/
 * /d/ -> /rd/
 * /b/ -> /rb/
 * /r/ -> /rd/
 * /ɸ/ -> /b/

Pitch Accent
Pitch accent is a prominent feature of Loca. The accent results in a higher-pitched syllable, and each word only has one accent. Accent is marked in the romanization by marking the relevant vowel with an acute accent. Sequences of identical vowels act as one prosodic unit when pitch accent is involved, which is the only relevant phonological difference between long vowels and non-identical vowel sequences. Because it is most commonly on the penultimate syllable, the accent is not marked in the romanization when it appears in this position.

Noun Morphology
Nouns in Loca decline in gender, number, and case. All of these categories are heavily intertwined.

Gender
As in most Indo-European languages, nouns in Loca have an inherent gender. As in Late Proto-Indo-European, those genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine and feminine nouns generally do map onto

Number
Loca nouns decline for two numbers: singular and plural, with the Proto-Indo-European dual lost. Inflection tends to correlate with gender, though there are always exceptions.

Noun Case
Loca has a typologically unusual case system. There are three cases: common, genitive, and vocative. The common case and genitive cases occur frequently, while the vocative is relatively rare, confined mostly to some masculine, animate nouns.

The Common
The common case is a merger of an ancestral nominative and accusative. Though the nominative and accusative are still distinguished in pronouns, in nouns these cases are never distinguished, so the common

The Genitive
This case is called the genitive because it seems to map on mostly closely to the Proto-Indo-European genitive, and it indeed still has that function. However, it has developed a variety of other functions in addition to the ancestral genitive.

Accent Patterns
To discuss case inflection, the accent patterns of Loca nouns must be discussed. The accent pattern is inherent to each noun, though certain suffixes always condition a certain accent pattern. There are three accent patterns: proterokinetic, barytonic, and oxytonic.

Proterokinetic nouns shift the accent to the ending in the genitive. Barytonic and oxytonic both have fixed roots. Barytonic roots have the accent fixed on the penultimate syllable of the root:

Oxytonic nouns are rarer than the other two types. In these stems, the accent is always on the ending:

Pronouns
There are a variety of pronouns in Loca, including personal, demonstrative, relative, and interrogative pronouns.

Personal pronouns
As Loca is a pro-drop language, personal pronouns are mainly appear as the objects of verbs and in the genitive. However, subjects can occur for emphasis or to clear up ambiguity. Loca does not have true third person pronouns: demonstratives are used for this purpose. It is also worth noting that, in addition the the genitive, the nominative and accusative are still distinguished in personal pronouns: Using the genitive forms of pronouns in a possessive context is actually relatively rare. Instead, the possessive adjectival stems are utilized.

Verbal Inflection
Despite major losses from the verb inflection reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, Loca verbs inflect for person, number, voice, and mood. Aspect also occurs, but is not an inflectional category, but rather an inherent property of each verb.

Aspect
Loca has preserved the aspectual system of Proto-Indo-European somewhat faithfully, though it has completely lost the stative. A specific verb technically does not inflect for aspect. Instead, every verb is inherently perfective or imperfective, which each have somewhat differing inflection paradigms. In practice, there are several derivational strategies to make an imperfective verb perfective or vice versa, so most verbs in Loca exist in imperfective-perfective pairs.

A relatively unusual aspect of Loca does not have any traces of tense-marking, even in imperfective. Loca primarily relies on aspect and mood to communicate the time any action takes place.

Mood
All Loca verbs can occur in one of four moods: the indicative, infinitive, irrealis, and imperative.

Irregularity and other inflectional patterns
A rare class of verbs in Loca are those with an "unstable b." Though it does not appear in most forms, these verbs manifest a /b/ when the inflectional ending is preceded by a consonant. When followed by /i/ and no gemination is present, however, it manifests as /f/ instead. In these verbs, an epenthetic /b/ also appears when a sequence would consist of more than two vowels. Examples are given below of the perfective verb cā "to grasp, take" and the imperfective lea "steal."

As in most Indo-European languages, the copula essa 'to be' is somewhat irregular.

Basic Word Order
In Loca, the placement of the verb is highly variable, as long as the subject precedes the object. SOV is the most common unmarked order, but SVO is also frequent, and VSO is known to occur occasionally. Therefore, the following sentences all translate to "a dog is biting a man":


 * cōno iró dessi
 * cōno dessi iró
 * dessi cōno iró

Noun-adjective order is also somewhat variable. The default seems to be that adjectives precede the noun, but they can also follow it. IF there would be ambiguity, if two common nouns of the same gender are used adjacently in a sentence, then the default seems to be that the adjective precedes. If SVO order is used, however, then the order can once again be more flexible.

Genitive order is somewhat more strict. When possessing the noun, the genitive nearly always precedes it.