The Talossan language (ISO 639-3 language code tzl) is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison in 1980 for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa.
The Talossan language (el glheþ Talossan) is the best-known example of the micronational language genre of conlang. The language is spoken and used in the Kingdom of Talossa (Regipäts Talossan), a "constitutional monarchy" with its own parliament and a bicameral legislature, founded by Madison on December 26, 1979, and also in the Talossan Republic (Repúblicâ Talossán), formed in 2004 by ex-citizens of the Kingdom. There are over 28,000 words in its official dictionary.
The language is overseen by the Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ (CÚG; the Committee for the Use of the Language), a group formed in the Kingdom of Talossa by Madison in the 1980s. This group periodically issues Arestadas (Reformations), which describe and document changes in the usage of the language and to the vocabulary.
In the Republic the language is kept alive by the Talossan-Language project, which built an online dictionary English-Glheþ, Glheþ-English; and the formation of l'Icastolâ, the School of Talossan Language in the Talossan Academy of Arts and Sciences that was established 9 August 2005 with the "The Talossan Academy of Arts and Sciences Act" approved by the Parlamînt.
The most significant recent development in the language was the issuance of the Arestada of December 12, 2007. This Arestada instituted a rule for stress that allowed many extraneous stressmarks to be omitted, and simplified the vowel set by recognizing certain letters as allophones of other vowels, and respelled a few strange letter combinations. This Arestada is accepted in the Kingdom, but usage of Talossan in the Talossan Republic often retains pre-Arestada conventions.
Linguistic properties[]
Classification[]
Talossan is a constructed Gallo-Romance language, inspired by French and Occitan, and very naturalistic, with quite a few irregularities.
Writing system[]
The Talossan alphabet is Roman, but contains some letters not found in English—including the Germanic scharfes S (ß) [known as "eseta" in Talossan], Icelandic thorn (þ), the cedilla-c (ç), and Icelandic eth (ð). The eseta can be replaced by the equivalent digraph ss, and the thorn by the digraph tg. Prior to the 2007 Arestada, the eth was often seen written using the digraph th; the 2007 Arestada recognized the eth as replaceable in modern Talossan by the letter d.
The letters of the modern Talossan alphabet are:
In alphabetical ordering, c and ç are not distinguished from one another, nor are s and ß, nor any vowel from its marked counterpart.
See also[]
External links[]
- "It's Good to Be King" by Alex Blumberg. Wired 8.03 (March 2000).
- The Kingdom of Talossa's Talossan Language Reference Page
- Kingdom of Talossa
- Republic of Talossa
- The Republic's Talossan Language Reference Page
- The Talossan-Language project (with dictionary)
- The 2007 Arestada
Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Talossan language" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talossan_language, used under the GNU Free Documentation License.