Islhontish

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

Background

Isλǫtaλao is spoken on an alternate Earth that was created and populated, somewhat accidentally, by a device in our distant future called the Dream Engine. This alternate Earth is referred to as Carnassus, or Kalanaosa in Isλǫtaλao. The native speakers of this language call themselves the Ęjinǫwisa (a term which is derived from the Cherokee word for the Cherokee people).

In the world of Carnassus, there never was a Rome or Latin language, nor was there ever a population of Native peoples who are now called the Cherokee. This language, though it has ties in our world to those sources (and others), is actually a language isolate on Carnassus, as are all other languages there due to the way in which the world came to be.

Isλǫtaλao is an a posteriori language derived from a system of regular sound changes from Classical Latin vocabulary. The forms taken for verb conjugation and noun declension are closely related to the results of those changes, but not 100% faithful. After various words have been passed through the sound changes some obvious patterns appeared, and for the most part the author attempted to maintain them. But there are many places in which that was not the case, in those cases the author has decided to "streamline" the results to form a more cohesive system. Some of those places include the perfect tenses, which, like Spanish, now use an auxiliary verb, the distinction between nominative and accusative, and the somewhat forced syncretism of all non-genitive forms into an oblique case.

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 Islhonta 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

	Labial	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]	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]

Consonant Change

There are some morphemes in Isλǫtaλao that cause a bordering consonant to either undergo fortition (strengthen), or lenition (weakening). Not all consonants are affected by these changes, and those that are, are not all affected in the same way. The following table should adequately summarize what changes do occur.

	n	t	k	kw	ʔ	s	h	w	l	ɬ	t͜s	t͜ɬ
Weaken (+Ь )	l	s	t͜s	w	h						s	ɬ
Strenghtn (+Ъ)		t͜s				t	ʔ	kw	n	t͜ɬ	k

Stress

Stress in Isλǫtaλao consists of an increase in vowel length, as well as a slight increase in loudness of the affected syllable. This stress almost unfailingly appears on the penultimate syllable of a word. This may mean that a suffix or other conjugational ending will alter the stress of the word, which, unless noted, won't be blocked in any way.

There are a few morphemes which carry an inherent stress, or otherwise alter the stress pattern of the words they modify. In all cases, this is marked in the Romanization with an accute accent on the vowel of the affected syllable (ex: á), and a dot in the script. When stress falls on a syllable with a diphthong, it is marked on the first vowel in the case of áo, and the digraph æ is broken into two letters and again the accent is placed on the first vowel: áe. These visual markers are not used if the stress marker would happen to fall on the penultimate syllable, akin to how accent marks are sometimes dropped in Spanish (ex. when singular, sock is written calcetín, but it is calcetines when plural).

Sound Changes

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

The sound changes that bring Latin's phonology in line with that presented above begins with some of the classic changes that resulted in Vulgar Latin, but even those have been modified pretty heavily. The first draft of these changes was created by Click, like this author, a contributor on the CBB conlang forum. His draft, and subsequent assistance, helped to form the backbone of what would create the vocabulary of Isλǫtaλao. From those changes, which include: several consonant shifts, vowel deletions, mergers, epenthetic additions in the form of a to break consonant clusters and ʔ to break up vowel clusters, and a system of regular vowel metathesis, we arrive at Isλǫtaλao.

To arrive at a word in Isλǫtaλao, one need only apply the changes linked to above to an accusative form of a noun in Latin, for nouns; a genitive form of an adjective, for adjectives; or the present active infinitive form of a verb, for the base infinitive form.

Grammar

Coming... at some point. (Soon™)

Noun Declension

There are four classes into which a noun can fall in Isλǫtaλao. In each case, it is the terminal vowel of a noun that determines its class. These classes impact how each noun is declined for Isλǫtaλao's three cases, which are direct, oblique and lastly, genitive. Latin's case system collapsed into these three cases by merging the nominative and accusative cases into direct, and having all but genitive fall into oblique (in the case of vocative, its usage was limited already and was replaced by the nominative fully before Isλǫtaλao developed... if it had in fact developed that is).

Class	Ending		Direct	Oblique	Genitive
I	-a		-	-æ	-atæ
II	-u		-	-i	-utæ
III	-ao		-	-u	-utæ
IV	-X		-	-	-Ъitæ

In the above table, Class IV includes all nouns that end in a vowel other than -a, -u or -ao. However, whatever vowel they end in, it is always removed in place of -itæ in the genitive. Also, the Class IV genitive shows the first instance in which consonant gradation comes into play. The consonant preceding the terminal vowel always undergoes fortition (when able) before appending the genitive ending.

Also, as you might have noticed, the direct case is always unmarked and serves as the citation case, it is the noun as it results from sound changes from the Latin accusative form.

Syllabary

The syllabary for Islhonta 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 Islhonta 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.

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

	'S' Alone	Nasalizer*		Carrier
Other

Diacritic
Function	Changes æ to ao	Changes ao to æ	Changes ao to æ	Indicates stress
Placed	Above	Above	Below	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.)
• Whenever a syllable is nasalized, if it has a descender or other component that would overlap, the hookless version is utilized.
• The stress marker is the only diacritic that can optionally appear above a glyph when a descender would be in the way. It is only used when stress falls on a syllable other than the penultimate, or for disambiguation.

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.

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 (or 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!