  We consider the chiral Lagrangian with a nonet of Goldstone bosons and a
nonet of light vector mesons. The mixing between the pseudoscalar mesons eta
and eta-prime is taken into account. A novel counting scheme is suggested that
is based on hadrogenesis, which conjectures a mass gap in the meson spectrum of
QCD in the limit of a large number of colors. Such a mass gap would justify to
consider the vector mesons and the eta-prime meson as light degrees of freedom.
The complete leading order Lagrangian is constructed and discussed. As a first
application it is tested against electromagnetic transitions of light vector
mesons to pseudoscalar mesons. Our parameters are determined by the
experimental data on photon decays of the omega, phi and eta-prime meson. In
terms of such parameters we predict the corresponding decays into virtual
photons with either dielectrons or dimuons in the final state.
