Talossan language

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Talossan El Glheþ Talossán
Created by:	R. Ben Madison	1985
Setting and usage:	Talossa
Total speakers:	2 fluent, est. >30
Category (purpose):	constructed languages artistic languages micronational languages
Category (sources):	a posteriori language (Romance)
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`art`
ISO 639-3:	—

The Talossan language (El Glheþ Talossán) is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa. It's also the official language in the other Talossan micronation which split off in 2004, the Republic of Talossa.

Talossan is a constructed Gallo-Romance language, inspired by French, Provençal and Occitan, and very naturalistic (with quite a few irregularities). In an effort to create a kind of "national mythology" for his micronation, Madison discovered in 1985 that one of the Berber sub-tribes of Morocco was called the Talesinnt, and decided that Talossans were "inexplicably and inextricably connected somehow to Berbers." This resulted in the Talossan language being inspired by Berber languages. More recently however, words are derived from Romance roots and given a French/Provençal feeling to them (some see a Romanian influence as well), but there is no one set of rules for derivation through which every word can be predicted. The word "Talossa" itself is not Romance, but Finno-Ugric in origin: it comes from the Finnish word for "inside the house" (Talossa began in Madison's bedroom.).

Talossan is the best-known example of the micronational language genre of conlang. It's spoken in the Kingdom of Talossa (El Regipäts Talossán), a "kingdom" with its own parliament and a bicameral legislature, founded by Madison on December 26, 1979, and also in the Talossan Republic (La Repúblicâ Talossán), formed in 2004 by ex-citizens of the Kingdom.

In the Republic the language is kept alive by the Talossan-Language project, which built an online dictionary English-Talossán, Talossán-English; and the formation of l'Icastolâ, the School of Talossan Language in the Talossan Academy of Arts and Sciences that was established 9 August 2005 with the "The Talossan Academy of Arts and Sciences Act" approved by the Parlamînt.

Talossan is one of the best-known artistic languages on the Internet. It garners perennial interest and respect from online conlangers and conlang aficionados. Of particular interest to them is its large vocabulary -- with over 28,000 words in its official dictionary, it is one of the most detailed fictional languages ever invented.

1 Criticism
2 Example of the language
3 State of the Language
4 See Also
5 External links

[edit] Criticism

Criticism of Talossan includes:

That words and grammar are just made up at random, thus having no regular derivation from Latin, as claimed by Talossans by calling it a Romance language.
The use of too many unnecessary accents and letter combinations.

[edit] Example of the language

The following are the first two tercines of the first stanzas of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind translated in Talossán:

Ô vînt traversâ salvátx, tú ånd d'Otogñheu së eßençù,

tú par qissen ûnvidat presençù els föglhâs morteschti

sînt drivadâs, come spiritzen d'iens encantéir escapînden,

vermél, és negreu, és brançéu, és gripesc roxh,

pestidonça-cünsütadâs plenitüds: ô tú,

qi apoartás à lor auscür þivereu vuode.

...

[edit] State of the Language

Currently the two Talossan communities are starting collaborations on the language in order to expand the corpus. They also are collaborating to make available downladable and public domain courses for all conlangers who want to discover the language. The holder of the copyright on the previous grammar (La Scúrzniâ Gramáticâ del Glheþ Talossán) has put it offline.