Lutrin

Lutrin is spoken by the aquatic race native to the lakes and rivers of the Minwan Basin to the northwest of the Last Continent. It is poorly understood and often even denied the status of a language by many humans due to being physically unpronounceable by the more dominant species. The anthropologist Miriam Braun spent decades with a Lutrin tribe to codify its grammar and propose a method of translation between the two species, but due to political and cultural tensions between humans and Lutrins it has not been widely accepted apart from by a handful of diplomats.

Despite general opinion of it, Lutrin is in reality a number of separate dialects, some of which are on the verge of differentiating into their own languages, although this hardly matters as the tribes are being forced together in recent years and many dialects are dying out. Described here is the most prominent Lutrin dialect, Rieliko (Smallnose).

=General Information=

=Phonology=

Miriam Braun's final paper before her death outlined a suggestion for a phonetic transliteration standard that would easily replace Lutrin phonemes with human ones that could be recognized by a trained Lutrin ear, or vice-versa by a human trained in the standard. Although this work has been largely dismissed, Braun's phonetic equivalents will be included here along with descriptions of Lutrin vocalizations.

The graphemes used here were popularized in early descriptions of Lutrin sounds by explorers, and many digraphs correspond to what is in actuality a single Lutrin phoneme.

Vowels
Lutrin vowels are very high-pitched and difficult to distinguish to human ears. It's more useful to visually observe tongue and jaw placement.

Lutrin has a pitch-accent system that places either a high pitch on the first syllable and a low pitch on the second, or vice-versa. These accents are not typically written and are more important for social reasons than for comprehension, as whether a lexical item uses the first or second accent type varies greatly between even otherwise similar dialects.

Monophthongs

 * In cases in which E is paired with another vowel, it is nasalized and lengthened (EN) and retains its mora.

Diphthongs

 * Although front-front have variable spellings, the only back-front diphthong in the language, OE, defaults to that spelling, even when formed by contact between O and a front vowel other than E.
 * Where morphology would cause a vowel to be lengthened, it is also nasalized; orthographically, the second vowel in the geminate is N.

=Grammar=

Nouns
Lutrin is relatively synthetic, postspecifying, with an SVO/VS word order, four cases, three numbers, and two grammatical genders. Gender, number, and case are expressed in a single bound morpheme.

Possessive Suffixes

 * Possessive suffixes precede any case suffixes.

Verbs
Lutrin inflects for aspect (progressive, completed, contemplative), mood (conditional, potential, causative), person/gender/number, and voice (active, passive). The initial two inflections take the form of an infix before the first nuclear vowel, while the latter two are combined in a suffix.

Aspect and Mood
The following are infixes before the first nuclear vowel of a root.

Agreement
Verbs agree with the intransitive subject or the transitive object.

Adjectives
Adjectives follow the noun they modify. They agree with its gender or number with a suffix.

Nasalization of the final nuclear vowel in the adjective derives an adverb.

=Lexicon=

Numbers
Base-10. Follows noun. Ordinal derived using adjective suffix on final morpheme.