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 a variety of bimoraic sequences are allowed, including doubled versions of the main vowel qualities.

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 inflect 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.

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

Case
Loca has a typologically unusual case system. There are two cases: common and genitive. To discuss case inflection, the accent patterns of Loca nouns must be discussed. There are three accent patterns: proterokinetic, barytonic, and oxytonic.

Proterokinetic nouns shift the accent to the ending in the genitive.