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Introduction

What is Hisyëö?​

A small language for people around the world to communicate with each other about big ideas. Hisyëö was designed using these principles:

Neutrality​

Words are sourced from all world languages proportional to the square root of their world population of L1 speakers. Many people who come to learn Hisyëö have a small anchor of familiarity within the lexicon. It also is meant to symbolize our sacred bond to our collective linguistic heritage.

Additionally, the grammar is an analytic isolating language like its forebears Kokanu and Toki Pona. Analytic isolating languages remove the mutation of words by making grammatical syntax separate particle words. Alternatively, many languages mutate or attach lexemes to root words in order to achieve similar grammatical means.

It is the belief of the creators of this language that there's no one system that can reflect all ways of thinkings, be sufficiently comprehensible, and be easy to teach. So a complete moderately-naturalistic system was developed that improves expressiveness at the cost of some amount of neutrality. However, since the grammar provides more functionality and conventions than some minimalist languages, Hisyëö is able to reduce ambiguity which the creators of the language believe to be a second-order form of neutrality.

Succinctness​

Words are kept to a minimum where possible but information density is strongly emphasized so that the language can still be used for translations of scientific and artistic media. This principle is not the same as the more strict principle of minimalism in that it is meant to allow for including singular words from (1) concepts that appear in a multitude of conversations and (2) concepts that would need complex nested clauses that can otherwise derail a sentence from comprehension due to the added working memory to develop an understanding of the sentence.

Careful consideration is made that the semantic spaces that each individual word covers do not overlap other words although there are often more verbose ways to explain many of the words which can aid in clarifying intended meaning and allows for a clear Hisyëö to Hisyëö dictionary.

Expressivity​

The language is designed to be highly expressive in its word and grammar choices. With just over 840 words, there's a lot more ways (compared to minimalist languages) to express feelings, emotions, objects, actions and anything else you can think of.

Additionally, the grammar has been greatly enhanced from its origin to allow for handling of tense, aspect, mood, causation, and volition. The language has been tested against a multitude of translation media to confirm that no concept is too challenging or too verbose to express.

Is Hisyëö An International Auxiliary Language?​

Some of these principles, the orthography and grammatical features that you will learn may seem contrary to the practices of any self-respecting International Auxiliary Language. Hisyëö does not strictly follow the tradional principles (and isn't seeking to fit in any kind of IAL-shaped box). The creators of the language believe that too much effort within IAL development is spent on regularization and cherrypicking existing lexical and grammatical tactics of natural languages (while applying some first language bias regardless of the best intentions). Instead, Hisyëö pushes closer to an artlang or a loglang by focusing less on the linguistic equivalent of code golf and instead striving for a more complete "batteries-included" language.

Where did Hisyëö come from?​

Hisyëö was borne out of a desire from a member of the Kokanu community to grow Kokanu into something that could truly be versatile enough to be used for translations of popular media, scientific papers and philosophical treateses. Unfortunately for him, the Kokanu community intends the language to be as minimalist as possible and so the density of information when translating is not a consideration. Neither translation of media nor scientific communication are goals of the language. This community member spent considerable time becoming fluent in Kokanu and enjoyed the grammatical foundation that it offered. He was inspired by an at-the-time new kokanido (koanu) and decided to try to create his own kokanido, enhancing it with some ideas taken from other constructed and natural languages.

The Basics​

Now that you understand why and where Hisyëö came from, let's learn enough to write a few basic sentences.

Sounds​

Contains US English example words.

Vowels​

  • o as in slot or father
  • ö as in rope or Cambodia
  • e as in bed or cat
  • ë as in may or face
  • ı as in city or will
  • i as in happy or ceiling
  • u as in run or enough
  • ü as in lose, through

Consonants​

  • h as in ham or hold
  • k as in cup or stick
  • g as in gold or snag
  • t as in tip or putt
  • c as in chore or nature
  • s as in mist or ice
  • x as in ash or ration
  • d as in dig or bad
  • z as in jog or age
  • p as in poke or sip
  • v as in valid or gavel
  • m as in lamb or mineral
  • n as in nod or ban
  • w as in weep or awake
  • l as in linger or ballad
  • y as in yearn or mayo

Rules​

  1. Words do not ever mutate, special particles are used to introduce phrases of the sentence.
  2. Verbs can be used as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs depending on what particle introduced them into the sentence.
  3. There are no definiteness articles like "the" or "a/an".
  4. The basic structure of a sentence is any amount of phrasal constituents introduced by prepositions (thematic phrases) or verbs (object phrases).
  5. If the agent/experiencer phrase is placed as the first constituent of a sentence, then the particle that introduces the phrase can be omitted.

Usage​

Some basic words to get you started on sentence construction.

Choose a subject:​

noyo I

nimü you

nü we

niün they

Choose a verb:​

köto to say

monodo to meet

mokon to eat

vısun to know

Choose an object:​

ulyö that

küöxı fruit

pioli hello

sütüö friend

Choose a sentence ender:​

lötven polite

voxo surprise

ko question

löicök confirmation

or none

Now, make a sentence...​

noyo mokon küöxı I eat fruit

nimü vısun sütüö noyo ko Do you know my friend?

Next Steps​

Check out the lessons for details on how to use Hisyëö in a multitude of different contexts.

Join the community and help others learn the language.

Study the reference manual for a more linguistic-heavy description of the language.