About Sordish

Sordish is a small constructed language, that was made for a game called Suzerain.
Originally the language only consists of a few words, but even with these we were able to find trends within the words
Now we have gotten to the point where we can start adding our own words based on those guidelines given

The origin of words

In words we have a clear distribution between two major influences and one minor.
But before we can dive deeper, we do need to note the history of Sords in the game's lore
Sords once lived in the North of Merkopa, but between 600-995 AD they decided to immigrate to South Merkopa
With this information we can almost already conclude that older Sordish words would be coming from North Merkopa and new ones from the South
This becomes even stronger when we start to look at the origins of words we can find in the game.
The words we found in the game were mainly from a letter on the left-hand side of the screen, and a few other things, such as a radio on the table
It appears as if the older words would be quite similar to Proto-Germanic words, and the newer ones loans from Latin
With this we can pretty much conclude, that Proto-North-Merkopan is Proto-Germanic and Proto-South-Merkopan is followed by Latin
In the dictionary many words from the game have their expected origins next to them to prove this hypothesis

Languages of Merkopa

Proto-Germanic numerals and their Sordish versions

Phonology

Sordish phonology is strongly based on Proto-Germanic and Latin influence

Consonants

Consonants	Labial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar plain	Velar labialized	Glottal
Nasal	m	-	n	-	-	ŋ	-	-
Plosive	p b	-	t d	-	-	k g	kʷ (gʷ)	-
Fricative	(ɸʷ)	fʷ v	s (z)	(ʃ)	-	-	-	h
Approximant	w	-	-	l	-	-	-	-
Trill	-	-	-	r	-	-	-	-
Affricate	-	-	ts	(dz)	-	-	-	-

Notes

• <c> is pronounced as /ts/
• <ng> is pronounced as /ŋ/
• <nk> can be pronounced as either /ŋk/ or /nk/
• <sk> can be pronounced as /ʃk/ in more rural accents
• <kw> is pronounced as /kʷ/ and /gw/ is pronounced as /gʷ/
• <q> is pronounced at the start and end of a word as /kʷ/ but in voiced situations it is pronounced as /gʷ/
• <z> is pronounced as /dz/, but can also be pronounced /z/ in Southern accents
• <f> can be pronounced labially as /ɸʷ/ in older dialects, and is pronounced as /fʷ/ in newer dialects
• <t>, <d> and <s> are all dental or retracted dental

Vowels

Vowels	Front unrounded	Back-central unrounded	Back rounded
Close	i iː	-	u uː
Mid	e eː	-	ɔ ɔː
Open	-	ɑ ɑː	-

Dialects