Lemobrogian - the language of the Land of Eternal Spring.
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:21 pm
So - I'm a NationStates player; and while I didn't have to worry about conlangs for the main country I RP as on that website, since it's closely modeled on the region surrounding the city where I live in (if the confederation of city-states it helmed during a brief period in the Middle Ages had survived, at least), there's a second country I RP as, and that's where things get weird. So, I thought, what if the acid trips of Frazer, Graves, and Gimbutas, about a matriarchal, peaceful Neolithic society, were true, after all? And what would it take for such a society, if it weren't a complete fabrication, to survive and thrive until the modern day? Also, this society is supposed to be culturally and linguistically related to that of another country in the game, RP'd by another player, because we needed to fill some plot holes.
Now, I have a very rough outline of the grammar of that country's language, but not much more than that; what do I do? Well, I made almost everything up, coming up with a naming language at first and, whenever I needed to expand on it for RP reasons, I tried to sketch out a plausible grammar for it, to make new names and phrases fit into an overall theme. Due to that other player's own preferences, there's quite a few Japanese-esque traits that made it in, and more than a few hints at what their native language is but, due to my intense, and probably pathological, dislike for asymmetry and certain combinations of letters and sounds - to such an extent, I tend to avoid writing those letters and sounds down at all, whenever possible - there's a lot of myself in the grammar and phonology, too.
Since that browser game has a Wikipedia-esque website of its own, I wrote an article fit for it, rather than for any kind of conlanging forum, so it's going to be a very rough summary of the language (also because, well, I kind of made it up as I went along, according to need), but there's a little bit of everything. Here's a very abridged extract from it:
Eventually, those empires waned, but the experience made a subset of the population renounce Lemobrogia's traditional matriarchal, pacifistic ways; the plateau's monarchies unified in order to counter this threat - the defeated radicals eventually migrated to that culturally related country, installing an absolute monarchy there that, by the 20th century, had gained actual fascist traits - but the highlands were so weakened that the ruling royalty had to import migrants from abroad to recoup the losses, and become a protectorate of a rising colonial power, again getting a relatively favourable deal out of it for more or less the same reasons - if Bhutan and Nepal could do it... anyway, come the 20th century, Lemobrogia, now a semi-constitutional monarchy ruled by a hereditary queen and an elected king (echoes of those two nutjobs there, of course), experimented with Georgism and then, come the first signs of environmental degradation in the mid-20th century, it elected to the throne a monarcho-socialist vaguely based on Carlos Hugo of Bourbon, that collaborated with the government in order to enact policies Le Guin would've been proud of but, even then, s**t happened.
In 2024, Lemobrogia's not a bad country to live in - sure, a frightening percentage of the nation's GDP goes towards trying to undo the damage early- to mid-20th century mass industrialization did to it, and to mitigate the consequences of global warming, but local politics are remarkably clean and participatory, and while no one's filthy rich, no one is dirt poor, either; okay, the above mentioned environmental damage has led to the birth of some cults that are basically Aum Shinrikyo meets Poison Ivy, the descendants of those warlike renegades that set up a fascist regime abroad have been welcomed back into the country after that regime fell, and hardcore pacifism can get very weird when you look down on butchers as impure, oppose the digging of railroad tunnels due to it being a rape of the earth, and some of your religious rituals would make bonobos seem like prudes, especially when you hypocritically delegate the country's defense to the 21st century equivalent of Italian condottieri from the Renaissance, (that is, PMCs based in my other RP country with a very flexible understanding of human rights and rules of engagement), but at least the weather's nice, you can live a decent life no matter who you are, new anti-seismic technologies have been quite the welcome development, and the metal scene is thriving.
Now, I have a very rough outline of the grammar of that country's language, but not much more than that; what do I do? Well, I made almost everything up, coming up with a naming language at first and, whenever I needed to expand on it for RP reasons, I tried to sketch out a plausible grammar for it, to make new names and phrases fit into an overall theme. Due to that other player's own preferences, there's quite a few Japanese-esque traits that made it in, and more than a few hints at what their native language is but, due to my intense, and probably pathological, dislike for asymmetry and certain combinations of letters and sounds - to such an extent, I tend to avoid writing those letters and sounds down at all, whenever possible - there's a lot of myself in the grammar and phonology, too.
Since that browser game has a Wikipedia-esque website of its own, I wrote an article fit for it, rather than for any kind of conlanging forum, so it's going to be a very rough summary of the language (also because, well, I kind of made it up as I went along, according to need), but there's a little bit of everything. Here's a very abridged extract from it:
And that is all, for now; as for the country itself, it's situated on a subtropical highland plateau that experiences weather of around 20 degrees Celsius all year round and is incredibly fertile, making Lemobrogia live up to its sobriquet... except, it's also in a region that makes the Ring of Fire seem calm, so the locals never had to wage war with each other for resources that were widely available, but had to team up with each other to brave the elements, because earthquakes and eruptions could happen at any time. Since the Gimbutas-esque status quo hinted at above could only live on due to the land being quite isolated, Lemobrogia spent a whole lot of time in a Bronze Age stasis of sorts until it was inevitably discovered by horse-riding, iron-wielding foreign powers; the locals avoided the inevitable only by pursuing a vaguely Japan/Thailand-style diplomacy several centuries ahead of schedule, playing said foreign powers against each other while adopting useful technology from them, but even that couldn't prevent annexation - at least, both the elites and the subjects of the local fiefdoms retained considerable autonomy, in part due to how remote Lemobrogia was.The Lemobrogic languages form a dialect continuum, in which neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but widely separated varieties are not; Lemobrogian is a conservative and literary register of these languages, and it serves as the lingua franca of Lemobrogia. Even though most people in the country do not speak it as their first language, it is easily comprehensible and largely intelligible not only for average and ordinary speakers of the Lemobrogic languages, but also for cultured and educated speakers of [RELATED LANGUAGE].
