Archemia

Archemia is an artistic language themed around the fundamental elements and primes of traditional alchemy. While this understanding of the cosmos is in decline in the modern age, many alchemists, arcanists, and clockwork engineers continue to use the language because it provides a sense of community and familiarity for the otherwise very introverted folk who tend to work in these fields.
Archemia is notable in part because it uses particles relating to the elements (earth, air, fire, and water), the primes (soul/mind, spirit/life, and body) - as well as their opposites - as broad modifiers to indicate cases or moods. For example, when compared to an unmodified "cat," in Archemia, a "cat(fire)" might be considered feisty, hot-tempered, or constantly on the move, the incorporation of the 'fire' declension indicating that the cat has some aspects of elemental fire to it. In informal speech, this makes Archemia a useful vehicle for prose and poetry.

Writing System

The script of Archemia uses a set of logographs that can represent phonemes or words depending on the context. Glyphs that appear on their own are always interpreted as words or short phrases. If shown in a collection, these glyphs are instead to be interpreted as representing the phoneme that appears first in the word that would otherwise represented. For example, the glyph for 'terra' (earth) can be regarded as representing the /t/ phoneme when encountered in a phrase. It should be noted that there are no words shorter than two phonemes in the whole lexicon of Archemia.
Individual sentences in Archemia are written from right to left, but the flow of sentences are normally interpreted from right to left, then top to bottom, but they can appear in any order so long as lines are drawn to connect them as such. In this way, written Archemia is unique in that a single sentence can lead to, or proceed from, multiple other sentences in a document based on how they are connected, forming a web of possible interpretations. Particularly complex concepts requiring extensive logical reasoning or choice on the part of the reader can easily be explicated with the Archemia writing system; long-form technical documents written in the language look more like flow charts or arcane glyphs than paragraphs or prose. Explaining such a branching work in the verbal form of the language is extremely difficult, but can be done with logic and relational clauses between sentences - and, usually, someone willing to take comprehensive notes on the conversation.

Morphology

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in Archemia exhibit declension through the application of suffixes. Multiple such suffixes can be affixed to a word should more than one be applicable, though they should be placed in order from earliest to latest based on relevance to the nature of the root. There are multiple possible interpretations of a given suffix within a set range of possibilities based on a combination of cultural idiom and what part of speech is effected, requiring a degree of memorization on the part of the language learner. This is intentional, as exhibiting a comprehensive understanding of the byzantine symbolism of Archemia serves as an indication to the listener that the speaker is 'one of the tribe.' Some interpretations of these include:

• Earth:Passive, sturdy, heavy, durable, traditional. Nouns with an earth suffix tend to be in the locative case. Verbs with an earth suffix are in the past tense.



• Air:Impermanent, flighty, light, frangible, invasive. Nouns with an air suffix tend to be in the ablative case. Verbs with an air suffix are in the future tense.



• Fire:Active, antagonistic, energetic. Nouns with a fire suffix tend to be in the genitive case. Verbs with a fire suffix are in the present tense.



• Water:Flowing, vibrant, forceful, flexible, persistent. Nouns with a water suffix tend to be in the instrumental case. Verbs with a water suffix are in the perfect tense.



• Soul:Relating to the transcendant or eternal principles, ideal. The soul declension may indicate that the modified word exists either solely as an idea (i.e. a hypothetical statement) or as a part of the sentence of which the speaker is uncertain (as in a question).



• Spirit:Relating to thought or tradition, interior, rhetorical. The spirit declension may indicate that the word is associated with the inner or outer dialogue of the speaker and often appears in stories where characters are interacting with one another.



• Body:Relating to physical action, exterior, real, concrete. The body declension may be used to convert a noun into an action verb where the subject is doing something related to noun (i.e. "The man adult(body)" indicates that the man "adulted," which is to say he fulfilled his duties as an adult member of society or his household).

Vocabulary

Archemia features an extensive vocabulary for alchemical substances and processes of all sorts, meaning that, while some of the terminology has taken on new meaning with the progress of scientific understanding, it nevertheless remains an excellent lingua franca for describing scientific, academic, medical, and industrial concepts.

Phonetics

Consonants: /m/, /n/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/, /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /r/, /l/


Vowels:
/a/, /a:/, /e/, /e:/, /i/, /i:/, /o/, /o:/, /u/, /u:/
Long vowels are denoted in both the script and the romanization as a repetition of the vowel.

Sentence Structure

Archemia uses the Subject-Object-Verb ("I the ash calcinated") sentence construction. Adjectives and adverbs follow the parts of speech they modify ("I the product solubulized boiled thuroughly), and the arguments of transitive verbs follow at the end of the sentence ("I the oils residual condensed then into the beaker large").