the myojanu language

I have devised this language called myojanu. this language has no lofty purpose; I make my languages as a personal artistic endeavor and to satisfy my desires for a language. nonetheless, I absolutely would love for anyone to pick up the language and do things with it; that would make me very happy.

my major inspiration for this language was, as you might guess from the grammar and some of the vaguely similar words, toki pona. I have been speaking toki pona for a while. some people assume that toki pona is too inexpressive to talk about many things, which isn’t very true. you can talk about all kinds of things. that said, there are things that are constricting about it. not that its limitations are flaws (they’re intentional design decisions), but I wanted to adapt some of toki pona’s ideas to a more complicated and expressive language.

toki pona has a limited set of words. even if nimi sin are used, it is a point of speaking the language that you limit yourself to a set vocabulary. often, when languages lack a word for something, they create a term for it, i.e. they lexicalize a combination of words to refer to a specific concept. toki pona avoids this (at least in theory), as although lexicalizations don’t constitute new words, they certainly constitute new lexemes.

so, toki pona works by describing salient aspects of things, rather than having common terms for them. this does require a lot of shared context between the speaker and the listener. shared context is required for any communication, but it is true moreso of toki pona than other languages. like with anything, toki pona’s simplicity is a tradeoff. I wanted to make a language with a somewhat different tradeoff.

like toki pona, myojanu restricts the speaker to a limited set of roots. however, it also has a mechanism for explicitly creating lexicalized terms via compounding roots. hopefully this achieves expressivity while also reducing the amount of morphemes that someone must know to speak the language. even though the language may grow to have many words per se, each word will be described from roots that a speaker will already be familiar with.

here is a work-in-progress list of roots when the roots are mostly finalized I will make a dictionary of some compounds. the phonology and grammar of the language are described below.

phonology

/p t k v ð~d ɣ~g w ɾ j s ts dz m n ç~h ŋ/
<p t k b d   g   w r y s c  j  m n h   n>
/a e i o ɯ/
<a e i o u>
<n> is used to write both /n/ and /ŋ/. it is /ŋ/ at the end of a syllable and /n/ otherwise.

phonotactics

O: p t k v ð~d ɣ~g s ts dz m n ç~h
L: w ɾ j
V: a e i o ɯ

(O)(L)V(ŋ)

prosody

words are pronounced with initial stress.

pronouns

  • ka: 1st person
  • ta: 2nd person
  • do: 3rd person
  • nu: demonstrative
  • bri: reflexive
  • sen: interrogative

pronouns are default singular and may be made plural by suffixing -su.

grammar

sentence structure

non-relative relative
active stative active stative
predicate ri na rin ni
imperative yo yu
object du da

a sentence is structured like so:

yan    ri       byu du  mi 
person PRED.ACT eat OBJ fruit 
someone is eating fruit
a sentence contains a subject, followed by a predicate marked by a predicate marker, which contains a verb followed by an optional object marked by du.

a na predicate communicates that the verb is a state that the subject exhibits passively or is subjected to.

ka na        byu
1s PRED.STAT eat
I am eaten

ka na        gwon
1s PRED.STAT die
I die

ka na        hi
1s PRED.STAT good
I am good

ka na        pyi
1s PRED.STAT bug
I am a bug
a ri predicate communicates that the subject is actively performing an action that it may be subjecting an object to.

ka ri       byu
1s PRED.ACT eat
I eat

ka ri       gwon
1s PRED.ACT die
I kill

ka ri        hi
1s PRED.STAT good
I ameliorate

ka ri        pyi
1s PRED.STAT bug
I bugify (?)
a yu/yo predicate expresses a request or command to its subject. the subject may be omitted.

yo           byu du  mi
PRED.ACT.IMP eat OBJ fruit
please eat the fruit
a content phrase (such as a subject, verb, or object) may be modified by a ni/rin predicate. objects in a relative predicate must use the relative object markers.

yan    rin          byu da      mi    na        hi   ni            su 
person PRED.ACT.REL eat OBJ.REL fruit PRED.STAT good PRED.STAT.REL very
the person who eats fruit is very good
a relative clause may specify a subject instead of what is being modified, with what is modified acting as the object instead. a “dangling” object marker is placed after the verb.

yan    ri       byu du  mi    ka rin          min  da
person PRED.ACT eat OBJ fruit 1s PRED.ACT.REL want OBJ.REL
someone ate the fruit I wanted

“adverb”/sentence modifier

an entire sentence can be modified with a content phrase followed by en, sort of like an adverb.

hi   en  ka ri       byu
good ADV 1s PRED.ACT eat
thankfully, I'm eating
(whereas ka ri byu ni hi would mean, “I’m eating well”)

coordinators

  • o: “and”
  • i: “or”

a sentence may have multiple subjects by using coordinators.

mi    i  kwi   na        hi 
fruit OR plant PRED.STAT good
fruits or vegetables are good
a sentence may have multiple predicates or objects by suffixing additional sentence particles with a coordinator (e.g. na becomes nao).

do na        hi   ri-o         byu du  mi    du-o    kwi
3s PRED.STAT good PRED.ACT-AND eat OBJ fruit OBJ-AND plant
they are good and eat their fruits and vegetables)

compounds

all the words in the language are constructed from a finite set of roots. more complex lexemes can be constructed via compounding. the most basic relation is to suffix A with B, to express that it is an A related to B.

