| Introduction In the summer of 1990, I realized that the artificial country I have been designing for two years lacked an essential element, its own language. The Mediterranean country was an island named Salamon after the Canaanite tribe that migrated to it. By that summer, I had created several maps of Salamon, had written an account of its history that was integrated in the history of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and had even printed stamps and money notes. The official languages of the island nation were Arabic and English until I designed Salamonese, the ancestor of Delason. Looking back at that summer, I am not surprised that I thought of constructing an artificial language by that time, I have lived in or visited more than 12 countries in four continents and have studied, formally or informally, about five different languages and came in touch with several modern Arabics (Palestinian, Egyptian, Tunisian, etc.) But creating my "own" language seemed like the most fascinating challenge I ever attempted. Seven years later, I am still working on it. The language has metamorphisized several times especially as I went to college and majored in linguistics. So as I learned more about human languages and realized how diverse they are, I modified my language. During my college years, Delason lost its connections with its fictitious origins and became a linguistic "test-tube." I toyed with the possibility of combining dissimilar syntactic properties such as having both pre- and post-positions, or optional case markers which can increase the freedom of Delason's word order. Phonologically and morphologically, however, Delason is quite lame since I was never interested in experimenting with these aspects of language. Delason's phonology is simply a regularized marriage of Spanish and Modern Hebrew. And all morphological derivations are done using prefixes and suffixes only. On the other hand, Delasoni vocabulary is quite remarkable in that its roots come from a set of about 20 languages with the main contributors being from the Indo-European and the Semitic families. Some of the roots are borrowed with no modifications such as telefon (Latin telephone) or on (Turkish ten). Other roots were created by scrambling elements from different languages. For example, olan (hello / peace) is constructed from hola (Spanish hello) and ahlan (Arabic hello) with the semantic component peace from shalom (Hebrew hello / peace). In addition, I used names of famous real and fictitious individuals such as makbeta (guilt) from Macbeth and hickoka (fear), pronounced hish-ko-ka, from Hitchcock. In addition to its syntax and vocabulary, Delason is special among other constructed languages in that it is one of the few with their own script. It was designed by integrating elements from different scripts with the main contributors being Japanese Kana and Kanji. I have created several fonts for this script and have experimented with calligraphy. The goal of this book is to document my work on Delason and share it with other conlangers (language constructors or as I prefer to call us linguartists - pronounced ling-gwar-tists). The book contains an introduction to the Delasoni writing system, a complete grammar reference, a phrase book, selected texts, and an English-Delason dictionary. I hope you enjoy this humble work of linguart and thank you very much for your interest.
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