The phonology and phonotactics of Lemobrogian are fairly plain and regular, sharing several key characteristics with [RELATED LANGUAGE]: the language consists of 27 consonant phonemes and 9 vowel phonemes; they are usually paired in CV syllables, but the language's phonotactics also allow for word-initial vowels and word-final consonants, as well as for sonorant consonants as syllable codas, that allow for word-medial consonant clusters consisting of a sonorant and another consonant.
In addition to the above, there are also 6 diphthongs: [ei̯], [ou̯] and [aɛ̯] are closing (and quite frequent); [ɛ̯a], [i̯e] and [u̯o] are opening (and less frequent). Northern or lowland vernaculars are notable for either the presence of additional [ä̯ə] and [əä̯] diphthongs, especially northeastern vernaculars such as the Ŋéžó language, or for the presence of vowel length in stead of diphthongs, especially northwestern vernaculars.
Lemobrogian's basic word order is object-subject-verb; it is a chiefly isolating language: beyond adhering to a very basic grammatical gender system, nouns are not subject to declension, and verbs are not subject to conjugation - instead, particles follow nouns and verbs to convey additional information about them. A not insignificant number of proper nouns, ending in a consonant preceded by [a], are the result of noun/particle fusion: in fact, this characteristic ending is so widespread, that it has turned into a de facto third gender, with adjectives (in Lemobrogian, they follow the nouns they depend on, and take on their grammatical gender suffix) agreeing with this ending as with any other grammatical gender suffix. Verbs, on the other hand, end in [ə]; the basic form of the verb, when not followed by a particle, acts as an infinitive or as a present tense, depending on context.
In addition to the very basic grammatical gender system detailed above, that provides a fusional feature to the Lemobrogian language's chiefly isolating nature, the tongue's penchant for compounding provides an agglutinative feature to it; unlike adjectives, that follow the nouns they depend on, the compounded or composited parts of speech that are added to a root word in order to create a new lexeme precede the nouns they depend on, whatever their nature. The native endonym for Lemobrogia - Daènókèŋó - is, itself, a compound in which the Lemobrogian term for "country", kèŋó, is preceded by the Lemobrogian term for "elm tree", daèné, whose inflectional suffix has been made to agree in grammatical gender and vowel height with the former term by the rules detailed above.
The variant of the Latin alphabet used to write present-day Lemobrogian, based on the [RELATED LANGUAGE] one, was adopted only as late as 1992 CE, with the end of [OTHER COUNTRY]'s protectorate over Lemobrogia. This alphabet is highly phonetic, and each letter represents exactly one sound; while there are, in fact, instances in which the present-day Lemobrogian alphabet does not fully align with how it is spoken, these instances follow very specific and predictable rules.
Eventually, those empires waned, but the experience made a subset of the population renounce Lemobrogia's traditional matriarchal, pacifistic ways; the plateau's monarchies unified in order to counter this threat - the defeated radicals eventually migrated to that culturally related country, installing an absolute monarchy there that, by the 20th century, had gained actual fascist traits - but the highlands were so weakened that the ruling royalty had to import migrants from abroad to recoup the losses, and become a protectorate of a rising colonial power, again getting a relatively favourable deal out of it for more or less the same reasons - if Bhutan and Nepal could do it... anyway, come the 20th century, Lemobrogia, now a semi-constitutional monarchy ruled by a hereditary queen and an elected king (echoes of those two nutjobs there, of course), experimented with Georgism and then, come the first signs of environmental degradation in the mid-20th century, it elected to the throne a monarcho-socialist vaguely based on Carlos Hugo of Bourbon, that collaborated with the government in order to enact policies Le Guin would've been proud of but, even then, s**t happened.
In 2024, Lemobrogia's not a bad country to live in - sure, a frightening percentage of the nation's GDP goes towards trying to undo the damage early- to mid-20th century mass industrialization did to it, and to mitigate the consequences of global warming, but local politics are remarkably clean and participatory, and while no one's filthy rich, no one is dirt poor, either; okay, the above mentioned environmental damage has led to the birth of some cults that are basically Aum Shinrikyo meets Poison Ivy, the descendants of those warlike renegades that set up a fascist regime abroad have been welcomed back into the country after that regime fell, and hardcore pacifism can get very weird when you look down on butchers as impure, oppose the digging of railroad tunnels due to it being a rape of the earth, and some of your religious rituals would make bonobos seem like prudes, especially when you hypocritically delegate the country's defense to the 21st century equivalent of Italian condottieri from the Renaissance, (that is, PMCs based in my other RP country with a very flexible understanding of human rights and rules of engagement), but at least the weather's nice, you can live a decent life no matter who you are, new anti-seismic technologies have been quite the welcome development, and the metal scene is thriving.
I used the six most common cases in world languages according to the case hierarchy Wikipedia article to save time, realized the result was kind of too Latin, replaced the ablative with the instrumental - so that the locative can take over the "to/from" functions of the ablative, and the instrumental can double as a comitative, ornative, etc. 
