Islhontish

File:Flag-Islhonta.png
Islhonta Isλǫtaλao
Pronounced:	Native: /is.ɬɔ̃.'tɑ.ɬɑʊ̯/ Anglicized: /ɪs.'ɫɔn.ta/
Timeline and Universe:	Alternate Earth
Species:	Human
Spoken:	Unknown
Writing system:	Syllabary
Typology
Morphological type:	Undecided
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Undecided
Basic word order:	Undecided
Credits
Creator:	D. Matthew Mikalowsky
Created:	July 2014

Phonology

Isλǫtaλao has 12 consonants, three pure vowels, two nasal vowels and two diphthongs. The vowel inventory is rather symmetric, with an equal measure of front and back vowels. Also its diphthongs are both formed with a with off glides toward i and u, which are the two topmost points of the "vowel triangle." Consonants, on the other hand, are mostly coronal with few dorsal and even fewer laryngeal.

One notable item missing from Islhenti is labial consonants, with the exception of /w/. I decided that /w/ would be retained due to its similarity to /u/, and that all other labials would have fallen out. This was inspired by Tsalagi.

Consonants

	Coronal	Dorsal	Laryngeal
Nasal	n [n]
Plosive	t [t]	k [k] and q [kw]	j [ʔ]
Fricative	s [s]	h [x~h]
Lateral	λ [ɬ]
Affricate	z [t͜s] and tλ [t͜ɬ]
Approximant	w [w] and l [l]

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i [i]		u [u]
Middle	ę [ɛ̃]		ǫ [ɔ̃]
Low	a [a~ɑ]

Diphthong	æ [ɑɪ̯] and ao [ɑʊ̯]

Sound Changes

See: Sound Changes for full list of sound changes from Latin.

The collection of sound changes created so far are primarily the work of another poster on the CBB, and are subject to change as the exact phonotactic rules are laid out.

This is my first foray into diachronics, so it will take a bit for me to get up to speed with them all.

Grammar

Coming... at some point. (Soon™)

Syllabary

The syllabary for Islhenti was created with influence from the form of letters in the Georigan alphabet, but also the shapes were inspired by the various glyphs in the Cherokee syllabary. However, whereas most of the forms in the Cherokee syllabary appear similar to Roman majascule, the glyphs in Islhenti are made to more resemble Roman miniscule.

In addition to these glyphs, there are several diacritics that can be added to glyphs to alter them further. When a diacritic would be placed above a letter with an ascender, or below a letter with a descender, a carrier symbol is added to hold the diacritic in question.

	ø	n	t	k	j	s	h	l	λ	z	tλ	q
a					File:ISL-ja.png
i					File:ISL-ji.png
u					File:ISL-ju.png
æ
ao					File:ISL-jao.png

	Initial s	Medial s	Carrier
Other

Diacritic
Function	Nasalizes vowel*	Changes æ to ao	Changes ao to æ	Adds w	Deletes vowel
Placement	Above	Above	Below	Above	Below*

• Headings for the table are given in the Romanization, not the IPA.
• When a vowel is nasalized, it is also lowered. (Syllables containing a and those with diphthongs cannot be nasalized.)
• The vowel-killer diacritic is the only one that can optionally appear above a letter when a descender would be in the way.
• Syllables beginning with w are formed by adding the w-diacritic to a bare vowel glyph, and wao is automatically formed when it is added to the æ glyph.

Lexicon

—For a partial list of words in Isλǫtaλao, see: Lexicon.

Since Isλǫtaλao is a language that derives directly from Latin via sound changes, there will probably never be a complete list of words for the language since I can just run through the sound changes and generate a word at will. However, there will likely be a list of commonly used words, and those that have deviated in one way or another from what one might expect from the sound changes. Again, since this is my first foray into diachronics, my opinion on this matter may shift as time goes on and I learn more about what I am doing.

At present, I have yet to even create the formatting for a lexicon.

Creator Comments

This language came as the result of a thought experiment in which I pondered what it would be like to remake the Cherokee Syllabary (which I will hereafter refer to as Tsalagi) into one in which the character shapes are based on lowercase Latin letters, and not the uppercase versions. From there, everything sort of snowballed.

I began work on a direct port of the syllabary, and became inspired by some of the letterforms of Georgian's script. Thus, there was some integration there as well. Eventually, I figured that this may end up shaping into a language all its own and not just a rehash of Tsalagi. So, I began altering the phonology of Tsalagi, adding things here, removing them there, and in the end, simplifying the syllabary quite a bit. One of the first things on my agenda, was in making sure that none of the very similar letterforms used in Tsalagi made their way into my own language. After the syllabary was finished... well, I had no idea what to do with it. Hence my next source of inspiration.

I had never worked on an a posteriori conlang before... and I had never felt like making a Romlang either. Both were things I didn't fully appreciate at the time. Some folks over at the CBB were posting their inventories, and their words and phrases, and it always seemed like Spanish/Portuguese/Italian 2.0. I eventually came to realize that there was a TON more work involved and me writing them off like that was because I hadn't looked into the process before. Well, I still didn't want to make a straight-up Romlang... so I thought "what if I morphed the phonology to agree with what I made for Tsalagi 2.0?" So, this is the strange bastard love-child of a Classical Latin lexicon, an approximation of Tsalagi's sound inventory, Georgian-inspired glyph shapes, and the Cherokee Syllabary!