Silvinian

Silvinian Nyilvö
Pronounced:	[ɲil.ʋɵ]~[ɲil.ʋə]
Writing system:	Latin
Typology
Morphological type:	Agglutinative
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Split-S
Basic word order:	OVS
Credits
Creator:	Koyeniru
Created:	2025

Silvinian (autoglossonym: Nyilvö, Silvinian: [ɲilʋɵ]) is a personal conlang. Therefore, this language was made to express her creator's ideas and thoughts as truthfully and accurately as possible, as well as encompassing as few negative ideas as possible, most of them lacking a separate word, instead mostly relying on particles to express those meanings. Furthermore, this language has no intention of being fully naturalistic, even though some naturalist thinking has been done during the conception of this language.

Grammatically and morphologically speaking, Silvinian is an agglutinative, mostly suffixing OVS language, which makes use of postpositions, and lacks "true" adjectives, a function that is fulfilled by nouns. Verbs in this language have a very strict valency distinction, especially for ambitransitives, that may have two or more forms depending on their valency in-context.

Phonology

Silvinian distinguishes between 16 to 25 consonants, depending on whether allophones are counted or not, though the standard is to consider that there are 18 consonants. Similarly for vowels, Silvinian can be analysed as having between 6 and 8 vowels, where the maximum range (8 vowels) is considered to be the standard analysis.

Consonants

	Labial	Coronal	Dorsal	Glottal
Dental	Alveolar	Palatal[1]	Velar
Nasal	m	n̪~n		(ɲ)	ŋ
Plosive	p	t̪~t, d̪~d		(c, ɟ)	k	ʔ
Fricative	ɸ	(θ, ð)[2]	s, z	(ʃ, ʒ)	x	h
Approximant	ʋ~w	l̪~l		(ʎ), j
Rhotic		r̪~r

1. ^a  Palatal consonants (except /j/) are only allophones of coronals (except for [θ] and [ð]) followed by /j/.

2. ^a  [θ] and [ð] are allophones of intervocalic /t/ and /d/.

Further notes

• Syllable-final "n" might be dropped, nasalizing the preceding vowel, as in "hatyön", which is pronounced anywhere between [ha.ˈcɵn] and [ha.ˈcɵ̃].
• Nasal consonants assimilate in place of articulation with the following consonants, and precedes nasalization in rule order, like in "ándyas", pronounced [æːɲ.ɟas], and not *[æ̃ː.ɟas].
  • The cluster [ɲɟ] (or any nasal-plosive cluster) can also be pronounced as a pre-nasalised stop like [^ɲɟ].
• Intervocalic non-geminated plosives lenite into fricatives (see §Consonant lenition for more).

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i, (ɪ)[1]		u, (ʊ)[1]
Mid	e	(ə)[2], ɵ	o
Low	(æ)[3]	a

1. ^{a  b}  Short [i] and [u] can be pronounced as [ɪ] and [ʊ]

2. ^a  [ə] is considered as an alternate realization of short [ɵ], but is also used to "break" some consonant clusters (see §Cluster breaking for more).

3. ^a  [æ] is considered as an alternate realization of long [a].

Vowel length

In Silvinian, every vowel can be long, with length being written with an acute, or with a double acute in the case of "ö".

Furthermore, vowel length is contrastive, meaning that the meaning of a word changes whether a vowel is short or long:

Minimal pairs

Vowel	Short vowel			Long vowel
	Word	IPA	Meaning	Word	IPA	Meaning
[a~æ]	sar	[sar]	(living) fish	sár	[sæːr]
[e]	cyern	[kjern]		cyérn	[kjeːrn]
[ɪ~i]	mit	[mɪt]~[mɪθ][1]		mít	[miːt]~[miːθ][1]
[o]	ryon	[rjon]~[rjõ]		ryón	[rjoːn]~[rjõ]
[ʊ~u]	u	[ʊ]		ú	[uː]
[ə~ɵ]	sönt	[səⁿt]~[sə̃θ][1]		sőnt	[sɵːⁿt]~[sɵ̃ːθ][1]

1. ^a b c d  The second pronunciation for each of those words correspond to the way they are pronounced before vowels.

Phonological processes

Consonant lenition

In most cases, between vowels, plosives lenite and become fricatives, whether within a word (internal lenition) or across word boundaries (external lenition)

Initial	Lenited
/p/	[ɸ]
/t/	[θ]
/d/	[ð]
/k/	[x]

Internal

Internal lenition can almost never be blocked, unless if adding a "dyerá" just after the consonant, written as an apostrophe. The "dyerá" acts as an ultrashort schwa, which may or may not be pronounced.

Just like vowel length, lenition also creates minimal pairs, such as with "cadá" (pronounced [kaðæː]) and "cad'á" (pronounced [kad(ə̆)æː]), although those are very much rarer.