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.

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.
 * Vowel length is phonemic.
 * E becomes OE when followed by O and is lengthened when followed by any other vowel (not diphthongized).

Phonotactics
Syllables can be V, VC, CV, or CVC. Consonants cannot geminate.

=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.

Open Class
=Examples=

The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9)

 * 1) Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
 * 2) And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
 * 3) And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
 * 4) Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth."
 * 5) And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
 * 6) And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
 * 7) Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech."
 * 8) So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
 * 9) Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.