Leonine

Leonine is a language spoken by people who have taken the Lion morph, following the spread of the Neo-Mutant virus. The main lexical base is Japanese, but a large amount of Chinese, Romance and Germanic roots and untraceable new words have made it into the vocabulary.

File:Flag-Leonine.png
Leonine Reoni
Pronounced:	/ɾeoni/
Spoken:	Leonine
Writing system:	Latin
Genealogy:	Japonic Japanese (creole) Neo-Mutant Feline
Typology
Morphological type:	fusional and agglutinative
Morphosyntactic alignment:	theme-based alignment
Basic word order:	SOV
Credits
Creator:	User:Madbrain

History

The Neo-Mutant virus, after spreading through humans, turned them into various "morphs". People with similar morphs tended to congregate together, and ended up creating new languages starting from creoles based on the various human languages they spoke. Japanese was a particularly important source, forming the base for all the Feline Neo-Mutant varieties. The Feline languages are characterized by their use of supra-segmental phonetic distinctions (length, tone, accent, etc) as a basis for their grammatical inflections.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants in Leonine follow the rough structure of Japanese and Indo-European languages.

	Labial	Dental	Palatal	Dorsal	Glottal
Stop	p b	t d		k g
Africate		ts dz	tʃ dʒ (ch dj)
Fricative	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ (sh j)		h
Nasal Stop	m	n		ŋ ɴ (ng nr)
Liquid	w	l ɾ	j (y)

Vowels

Short vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨᵝ (u)	u (û)
Mid	e~ɛ		o~ɔ
Open	a

Long vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	iː (ii)	ɨᵝː (uu)	uː (ûû)
Mid	eː (ei)		oː (ou)
Open	aː (aa)		ɑˤː (ao)

Ii, uu, ûû are only used in loanwords and as part of grammatical elongation). The spellings ei, ou are used for etymological long vowels; grammatical elongation uses ee, oo.

Nasal vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	ɪ̃ː (in) *	ɨ̃ᵝː (un) *	ʊ̃ː (ûn) *
Mid	ɛ̃ː (en)		ɔ̃ː (on)
Open	ãː (an)

(* Very rare)

Diphthong

	Front
Open to close	ai

The diphthong /ai/ can be turned into the vowel sequence /a.i/ by grammatical processes.

Consonant Gemmination

Consonants except /ɾ/ can be long. This is often produced by grammatical processes. The initial consonant of a word cannot be gemminated.

Tones

Leonine uses tone strictly as a grammatical process. Only a few syllables are marked for tone, which spreads to adjacent syllables.

Name	Contour	Spelling	Notes
Plain	(varies)	a	Determined by intonation
High	˥	á	Often spreads rightwards
Dipping	˨˩˦	ä	Similar to Mandarin 3rd tone
Falling	˥˩	à	Similar to Mandarin 4th tone

Syllable Structure

The syllable structure of Leonine strictly (C)V, where C stands for a consonant and V stands for a vowel or the /ai/ diphthong. If the /ai/ dipthong is followed by a vowel, it is resyllabified as /a.jV/ (where V is the vowel). Various vowel sequences are possible.

The following syllables are not used outside of loanwords: /ti, tɨᵝ, tu, di, dɨᵝ, du, tse, tsa, tso, tsai, ji, wo, wɨᵝ, wu/, plus long and nasal versions of these.

Prosody

The concept of stress doesn't apply very well to Leonian, but generally you could describe the process as a right-leaning accent on the last syllable of the word. The syllable rhythm is moraic.