Kot Wawa

Kot Wawa is a personal conlang I've developed to experiment with grammatical mechanisms to make it easier to communicate clearly, and express a lot of ideas from a small amount of words and grammar rules.

This article is here to give an idea of how it works.

Style

It's currently a mostly analytic language, with a little bit of inflection. Nouns are not inflected for number or case. Verbs are not inflected for tense, aspect or mood.

Speech is mostly about saying the words the words you want in the right order.

The design is built around the idea of getting as much power out of verbs as possible. There are five classes of word:

1. structure word,
2. verb,
3. noun,
4. question-option, and
5. connective.

Structure words tie the other words together and mark parts of speech. Verbs are used to assert the presence of actions, and also to refer to them hypothetically. The functions of adjectives and adverbs are performed by verbs. Every verb, noun, question-option and connective word is a content word. A content word of any type can be converted to any other type by inflection.

The core vocabulary, and some of the grammar rules, come from Toki Pona, making Kot Wawa a tokiponido. The name, "Kót Wàwa", is derived from the words "toki wawa", to mean "strong speech".

Phonology

The phonology is based on looking at the structure of the space of sounds people can say and using it to enable sound changes to be applied to words to inflect them. Symmetries play a large role in the choice of sounds. It has 26 consonants, 11 vowels, and 3 tones.

Consonants

p	t	ʈ	c	k	k
b	d	ɖ	ɟ	g	gb
	s			x
m	n		ɲ	ŋ
ʋ / ư	l / l	ɻ / ɻ	j / i	ɰ / ɯ	w / u

The symbols k and gb refer to labio-velar stops (k͡p and ɡ͡b). The bottom row has two symbols for each sound. The first is the initial and medial form. The second is the off-glide form, as some of the approximants act as the second part of a diphthong.

Vowels

i	ʉ	u
e		o
ɛ	ə	ɔ
æ	a	ɒ

Tones

á	high
a	mid
à	low

Word structure

Native unit word: (C*V)*C*VC* Permissible unit loan word: (C|V)* Compound word: (unit word)(unit word)

The combination of sounds into words is based on an alphabetic principle followed by a “unit word” principle. The alphabetic principle: first you allow any string of consonants and vowels, and then insert schwas after consonants or glottal stops between vowels wherever required to make the word pronounceable, or just easier to say. Then the unit word principle: Every utterance to be used is grouped into unit words, which each have a beginning and an end, and contain a sequence of syllables (at least one). Any unit word beginning with a vowel is equivalent to the same word with a glottal stop prefixed to it. The final syllable is the main syllable of the word. Every syllable before it is a minor syllable. For the end, if the last sound is a vowel, it is said long (a → a:). Syllable stress is on the final syllable, or evenly spread across the syllables. It is less important than tone and vowel length.

In a transition from one word to another, where the second word begins with a vowel, or the first word ends with a vowel, the division must be made clear. This can be done via the extra length of a final vowel, a tone change, an inserted glottal stop, creaky voice on the vowel starting the second word, a stop consonant on the end of the first word not being released etc.

The native words do not have long vowels before the end, and only ever carry a non-mid tone on the first syllable. The equivalent rules for loanwords are a bit more flexible, and will be described later.

Due to these rules, the rhythm of Kot Wawa sentences can end up quite different to Toki Pona.

Writing

Default romanisation

The default representation of Kot Wawa is an IPA phonemic transcription (except with two extra letters for kp and gb), which covers everything except some of the changes applied for word boundaries (such as lengthening of final vowels).

Typist-friendly romanisation

There is also an ASCII-only form, for easy typing:

Consonants

p	t	tr	c	k	kp
b	d	dr	dj	g	gb
	s			x
m	n		nj	ng
v / v	l / l	rr / rr	j / i	wg / wg	w / u

The bottom row has two symbols for each sound. The first is the initial and medial form. The second is the off-glide form, as some of the approximants act as the second part of a diphthong.

Vowels

i	ue	u
e		o
ea	'	oa
ae	a	ao

Tones

a'	high
a	mid
a`	low

Sitelen Pona

Kot Wawa can also also be written in a variant of the Sitelen Pona script used for Toki Pona.