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 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.