Coladir

What is Coladir? Why does it Exist?

Coladir is a personal, non-naturalistic, fusional, a priori conlang I've been constructed for a while. What does that mean? Basically, it means Coladir is an artificial language in which every aspect of it is created by me, for personal use, and that doesn't try to emulate natural languages at all. This is far from the first time I've tried to do this, and this is also the farthest I've gotten on a single project, so I'm hoping writing all this out will help me devolp it further.

Now, what do I plan to use it for? Not sure tbh...
(I'll translate a bunch of stuff into it and it will be cool trust me)

More Questions

Who is this webpage for?

In it's current state, this grammar will be geared towards other conlangers who are familiar with a decent amount of linguistic vocabulary. Once I've gotten significant progress done on this page I'll most likely start working on a version for the average joe who is curious on how this language works.

Is there a conworld that this language fits into?

Currently, no. I've got a few ideas in my head right now but no such world exists. Even if it did, I'm not sure I'd be satified putting in a non-natural language into a conworld setting. Only time will tell though.

Is it fully a priori?

Not particularly, I've definitely stolen some French and Norwegian vocabulary, and various gramatical features wholesale from other better conlangs.

Phonology

Here's a table:

Not much to say about it, just six vowels, not much allophony. After "palatal" consonants, /u/ and /o/ move to /y/ and a sound somewhere around /ø~ɵ/, respectively.

Chart number two; much cooler in my opinion:

What's going on with the consonants? First off I think it's important to mention that, yes, I know /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ are not fully palatal, but my table has enough self-respect to not add a post-alveolar column. In terms of allophony there's fricative voicing between vowels, /n/ changes place of articulation before /k/, /g/, and /h/, "c" is always /k/, (which is more of an orthography thing but might as well put it here), and -- on the topic of things that aren't really allophony -- a Celtic-style consonant mutation system.

Consonant Mutation

Table très:

These are word intial mutations, each caused by different particles or articles that come before nouns. (INSERT EXAMPLES HERE) There are no exceptions made for loanwords or proper names. For example, say someone is writing me a love letter in Coladir, and they wanted to say "my Calvin", it would be incorrect to say "maja Calvin". The proper translation would be "maja gCalvin" (/ma.'ja 'gæl.vɪn/). When a proper noun's affected by a soft mutation, the digraph is written in reverse to preserve spelling of the original word. With the exception of /tʃ/, which has an "s" added before it when mutated.

When a soft mutation is applied to /f/, it isn't pronounced. Fricatives are not mutated nasally. In the future I may evolve this language in a way where the articles are dropped and end up with some non-concatinative morphology, or at least some double case marking.

Phonotactics

• Syllables look like this: (C)V(C, except h)
• /ɪ/ cannot end a word
• /st/, /sk/, and /sɾ/ can appear in onset positions
• Diphthongs /aɪ/ (written ai), /eu/ (written "eu") and /aw/ (written "au") can all serve as nucleuses
• One letter cannot appear twice in a row, combing two syllables like "sab" and "ben" would result in "saben" not "sabben"

Nouns

Without further ado, here are two more charts:

Coladir is a split-ergative, active-stative, fusional language. Inanimate nouns can be either ergative, absolutive, or absolutive-dative. (I made that last one up but you get what I'm saying, right? The indirect object). Animate nouns in a transitive sentence can be nominative, accusative, or dative, but in transitive sentences they are marked as either an active or stative subject, which conveys volition and means a lot of intransitive verbs can have two definitions. Inaninmate nouns can be marked instrumental, animate nouns cannot. The stative and nominative case endings are identical, as are the ergative and active.

Think we're done with tables? Sorry to break it to you...

Inanimate pronouns that are marked “stative” are analyzed as instrumental. Pronouns are all dealt with nominative-accusatively.