Introduction

I've been curious about how language works for a very long time. This curiosity has lead me down many fascinating rabbit holes, but for a long time I have either been cribbing off of other people's work or studying natural languages that don't have a cohesive plan or core to them. Constructed Languages (or conlangs as I will probably be calling them from here on out) are a simpler model of this. You might be familiar with Klingon from the Star Trek series, the various forms of Elvish as described by J. R. R. Tolkien or Dothraki from Game of Thrones. This series will show an example of how one of those kinds of languages are created.

Recently a challenge came up on /r/conlangs called ReConLangMo and I've decided to take a stab at this and flesh this out into a personal language.

The language I am going to create will be called L'ewa (⁄l.ʔɛ.wa⁄, also romanized lewa for filesystems). This word is identical in English and in L'ewa. It means "is a language". The name came to me in a shower a while ago and I'm not entirely sure where it came from.

This language is being designed as a personal language to help me keep a diary (more on that later) and to act as a testbed for writing a computational knowledge engine, much like IBM's Watson. I do not expect anyone else to use this language. I may pull this language into fiction (if that ever gets off the ground) or into other projects as it makes sense.

Some of the high level things I want to try in this language are ways to make me think differently. I'm following the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by this logic. I want to see what would happen if I give myself a tool that I can use to help myself think in different ways. Other features I plan to include are:

  • A seximal number system
  • A predicate-argument system similar to Lojban
  • Nounlessness (only having verbs for content words) like Salishan languages
  • An a-priori (or made up) vocabulary
  • Grammatical markers for the identity of the thinker of a sentence/phrase/word
  • Make each grammatical feature and word logical, or working in one way only
  • Typeable with standard QWERTY en-US keyboards
  • A decorative script that I'll turn into a font