Kaeli’n

Everything here is built out of a handful of small roots. Learn those and you stop having to memorise the dictionary — you can just work words out. Search in English or in Kaeli’n, whichever you’re thinking in.

Words you add stay in your browser. Nothing gets sent anywhere. Once you’re happy, copy the lexicon out at the bottom and drop it into data/lexicon.json as a pull request.

Propose a word

Three tests, in order

Build it from roots that already exist, so someone else can guess what it means. Say it out loud in both Portuguese and English — if you two end up making different sounds, the word’s wrong, not the speaker. Then check the stress lands where the rule says.

The first and third are checked for you when you press Check the sound. The second one is yours.

Removing words

Put a × beside every word in the lexicon, so I can strike them out.

Striking a word out only hides it from your copy. The published lexicon is untouched until someone merges your change.

Your changes

Nothing changed yet.

English or Portuguese, into Kaeli’n

Don’t expect a clean translation — nothing honest could give you one. What you get is the working out: which word went where, what the grammar did to it, and mostly the stuff Kaeli’n makes you decide that your own language lets you dodge.

I love you, but you don't know it.

Try these

Where it fails

It’s fine with short sentences and simple questions, and falls apart the more clauses you pile on — subordination isn’t settled yet, and showing you nothing beats making up a rule I can’t back. String verbs together and it only keeps the last one. Anything not in the lexicon comes back red instead of guessed at.

The last box is the good bit. Translating into this language means answering something English never asks: how do you know that? There’s no neutral way to say anything here. You commit, every time.

Grammar

Kaeli'n cares about how you feel, how sure you are, and where you heard it. It doesn't bother with tense or gender — that's not an oversight, it just spends its grammar somewhere else.

Building a word

Words assemble left to right, always in the same order: root → modifier → intensity → state.

A bare root, said alone, is an interjection of state. G'ok! — "furious!" Ya! — "I want!"

Verbs have no tense — they have state

The last vowel of a verb tells you what condition the action is in. Time, if you need it, is a separate word you add.

This is why Kaeli'n needs no modal verbs. "Can" is just the -u. Kalfu pa is "I can eat" and "I would eat" and "I might eat" — the difference is context, and the language is content to leave it there.

Knowing and saying how you know are one word

This is the centre of the language. pa, sa and ta are not pronouns with an evidential system bolted on. They are single markers that carry both at once, because Kaeli'n does not regard them as separate questions.

So Pa kna is "I know." Sa kna is "someone near me knows." Ta kna is "they say it is known." You cannot make a statement in Kaeli'n without answering for it.

The anchor, na

na means a point where something fixes. Put it on the triad and you get the full pronoun set — every one of them genderless, not by policy but because no step in the derivation ever asks.

tsena is its own definition. ta is whoever is not me. sa is whoever is present. The one who is not me but is here is exactly you.

Two ways to say no, and they mean different things

This is one of the language's sharpest tools, and it costs nothing to learn: the same piece be means one thing in front and another behind.

Forgetting and being wrong are not the same failure. Silence and lying are not the same silence. Kaeli'n refuses to let you blur them, and it charges you two letters for the distinction.

The three faces of ka

One piece meaning an opening, a gap, giving access. Where you put it decides what it opens.

Two of the question words have no English equivalent and are used constantly: ka'pa — "how do you know that?" — and ka'ta — "who said so?". They do not challenge what you said. They challenge where you got it.

Word order moves the weight, not the meaning

The neutral shape is predicate, then deictic, then argument. Move something to the front and you have not changed who did what — you have changed what the sentence is about.

• There is no verb "to be". Kalfo yatee — "the food good."
• Owning is deixis. Keli pa — "thing-mine." No verb, no preposition.
• Time is a word you add, never an ending. Kalfe pa tekaf — "I ate, before."

Widening a word: e → ae

Stretch a root's vowel into the ae diphthong and the word opens out to the collective.

This is where the language got its own name: kaeli, the collective, plus -'n, a mode or system. The way of the people.

Counting

Counting puts the thing first and the number after it: keli'min three things, funova'zek two people, tey'kaen ten times. Powers of ten are written with an apostrophe — kaen'zek is ten-to-the-two, a hundred.

What counts as a person

Two roots do all the work here: mu, biological life, and phu, recognised individual presence. Keep them apart and the whole taxonomy falls out on its own.

Every funova is a munova. Not every munova is a funova. The 'te on funova'te marks cognitive density, not worth — which is what lets the language name a mind that isn't human without ranking it.

