Pupe

Matthew McVeagh | my conlangs

Pupe is a binary language. It only has two possible syllables, "pu" and "pe". Actually you could replace those with any other two syllables and it would be a readily understandable cipher of the same structure, as long as it was clear which was primary (equivalent to "pu") and which secondary ("pe").

When I first thought of this it was a jokelang. But the more I thought about it the more I realised it was actually possible, and would be a test of extreme grammatical and lexical potential, as well as everyone's patience.

"Pu" and "pe" are not strictly morphemes, or at least single morphemes. They have many meanings according to where they appear in a word. I would structure it with the most general at the beginning and the most specific at the end. So a noun for instance would first be "entity" vs "quality", then an entity would be "animate" vs. "inanimate", etc. The semantic structure would be redesigned to involve successive breakdowns of hypernyms into binary choices of hyponyms, and words would follow those breakdowns with sequences of such choices encoded as "pu" or "pe". A typical noun or verb might be "pupupepupepupepepupepupupepepepupepupepupupe".

Grammatical functions would probably best be encoded as affixes, rather than separate particles. I realised it was probably best to indicate a word's syntactic category at the beginning, which means that function words would have a whole load of initial syllables indicating the syntactic status of the word before it got to its grammatical meaning. If the grammatical info was represented by affixes however it would just be included in the noun/verb/whatever it was to do with, with no need for any syntactic category to be stated other than that of the noun/verb/whatever. In this way making Pupe deeply synthetic would reduce syllables and morphemes needed, so it would probably be a good idea (though it would lengthen words).

This would be the ultimate machine-readable language. Syllables could be stored as mere 1s and 0s.