ÍLASI

What this is

Ílasi is the constructed language of the Ílani — the singing sea-folk of the SubMergence world. It is a full, decodable language: real sounds, real grammar, a growing lexicon. But it is built for one purpose above all — to be sung by a human soprano, underwater, heard through bone.

That single fact dictates everything. The sea high-passes away the lowest frequencies, collapses stereo to mono, and truly carries only the ~500 Hz–3 kHz window. So Ílasi keeps only the sounds that survive that crossing — soft, flowing, holdable on a note — and throws away everything percussive. The language and the album's nourishment layer share the same physics. That's what makes this tongue ours, and not a generic fantasy language.

Track 11, Naia, will be written in it. (Lyrics are a later pass — this codex is the language itself.) The word naia means beloved.

The somatic logic, in three moves

The sounds — phonology & romanization

Consonants — the soft thirteen

No plosives. Every consonant is a continuant or sonorant you can hold on a note and melt into the vowel beside it. There is no glottal stop — a glottal stop is a hard edge, and Ílasi has none.

Vowels — the song carriers

Five pure, Italian/Hawaiian-clean vowels — the most singable sounds a soprano owns — each short or long. Length is written by doubling and means something: long vowels are the language's depth axis (and literally its held notes).

Diphthongs: ai, au, ei, oi, ou, ui, ia, io, ua, ue — all already in the wordless vocalise (ai-yaa, oo-oh).

How syllables work

• Shape: (C)(glide)V(V)(sonorant). Open syllables strongly preferred — most words end in a vowel, so the last note can ring as long as the lungs hold.
• No hard clusters. The only onset cluster is consonant + glide (lwa, nya, swi). Codas may only be sonorants (m n ny ng l r) — never a fricative, so words always end singable.
• Stress is penultimate and predictable, so it is never written: ma-RA, lu-MI, i-LA-si. A long vowel pulls stress to itself. That's the whole prosody — the page stays clean enough to sing from directly.

Why no tone. A tonal siren-language sounds clever — until you sing it, and the melody erases the tone (it's why sung Mandarin loses its tones). So Ílasi has no lexical tone: melody carries the pitch, and length + stress do the rest. Cleaner, and it actually works sung.

The sound-symbolism engine — how the language grows like coral

Ílasi words aren't arbitrary: a word's sound echoes its meaning (the bouba/kiki effect, used as a rule). This is the tool that lets the lexicon grow coherently forever. To coin a new word you don't pick sounds at random — you assemble the meaning out of these fields, and the word comes out feeling native.

Hear it work

• mara "sea" — m (holding body) + open a–a (the sea itself) + r (flow).
• voolu "deep" — v + long oo (depth, dark) + l (the pour down) + u (the deepest). You can hear it sink.
• siri "bright / to shine" — all surface-light: s (shimmer) + high front i. Pleasingly close to siren and shimmer, by design.
• íla "song / to sing" — pure open flow; the most central word. The language is named after it.
• soona "to sink, descend" — s (slipping under) + long oo (down into the dark) + na (held). The album's whole descent in one word.

Coining rule of thumb: start from the meaning's depth (vowel back/length), add its motion (liquids/glides), wrap it in its feeling (nasals for love/holding, sibilants for foam/breath), keep it singable (open final syllable). If a word feels wrong, it's breaking one of these — fix the sound, not the meaning.

Grammar

Verb-first. Pitch from the melody, not from tone. Say how an action flows, not merely when. Know whether you mean us or us-without-you. And hold close — grammatically — the song, voice, tide and name that can never be taken from you.

Word order — VSO

Head-initial throughout: modifiers, numerals and demonstratives follow the noun (mara voolu "deep sea"; mara ni "this sea"). There is no copula — a predicate noun or adjective just takes the verb's front slot (ilani ne "I am a siren"; voolu mara "the sea is deep"). In sung verse a noun may be fronted for emphasis with a pronoun left behind — the song register.

Pronouns — the heart of the language

Three persons × three numbers, with a first-person split between inclusive (counting you in) and exclusive (leaving you out). Inclusive forms carry the u-vowel.

nuwe is the album's pronoun. "You-and-I, the two of us, no one else" — the inclusive dual. Nearly every line a siren sings is reaching toward nuwe. Submerge with me is, in Ílasi, the wish to turn ne + lo into nuwe. No gender — the Ílani never needed it.

Number on nouns

Singular unmarked · dual = suffix -we (a pair: limawe "two hands") · plural = reduplication (mamara "waters," lulumi "many moons") — the sea repeating itself.

Possession — what cannot be taken from you

Inalienable (voice, song, tide, name, breath, heart, body, kin) takes the possessor as an enclitic: vena-ne "my voice," ila-lo "your song." Alienable (a found shell, a borrowed moon) uses le "of": shela le ne "my shell." A siren's song is inalienable — ila-ne, never "the song of me." You can lose a pearl; you cannot lose your song.

Verbs — aspect over tense

Roots don't conjugate for person. Meaning is built by preverbal particles. Ílasi marks how an action moves far more than when it happened:

Tense is two optional adverbs: ana "already/past," fai "not-yet/future."

Mood: imperative is the bare verb (ula lo! "Come!"); optative ve "let / may" is the album's mood of yearning (ve ula nuwe "let us-two come"); negative ni; yes/no question ha. Voice suffixes: reciprocal -wai "each other" (the merge made grammatical — mira-wai nuwe "we hold each other"), reflexive -noo, causative -sa.

The small machinery

Adpositions (before the noun): le (of) · en (in/into) · voi (to/toward) · mai (from) · mua (with). Connectives: ye (and) · vo (or) · nei (but) · hae (because) · mavi (if). Question words are transparent — ya- + a particle: yare (who), yana (what), yaen (where), yawo (when), yashi (how), yahae (why). Derivation: -ni (agent: ilani "singer"), -si (abstract/tongue: Ílasi "the song-speech"), -li (dear/little), -vo (great/vast).

Numbers: ai 1 · ewe 2 · sei 3 · noa 4 · lima 5 · hura 6 · mela 7 · luna 8 · nui 9 · sela 10. (lima is both "five" and "hand" — a hand is a five.)

Lexicon — 270 roots, grouped by field

The canonical dictionary lives as data in data/lexicon.json — searchable, with a two-way translator, in tools/translator.html. (270 roots yield 1,000+ legal word-forms via derivation; see the scaling guide.) A selected showcase by field follows — tap a heading to open. Every word obeys the sound-symbolism above.

Sample texts — the proof it works

A language is real when you can carry a thought into it and read it back. Glossed three lines deep. Every word is in the lexicon above.

Passage — A Siren's Invitation

An original poem in Ílasi — proving the grammar carries connected verse. (Not the Naia lyrics; those come later.)

An album line, carried into Ílasi

From the spirit of "Moon Tide Call" — to show the tongue can hold the record's own voice.