About Nwehu Nuswei
Imagine a language where all the words make sense... a language where the sounds aren’t hard to pronounce... a language that is artificial, but combines pleasing and natural elements in a harmonious balance... a language that reflects human nature but is designed to fit snugly into today’s world of computers. That’s Nwehu Nuswei.
“Nwehu Nuswei” means “Communication system combining natural and artificial elements harmoniously.” Its development began in the 1970s, inspired by 17th century renaissance ideas, and continues well into the 21st century, nourished by contemporary brain function studies, practical psychology and quantum physics.
Its words “make sense” by combining logical vocabulary organization with research into how people perceive the emotional qualities of sounds. It doesn’t borrow words from other languages, but makes a completely fresh start. It can be written in everyday (latin) letters, but also has its own distinctive letters. Based on a broad understanding of the languages of the word, it accommodates multiple ways of expressing your ideas, and doesn’t force you to say things in ways you’re uncomfortable with. For example, Nwehu Nuswei pronouns don’t force anyone to talk about gender – but if you do want to talk about it, you can easily refer to male, female, or flexible-gender.
Instead of just talking about “past, present, future”, Nwehu Nuswei also lets you talk about distant-time, intermediate-time, near-time; or time from the perspective of current reality, light-speed travel, or time-travel. As new discoveries are made, Nwehu Nuswei has built-in ways of welcoming new terms into the vocabulary.
Nwehu Nuswei offers an incredibly deep and rich system of verbal inflections, allowing you to easily express nuances that require a lot of words in natural languages – but at the same time, there is a simple, straight-forward way of expressing ideas that doesn’t require a lot of learning-time or thought. It’s designed to be a language that’s easy to get started with, and will keep growing on you.
You may be wondering... How will Nwehu Nuswei be used? Realistically, it probably won’t ever be used, but who knows???
By the way... How is “Nwehu Nuswei” pronounced? Using the
International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA): [nwɛˈhə nəˈswɛj]; or in pseudo-English: nweh HUH nuh SWAY.
Using
its own letters,
it’s written Néhu Nusè.
A Work in Progress
I mentioned that Nwehu Nuswei vocabulary is organized logically.
Maybe a better term is “systematically”.
That implies that before words are given meanings,
the logical relationships between the concepts in any given subject need to be understood.
Nwehu Nuswei words are organized in a systematic framework:
there are 16 word “families”, each composed of 16 “geni” (“genuses”),
each containing 16 “species”,
which in turn have sixteen words each.
(If you're a math whiz, I probably don't need to tell you
that Nwehu Nuswei has 65,536 words.)
Within each species, the final vowels of words
provide a two-dimensional structure based on the sounds of the final vowel of each word,
which allows Nwehu Nuswei to associate certain types of meanings with sounds
(at least to some extent).
So the process of assigning meanings can be time-consuming.
It involves first learning about a topic,
then deciding how the topic fits the Nwehu Nuswei word framework,
and only then assigning meanings to words.
The process began in 1977
while I was a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Michigan.
I have now (2024) been retired from teaching for almost 20 years,
and Nwehu Nuswei is only about 50% complete.
I have described the grammar as throughly is I think necessary;
essential language features like verbs and pronouns are also firmly in place.
Several interesting areas of vocabulary are complete,
but day to day words so far are only very sketchily filled in.
I don't expect to complete certain areas of technical and professonial terminology,
although I believe Nwehu Nuswei's framework provides a clear path forward to do so,
if anyone with expertise in a technical field would care to.
So I present here a work in progress,
a fascinating experiment in making sense of the world
and the human condition
in a strictly constrained framework.
The rigidity of that framework imposes limitations,
but by its very order and symetry provides
highly resilient expressive potential.
Nwehu Nuwsei Materials
There are a couple of different ways Nwehu Nuswei is defined and explained.
The lexicon (dictionary) is defined in a set of spreadsheets.
These do not lend themselves easily to HTML presentation,
so they are not available online – at least, not yet.
The background, explanation, and outline of grammar is available in PDF, linked to this Web page.
Like the language as a whole, the “book” on Nwehu Nuswei is a work in progress.
So far
(2024-09-29),
18 chapters have been written.
That will grow as time allows.
Nwehu Nuswei – the Book
Front Matter
- Introducing Nwehu Nuswei
- The Writing System
- Sound System
- Message Structure
- Families of Words
- The Verb
- Deictics
- Functional Words
- Discourse
- Love and Hate
- Emotions and Personalities
- Numbers
- Calendar
- Space and Time
- Physical Matter
- Communication
- Life Sciences
- Expansion Words
- More chapters will be added as time allows.
- Odd Notes
/home/krieg/Documents/LarryKrieg.name/NN/Book/
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