Word Distinctions
L'ewa is intended to be a logical language. One of the side effects of L'ewa being a logical language is that each word should have as minimal and exact of a meaning/function as possible. English has lots of words that cover large semantic spaces (like go, set, run, take, get, turn, good, etc.) without much of a pattern to it. I don't want this in L'ewa.
Let's take the word "good" as an example. Off the top of my head, good can mean any of the following things:
- beneficial
- aesthetically pleasing
- favorful taste
- saintly (coincidentally this is the source of the idiom "God is good")
- healthy
I'm fairly sure there are more "senses" of the word good, but let's break these into their own words:
| L'ewa | Definition |
|---|---|
| firgu | is beneficial/nice to |
| n'ixu | is aesthetically pleasing to |
| flawo | is tasty/has a pleasant flavor to |
| spiro | is saintly/holy/morally good to |
| qanro | is healthy/fit/well/in good health |
Each of these words has a very distinct and fine-grained meaning, even though the range is a bit larger than it would be in English. These words also differ from a lot of the other words in the L'ewa dictionary so far because they can take an object. Most of the words so far are adjective-like because it doesn't make sense for there to be an object attached to the color blue.
By default, if a word that can take an object doesn't have one, it's assumed to be obvious from context. For example, consider the following set of sentences:
mi qa madsa lo spalo. ti flawo!
I am eating an apple. It's delicious!
I am working at creating more words using a Swaedish list.