Meshnalogch

General
Łešgl is an artistic sci-fi language inspired partly by German, Russian, modern Hebrew, and Lojban. It attempts to find the middle ground between absolute explicitness in communication and aesthetic versatility. In this way, Łešgl sounds not as code-like as Lojban, but more like an academic paper.

[This language is very much a work in progress.]

Fiction
Łešgl is the so-called "initial language" of a Type-2 transhuman civilization, framed in an alternate universe. It acts as a temporary global language, before telecommunication becomes practical enough to implement.

Phonology
One of this language's defining features is its irreverence towards pronouncing vowels. Native speakers typically produce few to no distinct vowel sounds at all, except during emotionally-charged language such as singing. In fact, as Łešgl children are raised hearing this distinction in their parents' speech, they themselves gradually begin to separate vowels from consonants for extraneous uses. This vocal lacking affects the way that natives utter vowels, i.e. the result is usually unrounded and closer towards the back of the mouth.

Consonants
Łešgl represents the glottal stop /ʔ/ with an apostrophe, although the phoneme is found only in loan words/names. The lateral click /ǁ/ is also featured in this language. Furthermore, each nasal consonant can be unvoiced and each plosive except for /b/ and /ʔ/ can be nasalized or lateralized.

Phonotactics
Syllables in Łešgl follow a peculiar (C)C(V)C(C) structure. This means that while vowels may be added to help foreign pronunciation or to emphasize the speaker's emotions paralinguistically, they are by no means required.

Orthography
Below is a romanization of the Łešgl abjad.

The letters ī, ū, ē, and ā represent /ɨ/, /ɰ/, /ɜ/, and /ʌ/ respectively. The symbol ʎ' below represents the voiceless lateral palatal fricative. For each letter's name, all characters before the vowel character make the respective letters (for example, "vhid" is the name of the letter "vh"). Qlv is the name of the letter Ql (lateral click), and 'ējn is written as the symbol *. ' ējn doesn't represent any phonemes on its own. It instead acts as a modifier, similar to the Russian letter ъ.

Any letters from above which represent two phonemes are called "soft" letters. Soft letters always produce the phoneme on the left in the chart unless they are followed by *, in which case they produce "hard" sounds (phonemes to the right).

Furthermore, any plosive followed by l, lj, m, or n becomes lateralized or nasalized, respectively. However, the hard vhīd, /b/, cannot be nasalized and can be lateralized only by Lj. Also, if m, n, or ng is followed by h, the nasal becomes unvoiced.