Liroitian
| Liroitian Liroitach | |
| Spoken in: | Italy (Italya) |
| Conworld: | League of Lost Languages |
| Total speakers: | ~100 |
| Genealogical classification: | Isolate
|
| Basic word order: | SOV |
| Morphological type: | Agglutinative |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Accusative |
| Writing system: | |
| Created by: | |
| Taylor Selseth | 2011 C.E. |
Liroitian /lɪ.ˈɹɔɪ.ʃən/, native Liroitach /li.ˈroi.takʰ/ is a highly endangered isolate language spoken by a handful of people in northwestern Italy. It is similar typologically to Bausque, being agglutinative, SOV, and head-final, but no relation is apparent.
Phonology
Phoneme Inventory
The most notable aspect of Liroitian's consonant inventory is a 3-way voicing-aspiration contrast not unlike Ancient Greek.
Consonants
IPA
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
| Stops, Plain | p | t | k | |
| Stops, aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | |
| Stops, Voiced | b | d | g | |
| Nasals | m | n | ||
| Fricatives, unvoiced | f | s | ||
| Fricatives, voiced | v | |||
| Approximants | l | j | ||
| Trills | r |
Orthography
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | |
| Stops, Plain | p | t | c | |
| Stops, aspirated | ph | th | ch | |
| Stops, Voiced | b | d | g | |
| Nasals | m | n | ||
| Fricatives, unvoiced | f | s | ||
| Fricatives, voiced | v | |||
| Approximants | l | y | ||
| Trills | r |
Phonemic /v/ is only found word-initially and in consonant clusters.
/f/ and /s/ are voiced intervocalically.
Velar stops become palatal before /j/.
Vowels
Liroitian has a simple 5-vowel system of /a e i o u/. There are no phonemic diphthongs, but bimoraic vowel clusters exist.
Morphology
Liroitian has a complex, agglutinative, suffixing morphology that is very atypical for a Western European language.
Nouns and Adjectives
Nouns and Adjectives agree in case, but not number. Nouns inflect for possesion and adjectives inflect for comparison.
Number
Liroitian has 3 numbers, singular, dual, and plural. The singular is unmarked. The dual is -bu. The plural is -c following vowels and -ec following consonants.
velec
vel-ec
"trees"
casac
casa-c
"houses"
oasbu
oas-bu
"pair of eyes"
Case
The case system is extensive. There are 6 core cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Casual, Partitive, and Instrumental. There are 8 locative cases: Locative, Inessive, Lative, Superessive, Subessive, Illative, Ablative, Elative, Perlative.
The Nominative case, which is the unmarked case, indicates the subject and the copular complement of an "X is Y" statement.
The Accusative case -ja indicates the direct object.
The Genitive case -pho has two primary uses, to indicate possesion ("Jack's house) and for description, origin and reference ("men of Rome", "maid of honor", "of the issue I know nothing").
The Dative case -(v)u indicates the indirect object, but can also refer to the direct objects of some monotransitive verbs.
The Casual case -i indicates the cause of something, similar to the English preposition "because".
The Partitive case -fe indicates parts or amounts of something.
