Liroitian

Liroitian Liroitach
Spoken in:	Italy (Italya)
Conworld:	League of Lost Languages
Total speakers:	~100
Genealogical classification:	Isolate Isolate Liroitian Liroitian
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.