Luno Lei - a language with ~100 base words centred around word building

[bakk]

I have always liked the idea of a conlang where you can say as much as possible with as few base words as possible, to prevent having to memorise a ton of words. Lately, I have been working on Luno Lei, which is a language with just 118 base words (right now), but with a lot of word building to be able to say a lot with those few words. The dictionary contains almost 1000 examples of different variations of these base words, with distinct meanings, that can be constructed on the fly by adding suffixes. They are just suggestions though, you have a lot of freedom! Unlike toki pona, the point isn’t to be a simple as possible, but to require as little brute memorisation as possible.

My clong’s slightly interactive website: https://luno-lei.strct.net
You can hover root words and affixes to see what they mean. As you can see on the grammar page, there are quite a few noun cases, but they are just simple alternatives to adpositions. I chose noun cases over adpositions because they can be used for word building.

Languages typically have completely separate words for “big” and “small”, but why not have one base word used to express both, and then generic suffixes to differentiate between the two meanings? One less word to learn! In my conlang, “big” is “ikesa” and small is “ikeve”. Just “ike” means moderately sized. The -sa and -ve suffixes can be applied to almost all base words, since the base words have a neutral meaning. Further more, the way you conjugate words can change their core meaning. The word “noka” means foot (bet you recognise this one). If you add the -naa suffix (nokanaa), it gets the meaning “I am a foot”, but if you instead use the verbifying (-n) suffix (nokan), it means “I walk”. You could also add an intensifier (-tua) to noka, to say “leg”. If you add an intensifier to “nokan” (I walk), you get “I run”.

A more complex example is the way you can use the base word “toya”, which refers to a neutral state (neither active nor inactive). It could be turned into the following words (and more):

• on/active - toyasa
• off/inactive - toyave
• state - gotoya (abstractification)
• to turn off - toyavetu (off + lative case, and then conjugated as a verb)
• to sleep - toyave (then conjugated as a verb)

Creating words like this takes some practice, but it gets more natural with time, and is super fun.

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Here’s an example sentence in English, the Luno Lei translation, and finally just the base words translated to English:

English (from the book “Thing Explainer”, where they describe the international space station):
This building flies through space just above the air. People from different countries built it and fly up to visit it in space boats.

Luno Lei:
Tama kotu nokapi mautosvatuatat ike vesisvaliu. Masva samave leisvatol su usisapu enipaat et su mautosvanokapi sunasa mautosvatuapetoyetat enipaada samaslu.

Base words:
This house foot ground some water. [Dead/Living] [different/same] place keep and ground central ground vehicle [apart/together].

^ As you can see, the base words alone make absolutely no sense

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Here’s a visualisation of the -sa and -ve suffixes and intensifiers/diminutives:

If you have word building in your conlang, I’d love to hear about it!

Also, I just realised that my clong’s name is really similar to another one posted here (Lúnalai) haha

[ntsekees (Ntsékees)]

The scale gradations can be extended with “least” and “most” at the extremities.

[bakk]

That’s true, I should include that!

[mazzie (nano)]

this is a beautiful take on minimalist langs! I’ll check this out more in depth when I’m at my PC :)

[bakk]

Thank you!

[deschutron (ján Dèsutu)]

This is a great project, and the documentation is beautiful.

I’ve also been aiming for this same goal in my conlanging efforts. I don’t like always having to go back to the reference materials to be able to work with a language I’m learning. I like the idea of having something where if I don’t know how to say something, I can figure it out by stepping through with what I know.

My biggest work in this direction is Snvsdr Dhv. It’s a bit different. Rather than a system of affixes, it has some inflections and combines them with an analytical system for combining words together.

The root words are all one syllable or less/ They can be inverted or reversed and marked with a tone to set part of speech. Verbs and nouns take accusative objects as suffixes, which can be chained. Then verbs can come afterwards as modifiers. Verb phrases are valid sentences, and can also be joined by connectives.

To illustrate how it works, I’ve drawn up a table of conversions from Luno Lei to Snvsdr Dhv for the word root “noka” (leg/walk → ŕmsdo/do).

And here’s my translation of your example sentence.

EDIT: I’ve moved some of the stuff from this comment to the Snvsdr Dhv thread because it was long.

[jan_Asilu]

Interesting

[kasilija]

i’m really liking this!!

[bakk]

I don’t like always having to go back to the reference materials to be able to work with a language I’m learning. I like the idea of having something where if I don’t know how to say something, I can figure it out by stepping through with what I know.

Exactly! I feel the same way.

Snvsdr Dhv looks cool! Interesting that you can express so much with such a tiiiny language

[salarua]

This looks really cool! I’m not entirely sure how words with multiple roots work though; I’m seeing a lot of them in the examples, but this mechanism seems to be undocumented.

[bakk]

Hmm true compounds should be documented. They are just like regular compound words and you can combine them freely to say things, similar to how you describe things you can't express with root words in toki pona