LEXICON
Notes: Sometimes the translation gives only one syntactic category of the english word but intended are also all the others with the same semantic/pragmatic meaning (e.g. "marriage", but also "to marry"; "to count", but also "the act of counting")
| ( ){ }[ ]; | are usually called delimiters. See grammar part |
| īf | the real world we all experience; everything observable and believed true; includes the reconstruction of it's history and the current best guesses about things (physical laws, past events etc.) |
| sīt | time |
| ta | I to add, a solution/emulsion of |
| əlsīt | interval of time, timespan |
| ets | present, current, last observed |
| güri | Roughly what gentleman/lady entails (without the gender implication). Everything that can be interacted with verbally and socially is a person. That means most humans, and perhaps intelligent space aliens or AIs are persons. This a continuous qualification however, a child is less of a person than a trustworthy grown man; but a trustworthy child (or even dog) is more one than a severly psychotic human. |
| (person Alice) | means the behaviour/interface of Alice e.g. (person Alice){(liked self ())} |
| ~ | special glyph for /ələ/; this is basically a placeholder for a thing that is either unimportant or can be easily inferred from context; related in some way/function that the speaker is not going to bother saying explicitly |
| ⇒ | special glyph for /føl/; "the following is a direct consequence of the preceding action/object" this word has special syntax: It is usually placed between the two arguments, the first one also being logically (and therefore usually also chronologically) the first one. It can however also use the ordinary syntax; the difference is easily noticable because of the neighboring delimiters. |
| > | special glyph for /lat/; I greater than, sorted from largest to smallest |
| < | special glyph for /lit/; I smaller than, sorted from smallest to largest |
| ! | short form of {(~)?=uy} |
| uy | truthy, true, being sure about smth., happened, exists |
| əs; = | is, evaluates to, has this property/quantity/etc. Special syntax: object = quality If appearing in { }, the object is often omitted. |
| vu | 1) I belongs to, is subset of |
| 2) IV an arbitrary subset of, some, a few |
| luf | go, walk, drive, ride horseback, sail |
| nøn | III (nan agent object method/tools) inquire, research, look at, explore, investigate, delve into, learn |
| nønə | IV knowledge, wisdom, insight, skill |
| samøa | IV Samoa, samoan, relating to Samoa |
| tuvalu | IV Tuvalu, relating to Tuvalu |
| wusə | IV cultural group, people, subculture, convention, culture, ; III to acculture, to agree on sth., make a convention |
| ak | III make, manufacture, build, bring into existence |
| toŋ | III change, influence, modify |
| zīŋ | IV rope, string, flexible material with high tensile strengh to weight ratio |
| kli | III diminish, slow down, make smaller |
| ōs | IV size, volume, number; large, big, ample, massive, voluminous |
| nə | I negation |
| so | III count, enumerate, counting |
| sø | IV number |
| lüri | III poetry, wordplay, recite, rhyme |
| saŋ | III sing (humans or birds), play instruments, (make) music |
| puk | III stop, halt, interrupt, slow down |
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SYNTAX AND GENERAL NOTES
The language is divided into certain basic units, called objects. These can be surrounded with an arbitrary number of parentheses (as long as they match). Words can be compined in a manner that is reminiscent of polish function notation. The number, order and function of the "arguments" depends on the word and the number of arguments. Examples: (add 1 2 3 4 5) // i.e. 15 "(body self)" means "my body" or "the bodily aspect of mine" Whilst you can have (person) as a normal object (e.g. "(go person island sailboat)"), (person Alice) would mean “the behaviour of Alice” Many words follow similar patterns in syntax and can therefore be classified as outlined below. The classes are given for each word by their roman numeral in the lexicon. The examples use english words as those are easier to parse.
| (I) | any number of arguments |
| are all where their arguments do not have any hierarchy, it does not matter in what order they are said etc. |
| (add 1 2 3 4 5) // i.e. 15 |
| (intersection berries vegetables) //i.e. tomatoes, pumpkins, eggplant, etc. |
| (II) | some do have a hierarchy, e.g. vu |
| (vu tomato berry fruit plant) //tomatoes are a subset of berries, which are a subset of fruits etc. |
| (III) | Do have a distinct subject and object (and optionally tool), fixed maximum number of arguments, their arguments are listed in each lexicon entry. Note that only all the important arguments need to be stated, the others can be completely omitted. If the first argument is unknown/unimportant, it is common to either do (), or ~ at its place. |
| (hit agent object_being_hit tool) e.g. “I hit him with a stick” would be (hit I him stick) |
| (go agent destination means_of_transport) e.g. “I went to a/the island by boat” would be (go I island boat) |
| (kill agent object tool) e.g. “I killed him with a sword” would be (kill I him sword) |
| (IV) | the x aspect of y (usually just one argument) |
| the event occured at 18.00 ↦ (time event){18.00} |
| (write english) ↦ written english, the orthography of english |
| (shape (write english)) ↦ the glyphs used to write english |
Lists
There are two very distinct kinds of lists, called grouping and iterative lists. Grouping lists simply group their elements into a pair/group/set, whereas iterative lists serve to avoid repetition. Consider the following examples which should make this clear:
- He stole from (the married couple) Alice and Bob ↦ (steal he ((Alice)(Bob)) or (steal he (∪ Alice Bob))
- He stole from Alice and he stole from Bob (i.e. from two separate houses) ↦ (steal he (Alice; Bob))
- He went to the apple and ate it ↦ ((go; eat) he apple)
- Bring me an apple from the food basket ↦ (request (fetch you (apple fruit_basket))
New words; Pronouns
New lexemes are often invented/introduced during the text like so: Alice [(vu güri)] which roughly translates to: "consider a person, lets call her Alice, that ...." The infix of [ ] is not formally part of the text, it can be seen as similar to our usage of footnotes, or parentheses. Common choices for made up words are kuks, fū, kūks and many more depending on subculture.
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