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Spoken in:	Lamona Continent
Conworld:	Dhamashi, a circumbinary planet
Total Speakers:	~ 60,000,000
Genealogical classification:	Proto-Lamona    - Old Lortho       - Lortho          - ?
Basic word order:	Verb-Subject-Object
Morphological Type:	Agglutinating
Morphosyntactic Alignment:	Nominative-Accusative
Created by:
Brian Bourque	Conceived in 2003 Manifested in March 2016

Background

Lortho (IPA:[ˈloɾ.tʰo]) is an a priori constructed language I conceived in the beginning of 2003. It originally started as a prop for a strategy board game where only the script was created for aesthetics. It is an agglutinating language with some minor fusional aspects.

The people (Kalanune) who speak Lortho live on Dhamashi, a circumbinary planet which has two natural satellites. The planet's surface has many similarities to Earth where it has oceans, mountains, deserts, and forests. The planet has three major continents: Mashonu, Kashti, and Lamona. The Kalanune live on Lamona.

Inspiration

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A friend was creating a board game similar to Risk; however, instead of taking place on Earth, this new game was to take place on an inter-planetary scale. The game creator wanted to develop an extraterrestrial theme and requested a fictional script. The name of the race on this game is "Lortho" and thus the seed was planted. I was unable to work on this piece for quite sometime until I joined the CONLANG mailing list and observed both seasoned and novice conlangers discussing all aspects of linguistics. Since then I decided to move forward and bring Lortho into fruition. The language itself was not invented until the spring of 2016.

Much of the language stems from the languages that I know, namely Persian, French, and Korean. Although the language is a priori, much of its construction resembles that of an Indo-European flavor; albeit unintentionally. The phonology is largely inspired by Persian (Farsi) in that each letter is strictly pronounced regardless of their position in the the syllable/word. The agglutinating aspect of the language was largely influenced by Korean; however, the cases were inspired by both Hungarian and Finnish. The orthography was inspired by Central/East Asian orthographies which is further expounded here.

Another source of inspiration is my daughter. Through her development of learning how to make speech sounds leading to coherent speech and communication, she "created" words to communicate her wants and needs. Some of these words found their way into the Lortho lexicon.

Why?

Many people have asked me, "Why? What is the goal?" The answer is fairly straightforward: I am an artist and I love languages. So, I merged the two. I have an affinity towards non-Latin writing systems and I truly enjoy calligraphy. Therefore, aesthetics are very important in Lortho. If I am honest with myself, I would love to see this language in a movie or television series, but that isn't the main goal. The goal is to make a functional language and its associated world to where I can create works of art pertaining to this world/culture. I want to instill a sense of awe and wonder as if an old relic of eons past had been discovered and its beauty is unsurpassed by anything compared to contemporary times.

Etymology of Lortho

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Lortho is a combination of Lor, the god from which their story of life stems, and -tho, the inalienable form for the genitive case. It has since become a noun and can take other case endings (e.g. konpharin lortho-me - I speak Lortho-ACC).

The mountain whence Lor is said to originate is called Malhi Dharakhi, "Great Mountain," and is located in the coastal mountain range on the west coast of Lamona.

Goals

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The goal is to create the gradual progression of Lortho which will lead to the development of daughter languages and, eventually, create sister languages which have developed on different parts of the planet.

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Want to learn more? Then let's get down to business!

References

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