LotM - June

<title>Phonology</title>
Silvish's phonology is like a nice bowl of IPA soup. There aren't so many letters that you can't taste the broth, but there aren't so few letters that broth is all you get. Silvish has a full set of nasals /m n ɲ ŋ/, your standard plosives and fricatives, and a voiced/unvoiced distinction. It's also in no danger of dying of dehydration. That is to say, it also has plenty of liquids /ɾ r l ʎ/.

When it comes to vowels, Silvish has 8 oral vowels, 3 nasal vowels, and 2 semivowels. Dipthongs can be made from almost any vowel/semivowel pair save for /ue̯/, /uo̯/, or /ie̯/. Here's hoping you weren't a fan of those.

<title>Orthography</title>
Silvish's orthography is incredibly naturalistic. And by that I mean complicated, but in a good way. There are only 21 letters: Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv and Zz, but between digraphs, diacritics, and spelling rules the full phonology can be expressed. It reminds me of French; I don't actually understand it, but it sure looks good.

<title>Nouns</title>
Silvish's nouns have two genders, two numbers, two cases, and belong to two declensions. As gender is only somewhat tied to declension, every noun really only has 4 forms: <gl>SG.NOM</gl>, <gl>SG.OBL</gl>, <gl>PL.NOM</gl>, and <gl>PL.OBL</gl>. As someone who has seen some <i>very</i> large declension tables in my time, Silvish is a breath of fresh air. It's not <i>all</i> that simple, of course, bringing me to:

<title>Pronouns</title>
Silvish pronouns come in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons; singular and plural; male and female (in the 3rd person); and nominative, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, reflexive, and disjunctive. There's a lot of them. There's even a set of gender neutral pronouns to increase the count. I think they're number neutral, too.

<title>Verbs</title>
Verbs, oh verbs, I am reminded of Latin and my head is starting to hurt. Silvish has three conjugations, each with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons; four moods; an active and passive voice; tenses, aspects, and compound tense/aspects; and three non-finite forms. The resulting tables are mighty fine, but also mighty hard for me to learn. I don't know how you romlangers do it.