Laetia

Laetia (from laett, "source", and nia, "speech") is a dominantly suffixing language with lots of compounds. Adpositions are considered nonexistent, and instead, Laetia uses periphrastic constructions and case markings to disambiguate various grammatical roles. Its basic word order is SOV, though case marking makes the order highly flexible; to maintain this, the first one to come up in a sentence is considered the topic or focus of a discourse.

It is a language spoken by the Early Draenneans who lived in the island of Draenn. The exact location of the island is much to debate; often, it changes location randomly to wherever on Earth due to magical forces, though usually somewhere around the Indian Ocean and the Southern China Sea. The curious nature of the island affects Laetia in its vocabulary and grammar due to interactions with other languages.

General information
Laetia is a language isolate, spoken by the Early Draenneans before they split themselves into various tribes due to internal conflict. As their place of living was concentrated, dialect variations were scarce. A script was already in use by the time Laetia had developed into a fully fledged language, and because of it, history, literature, and religion thrived as the result of highly literate people.

Because of the concentrated population and the island's magical nature, the Early Draenneans just referred to it as Nia (lit. "Speech"). "Laetia" is an exonym created by the descendants of the Early Draenneans, using the language's own words rather than theirs.

For nouns, Laetia has 8 cases, 2 numbers, and 2 genders.. Verbs conjugate for their 4 moods and 8 times (of which tenses and aspects are mixed in some affixes).

Consonants
• The plosive geminates /tː kː/ become [tʰ kʰ] at the end of a word

• The nasal /n/ becomes [n͡m] and [n͡ŋ] when preceding a labial or velar phoneme

• The sound /h/ can occur only at the beginning of a word. When a word gets prefixed or preceded by a compound, it disappears

Vowels
• The vowels /æ ø ɪ y/ are called labiaśanaiagattaivénaé, (secondary vowels, lit. "word-ending soul songs"), namely so because they can only occur at the end of a word

• When /æ ø ɪ y/ get followed by a suffix or a compound, they change to [ae̯ oe̯ ie̯ ue̯], respectively

• When /i u/ precede or follow another vowel, they become [i̯ u̯], respectively

• When /e/ follows another vowel, it becomes [e̯]

Phonotactics
The structure of a single syllable is (C)(r)(S)V(S)(C)(G), in which:

• C is any consonant

• S is a semivowel

• V is a vowel

• G is a geminate of the previous consonant

Stress
Stress generally falls on the penultimate syllable, be it a standalone or a compound word; however, exceptions are:

• A Cr cluster somewhere in the word, whether preceding or following the penultimate syllable, in which the stress falls on it instead

• A geminate somewhere in the word, whether preceding or following the penultimate syllable, in which the stress falls on it instead

• If, in a word, both a Cr cluster and a geminate exist, in which the stress falls on whichever comes first

Writing System


Laetia utilizes an abugida, simply called Atria (lit. "Writing") by its speakers. Each letters are named after the sounds they write, except for the diacritics, which takes the diminutive suffix -ride after the sound they write. In total, there are 21 consonant glyphs (including ligatures), 5 vowel glyphs, 12 diacritics, 6 numeral glyphs, and 1 punctuation mark, making a total of 45 characters.

Consonants
Below are the labiaśintaé, (consonants, lit. "body songs"), listed in Laetia's alphabetical order:

Vowels
Below are the labiaśanaiaé (vowels, lit. "soul songs"), listed in Laetia's alphabetical order: