Hi guys,
This is a post to properly introduce my main conlang - kót wàwa. (aka Kot Wawa, i'm not strict about how to write it in English)
A proper guide & refgram for it is on my website.
I've made post listing its differences from toki pona on this forum.
So just to give a sense of what it's about, it's a naive attempt to answer the question "What if we got verbs to do as much of the work of a language as possible?" It's tonal and converts between parts of speech via a change in tone. Adjectives, adverbs and prepositions are modelled as verbs. Nominalisation is consistent (always agent noun). There are no genitives. Nouns can be applied as modifers but they are patients of the words they modify. Negation is marked by sound inversion. Passive verbs are formed by reversing verbs at a morphophonemic level.
And it's also a tokiponido, because it takes almost all its vocabulary, and much of its grammar from toki pona.
The phonology and target vibe of the language are based on the phonological history of Vietnamese (a language that inspired a lot my ideas for kót wàwa). As such, it's nearly monosyllabic and nearly fully tonal, with room to hypothetically evolve one way or another.
A result of all this is that the words in this language are very broad and context-dependent, and sentences can be very terse (e.g. a single verb is a valid sentence in real mood). But the grammar is very precise.
Overall, it makes sense to be used with a philosophy like that of toki pona: Just fill in the parts of the picture that you need to get your point across. And don't avoid context-dependence; use it consciously and intentfully.
ní àle nat mí li gèn-án màma e nási-án dòkna pi zùwi nàsa.
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"ni ale la mi ken mama e nasin toki pi suwi nasa"
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"This allows me to create a language that's bizarre yet appealing."
To name it, I looked back at the intent that I started the project with - to speak in a language with more expressive power per effort than English.
ní li ílpi "kót wàwa".
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"ni li sama 'toki wawa'"
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"This would be a 'kót wàwa' (strong language)."
When I was making it, I imagined it becoming something more compact that made more use of its phonemic space, maybe with prefixes and stuff. But when I tested it in this state, I came to enjoy it so much that I let it stay as it is, only making minor changes.
The next step in the development of what kót wàwa could have been can be seen to be snvsdr dhv, the result of applying kót wàwa logic to a smaller language than toki pona - teja, and tweaking things further.
sína li lùki gùt e ále dàupi létismí nì la li bònmí.
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"sina lukin kute e ale tawa sitelen mi ni la sina pona tawa mi"
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"Thank you if you've read up to here."
If you have any questions or have noticed any parallels with any of your own clong projects, I'd love to hear of them.
