Born on the school bus in 2011, still unfolding. łaá siri is a personally constructed language for artistic pleasure which has eleven contrastive phonemes (ʔ, l, ł, tł, s, ts, y, r, a, i, u), a somewhat complicated system of tone/pitch accent, and morphologically encoded deixis instead of person. Having outlasted all the others, it is currently my only conlang under active development.
łaá si-ri is a reflection of the things I love about the languages I encounter and a purposeful extension/expression of my earth-based neopagan spirituality. The language has been intentionally designed with ideas of Sacred Earth, Gaia Theory, Deep Ecology, and Intelligent Biosphere in mind because these are concepts that underpin my worldview and resonate strongly with me. I have also developed my own Metonic lunar calendar which is intimately interconnected with the language.
łaá siri is strongly head-final, typically adhering to OV word order with postpositions, suffixes, and enclitics occurring ubiquitously. Most verbal morphology, however, is prefixal. Noun roots are bound morphemes which must co-occur with suffixes that express noun class (human animate, nonhuman animate, inanimate, abstract). For example, here are two nouns inflected across different classes:
In practice, not every noun root can be meaningfully inflected across all four classes, and the human animate class is not fully productive anymore (e.g. certain nouns can be inflected for the human animate class, but derived nouns and relative clauses do not distinguish between human and nonhuman animates, they are all just animate).
When I initially created łaá siri, my idea was to see what a language would look like without personal pronouns. Instead of pronouns which expone (first, second, third) person, I designed a system based on spatial deixis. Spatial deixis refers to the relationship between objects of discourse in physical space; in English, we have deictic demonstratives, such as proximal "this" (close to me, the speaker) and distal "that" (far from me, the speaker). Other languages make more and/or different distinctions.
This system has been in constant flux since 2011 as I try to balance out the communicative need to refer to person with my initial experimental idea to remove person-marking. At some points in the history of the language, the system of deixis really just became a stand-in for person — for instance, the 'immediate' deixis which refers to the deictic center of an utterance, i.e. the speaker, was functionally first person. However, after at least 12 years of tinkering, the current system of deixis is distinct from person, despite some overlap.
In łaá siri, there are at least four physical degrees of deixis: immediate (close to speaker), near (far from speaker), distant (even farther from speaker), and absent (not in the vicinity of the speaker). There is also a fifth deixis which I refer to as 'abstract,' which is used nonreferentially, i.e. when not referring to a particular object in a particular location.
Spatial deixis in łaá siri is encoded in many ways. For instance, there are paradigms of deictic pronouns which inflect for animacy:
Spatial deixis is also indexed on verbs via subject/object agreement, and there is a class of locative verbs which encode locations along the same degrees of deixis.
For me, an interesting consequence of designing a language that indexes spatial deixis rather than person is that every utterance is heavily context-sensitive in a way that person is not. In order to understand an utterance, you need to imagine a physical scene with beings in relationship to one another.
For instance, imagine that I am speaking to you face-to-face, and I tell you that my name is Zach; I could say the following, using the immediate/human possessive pronoun łaí:
Now imagine a slightly different context, where I am not alone, but my brother is standing right beside me and we are face-to-face with you. Now, imagine I point to my brother and introduce him to you; I can still use the possessor łaí to refer to my brother, even though in this context, łaí is referring to a third-person.
Thus we see that deixis-marking and person-marking can diverge in interesting and unexpected ways. In a language with person-marking like English, the first person can only ever refer to the speaker — to the individual "me" — but in a deixis-marking language like łaá siri, there is no "me" exclusive of the people and things in my vicinity.
This has been a welcome consequence for me, because it has added a degree of depth to the ways that I think about language and translate things in łaá siri. It makes the language feel much more rooted in the real world, in a specific time and place, rather than in the abstract realm of thought. And, it also questions the boundary between the "individual" and the "world," since referring to individuals necessarily includes the things that are located in close relation to them.