tohi (good feeling, happiness)
prici (sky light, star)
myoja (means of communication, language)
ransyo (acquiring knowledge, learn)
additional suffixes compound relations. suffixes themselves can be compounds.

pricisi (large sky light, sun)
myojanu (this language, the name of the language)
atigra (small rough stuff, sand)
yanransyo (person of learning, student)
compounds express distinct lexical ideas. they can be coined by anyone, and homonyms are acceptible, but they communicate a distinct concept understood by speaker and listener, as opposed to just using the constituent words together.

special suffixes

  • -kin: emphasis

certain special suffixes can be affixed to content words to modify them. they can be placed on content words, prepositions, or preverbs. they modify the entire word, but are always placed at the end.

ka-kin  ri       ne  byu du  mi
1s-EMPH PRED.ACT NEG eat OBJ fruit
*I* didn't eat the fruit

preverbs

  • bin: “can”
  • sa: “might”
  • kan: “become”/inchoative aspect
  • min: “want to”
  • syo: “know how to”
  • pi: perfect aspect
  • be: “try to”
  • wen: “continue to”/progressive aspect
  • twen: “would”/subjunctive mood
  • ne: “does not”/“is not”/negation

certain content words can be used as preverbs, which specially modify the verb of a predicate. a preverb can be placed before a content phrase or another preverb phrase in the predicate to produce a preverb phrase.

ka ri       ne  pi   bin syo  byu du  mi
1s PRED.ACT NEG PERF can know eat OBJ fruit
I couldn't have known how to eat the fruit

prepositions

  • ron: “in”/“on”/“at”
  • ru: “of”/“related to”
  • twa: “to”/“towards”
  • ye: “for”
  • me: “from”/“because of”
  • kri: “via”/“using”
  • pyo: “near”/“with”
  • in: “inside of”
  • an: “outside of”
  • de: “above”/“on top of”
  • san: “like”/“as”
  • gi: “according to”
  • ba: “in front of”
  • mon: “behind”

certain content words can be used as prepositions. a prepositional phrase (consisting of a preposition and a content phrase) can modify any content phrase. it can also be used as a predicate.

ka na        ron ta-mun
1s PRED.STAT at  building-art
I'm at the museum

bwa  pyo  ka ri       twa-han  twa pro
bird near 1s PRED.ACT move-air to  away
the bird near me flew away
coordinators can be affixed to prepositions to coordinate them.

nu  na        a-byu     ye  ka ye-o    ta
DEM PRED.STAT stuff-eat for 1s for-AND 2s
this is food for me and you

ka na        go   ron ta       an      te-ni-ce-yan          pyoo ta-mun
1s PRED.STAT live at  building outside land-REL-group-person near building-art
I live in a house outside of town near the museum

questions

the interrogative pronoun sen can be used to form queries, replacing any content word in the sentence.

sen ri       byu du  mi
INT PRED.ACT eat OBJ fruit
who ate the fruit?

do ri       sen du  mi
3s PRED.ACT INT OBJ fruit
they did what to the fruit?

do ri       byu du  sen
3s PRED.ACT eat OBJ INT
what did they eat?
yes/no questions can be asked by suffixing the predicate marker with sen.

do ri-sen       byu du  mi
3s PRED.ACT-INT eat OBJ fruit
did they eat the fruit?

conjunctions

  • kyo: “and”
  • kyi: “or”
  • kyu: “but”
  • kya: “so”
  • kyabin: “if, then”

conjunctions can join sentences together.

ka ri       bin do, kyu      ka ri       ne  min  do
1s PRED.ACT can 3s, CONJ.BUT 1s PRED.ACT NEG want 3s
I can do it, but I don't want to do it

ta ri       ja   twa ka, kyabin nu  na        hi
2s PRED.ACT talk to  1s  if     DEM PRED.STAT good
if you'd talk to me, that would be good

situation nouns

  • ha: situation noun marker

this terminology/idea is borrowed from the languages of jack eisenmann, but it is a very simple one. rather than a content word, one can specify a situation noun as a content phrase. a situation noun is ha, followed by a complete sentence.

ha   ta na        byu du  mi    ni            nu  na        ne  hi
SITU 2s PRED.STAT eat OBJ fruit PRED.STAT.REL DEM PRED.STAT NEG good
it's not good that you ate that fruit

ka ri       syo  du  ha   ta ri       byu du  mi    ni            nu
1s PRED.ACT know OBJ SITU 2s PRED.ACT eat OBJ fruit PRED.STAT.REL DEM
I know that you ate that fruit

numbers

  • ne: zero
  • wan: one
  • ji: two
  • sya: three
  • cin: four
  • jya: five
  • jyawan: six
  • jyaji: seven
  • jyasya: eight
  • jyacin: nine
  • hu: ten
  • wanhu: one hundred
  • jihu: one thousand
  • syahu: ten thousand
  • cinhu: one hundred thousand
  • jyahu: one million

to express a number above ten, numbers can be suffixed to place values to produce a number in that place value. then, the number can be joined together with pyo.

wanhujyawan pyo hujyaji pyo ji (six hundred seventy two)