Lortho

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Lortho ['loɾ.tʰo]
Spoken in:	Lamona Continent
Conworld:	Dhamashi, a circumbinary planet
Total Speakers:	~ 60,000,000
Genealogical classification:	Proto-Lamona - Old Lortho - Lortho - ?
Basic word order:	Verb-Subject-Object
Morphological Type:	Agglutinating
Morphosyntactic Alignment:	Nominative-Accusative
Created by:
Brian Bourque	Conceived in 2003 Manifested in March 2017

Lortho is an a priori constructed language created by bbbourq in the beginning of 2003. It originally started as a prop for a strategy board game where only the script was created for aesthetics. It is an agglutinating language with some minor fusional aspects.

The people (Kalanune) who speak Lortho live on Dhamashi, a circumbinary plant which has two natural satellites. The planet's surface has many similarities to Earth where it has oceans, mountains, deserts, and forests. The planet has three major continents: Mashonu, Kashti, and Lamona. The Kalanune live on Lamona.

Inspiration[]

A friend was creating a board game similar to Risk; however, instead of taking place on Earth, this new game was to take place on an inter-planetary scale. The game creator wanted to develop an extraterrestrial theme and requested a fictional script. The name of the race on this game is "Lortho" and thus the seed was planted. Brian was unable to work on this piece for quite sometime until he joined the CONLANG mailing list and observed both seasoned and novice conlangers discussing all aspects of linguistics. Since then he decided to move forward and bring Lortho into fruition.

Another inspirational source is Brian's daughter. Through her development of learning how to make speech sounds leading to coherent speech, Brian found certain "words" to use in Lortho which he used to develop its phonology.

Etymology of Lortho[]

Lortho is a combination of Lor, the god from which their story of life stems, and -tho, the archaic form for the genitive case. It has since become a noun and can take other case endings (e.g. konpharin lorthome - I speak Lortho-ACC).

The mountain whence Lor is said to originate is called Malhi Dharakhi, "Great Mountain," and is located in the coastal mountain range on the west coast of Lamona.

Goals[]

The goal is to create the gradual progression of Lortho which will lead to the development of daughter languages and, eventually, create sister languages which have developed on different parts of the planet.

Phonology[]

Consonants[]

	Bilabial		Labiodental	Alveolar		Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m		n
Plosive	p pʰ	b		t tʰ	d dʰ		k kʰ
Fricative			f	s		ʃ		h
Lateral Approximant				l lʰ
Tap or Flap				ɾ

Vowels[]

Monophthongs

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Near-Close
Close-Mid			o
Mid
Open-Mid	ɛ
Near-Open
Open		a

Phonotactics[]

Syllable Structure

(C)(C)V(V)(C)

Prosody[]

Stress[]

Stress is handled fairly regularly with occasional shifts depending on the morphology.

Nouns (singular and plural) and adjectives, the stress is on the penult, or the first syllable for two-syllable words
Verbs are slightly different:
1. Stress is fixed on the penult of -t and -o verbs in the infinitive and verb stem
2. Stress is fixed on the final syllable of -n verbs both in the infinitive and verb stem
Grammatical case and verb conjugations suffixes are never stressed; however the masculine plural is the only exception for stressed affix and the stress shifts to the penultimate syllable.

Morphology[]

Nouns[]

Introduction[]

Nouns in Lortho have the following characteristics:

Are classified as one of three genders: Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter.
Modified for case by adding an affix.
Most nouns end in a vowel.

Gender[]

Most nouns can be easily identified as a specific gender by its final vowel:

-a is neuter
-i is masculine
-u is feminine

There are few instances where a noun's gender is not apparent:

Example: dhi [dʱi] adj. neut. · water