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Hello to Romconlang! This is my first post to the board, but I imagine many of you recognize me from Conculture. I am new to conlanging. I was first introduced to the idea of conlanging-as-hobby through Ill Bethisad. I was drawn to IB for the cultural and historical content, but then my career path took an unexpectedly language-oriented turn and I found I was able to comprehend the conlanging pages more than I had. The language I began writing was inspired by IB and is written to fit into the IB setting. Its home is the Crimea, which in IB is a melting pot of some two dozen different language communities. Parra is used for communication between members of different groups. Parra is based on a highly elaborated version of medieval Lingua Franca, the trade language of the Mediterranean. The grammar is quite simple by definition (which appealed to me as a novice) but that in turn has raised the challenge of avoiding ambiguity. Parra has a website (http://karnell.weebly.com/parra.html). I will post the bones of the language here bit by bit for comment, but you can always go to the site for the full project. I'm at about 200 words and a few short texts. The Our Father: Papa denes, ce da a seli, Noma deti esi santo fa fara. Sarso deti fa veni, Vele deti esi fa fara, tanta a sinla, tanta a seli. Xes den, xat de den per nos dada, E debiti denes perona, tanta nos perona emedebiti denes. E a temta nos ne conduşu, Ma nos escer de saló fara. Amen 1. Introduction and background history Parra evolved from Lingua Franca, brought to Crimea by Italian merchants to their colonies, controlled from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Parra, whose name comes from the Italian verb parlare, to talk, is the form that LF took when it spread from the ports into the whole of Crimea, becoming the language that the many language groups used to communicate with one another. Parra evolved from LF in three phases. Phase 1 was the LF brought into the Black Sea originally. This was an eastern form of the language used throughout the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean origin means that Parra's base has some influence from Catalan, Narbonese (Occitan), and Arabic. On the other hand, this eastern variety was a bit closer to "pure" Italian than the LF used further west in places like North Africa. Phase 2 happened in the 15th century. Genoa lost direct control of its colonies, but Lingua Franca lived on in the ports and spread to Crimea's interior. The dominant languages of Crimea were Tatar and Turkish, and besides contributing many words, these languages changed the sounds of Parra. Most notably, the pattern of Turkic front-back vowel harmony was enforced onto most words. So for example, the 1st-person plural possessive pronoun de nos (LF) > denos (phase 1) > denös (phase 2). The ö /2/ and ü /y/ sounds occurred in Phase 2: they had already been present in the Ligurian dialect spoken by many of the Italian traders, but now these sounds became phonemized. Phase 3 began in the late 18th century when the Russian Empire took control of Crimea. The Turkic vowels were unrounded to /e/ and /i/, returning Parra to a five-vowel system. Palatalization of consonants also occurred. So the word for eye is exe (phase 3, modern Parra) < öciö (phase 2) < euchio [2kio] (likely Ligurianized pronunciation in Phase 1). Many Russian loanwords also came into the langauge during this time. The language has developed well beyond a mere trade pidgin, but it has never creolized (that is, it has never become a home language). 2. Letters and Sounds Vowels: a e i o u Consonants: b c(/k/) d ç(/tS/) d f g j(/j/) l m n p r s ş(/S/) t v x(/x/) Parra has five vowels and 17 consonants. Modern Parra is left with the same 5-vowel system as old Lingua Franca, having lost the ö and ü sounds that were present in the second, Turkifying stage of the language. In written Parra, one letter corresponds to exactly one phoneme. There are no digraphs or doubled consonants (natively, the name of the language is actually spelled <Para>, and only the English spelling has 2 r's). The Cyrillic alphabet is the most widely used one for Parra. Latin is second, used more than you might expect. Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew scripts can also be used. The Armenian script and Gothic runes, both current in Crimea, are rarely used for Parra. - Ben