Sound

Kaeli'n was built by taking things away. Its sounds are the overlap between what a Portuguese mouth and an English mouth do identically — no effort, no accent, no argument. Anything one of them would bend was cut.

You can see it in what’s missing. The gaps are way too tidy to be an accident.

If you coin a word and the two of us pronounce it differently, the word is wrong. Not the speaker. That is the whole rule.

Five vowels

The old notes claimed four, then used five everywhere — no, yapo, gok, chu. The language was right and the chart was wrong. Five is also, as it happens, the most widely shared vowel system on earth.

Never let one go soft. If you speak English, fight the schwa — munova is [mu.ˈno.va], never [mə.ˈnoʊ.və]. If you speak Portuguese, fight the raising — keli is [ˈke.li], never [ˈkɛ.li].

Consonants

Where you put the stress

On the last heavy syllable. If there isn't one, on the second to last. Heavy means it ends in a consonant, or holds a diphthong.

Intensifiers are the exception — 'te and 'ete always pull the stress onto themselves. yasi·TE.

The two hard ones

Exactly two sounds in the old notes broke the rule the language is built on. Neither was deleted, because both carry too much history. Both were moved into the formal register instead.

þ

There is no [θ] in Portuguese. A lusophone will produce [s], [t] or [f] every single time. And þ was sitting on þy, þpha, þta, þkaph — the whole of time, which is to say the most-used words in the language. Frequent and difficult is not a combination that survives anywhere.

So it is no longer treated as a loose consonant. It is the prefix that marks time, and like any prefix it has a formal shape and a spoken one.

The old letter survives in careful writing, the way ph survives in philosophy. Nobody has to make that sound to speak this language well.

ph

[ɸ] is an f made with both lips. Neither language has it, but it is easy enough. The old notes used phunova and funova interchangeably, which quietly gave the game away: in ordinary speech the contrast isn't real. It only holds in the formal register, where it is written fh. The ph spelling stays because it shows you the root underneath.

and kn

Illegal at the start of a word in both languages — which is exactly why it was kept. It is the sound of the cognition root and nothing else. Formally it is a full [kn]; in speech an e slides in and kna becomes kena. In the middle of a word there was never a problem at all, because the syllable break does the work: benakna is be·nak·na.

Read these out loud

Every awkward transition in the language, in two lines. If these come out clean, nothing else will trouble you.

Tsena kena keiruk — pa kanva lae mute.
[ˈtse.na ˈke.na kei̧.ˈɾuk ˈpa ˈkan.va ˈlaȩ ˈmu.te]
You know fire — I see the green river.

Lu'tekae, funova'te. Benakna pa, benavae.
[lu.te.ˈkaȩ fu.ˈno.va.te be.ˈnak.na ˈpa be.na.ˈvaȩ]
Good day, human. I think in silence, and there is silence.

Phrases

Stuff you’d actually say, sorted by register. Same words in a different register aren’t a different meaning — they’re a different move.

Enough to get by

Meeting someone — Kaeli'sa

An argument — Kaeli'sa

This one does not translate cleanly, and that is the point. English cannot argue about sources in single syllables.

Something formal — Kaeli'ta

No tsena here. Full þ, ph becomes fh, ch becomes sh.

Thinking to yourself — Kaeli'pa

The register of thought. Particles you already know get dropped, because there is nobody to inform.

Yes, no, and all the ground in between

When you've had it

Built the same way as everything else — out of the anger root and the negation system, not borrowed from either language. gokela is the verb for using any of these.

Stuff people actually say

Notes

Kaeli'n's been around a while without ever really settling. These are the notes from the pass that tried to fix that — what changed, and why. Nothing changed just because I liked it better. Each one is either the language contradicting itself, or a word nobody could actually say.

Sound

Words

Structure

What got added

What was left alone, on purpose

Free word order stays. It is the identity of the language and it is not a defect. Emotion keeps priority over structural tidiness. yatet, þtaa, sakali, yate'e and the old glyph numerals are all still valid as older forms — marked, not deleted. A language that is alive keeps its irregulars, and a language with no history is not one.

If you want to add a word

Three tests, in order. Build it from roots that already exist, so a stranger can guess it. Say it out loud in both Portuguese and English — if the two of you produce different sounds, the word is wrong. Then check the stress falls where the rule says it does.

If it passes all three it belongs here, whoever made it.