nemune ju
nemune ju (meaning "renewed Nemune" in Nemune) is a project I've been planning to start for a while but never got around to it. It's a complete overhaul of Nemune, a defunct Tokiponido. nemune ju aims to renew its original philosophy with refined ideas and create a coherent experience that focuses on that philosophy.
Also, nemune ju is a working name, not intended to be the final name of the project.
This post is always a work-in-progress.
What was Nemune?
Nemune was a philosophical artlang with a minimalist theme like Toki Pona. Nemune started as an experimental way (nasin) of speaking Toki Pona, but as the nasin grew, it eventually became its own Tokiponido, with secondary goals of being fun and whimsical. It had a bunch of new grammatical features over Toki Pona, such as passive voice, hypotheticals, and new ways of marking predicate relationships. However, the most important part remained the philosophy and how it influenced the language's usage. Its dictionary can be found here.
Below is my personal interpretation of Nemune's original philosophy and is not a perfect representation of the thoughts and beliefs of other contributors. It can be incorrect.
Nemune's philosophy was intended to complement Toki Pona's philosophy of simplicity. Instead of focusing on value judgments ("pona", "ike") or material descriptions (generally, Toki Pona words fall into a category of a material, real thing being abstracted into more concepts. explained more later!), it focuses on observation and description of function to the speaker. These observations generally fall into the category of "what does this do" and "how does it do it" with a personalized lens. It aimed to make perception more about experiences of the speaker. As such, Nemune inherently needed to avoid lexicalization to accomplish its philosophical goals.
In the semantic spaces of content words, these philosophical ideals were realized through a pattern of derivations, originating from an abstract concept or idea that a speaker would interpret in their own way, then moving downwards into less abstract concepts. Take the definition for ximi, one of my favorite words in Nemune, for example:
sky; clear, transparent; infinite, never-ending; daunting, mystifying, confusing, paradoxical, sublime
ximi does not start its derivations from "sky", and neither does it start from various ways of saying "confusing". It actually starts from the idea of uncertainty about what we cannot perceive. This idea is what influences every part of this definition, From uncertainty about what we cannot perceive comes confusion. What we cannot perceive is the end of infinity. We cannot perceive what is transparent, and finally, to the sky and the heavens, full of mysteries beyond our scope. It starts from a feeling, an abstract sensation that we can understand in our sentient experiences, and moves to an abstract idea (infinity) and how we feel about that, something that can be described as imperceptible, and finally relating it to something in our world that we can perceive, yet still has that uncertainty.
This significantly contrasts with Toki Pona's semantic foundations. Toki Pona makes relations from real, physical things we can sense and perceive to abstract ideas. Many words in Toki Pona are defined physically without any relation to the abstract, with exceptions for a few words that have their abstract meanings directly associated (nasin, lawa). This leaves abstract descriptions using most words up to vague interpretation. Words being generally undefined in their abstract meanings is a common pitfall for beginners, as they lack the proficiency to associate these material concepts with abstract ones without acquiring it through sheer experience and talking to proficient speakers. It also leads to the common misconception that "Toki Pona can't express everything".
Nemune was initially created in the ma kule Discord server, a friend group server of Toki Pona speakers. As time went on, the single thread in the #toki-ante channel became insufficient, and development moved to its own Discord server.
I consider the main "creator" of the language to be Flora and its system, kulupu pi kon ilo (at least if I remember correctly), but there were many contributors to the language, such as jan Seli, netun, ilo Tani, and more. I contributed mostly by creating tools for Nemune, like the dictionary Discord bot kose nemune (meaning "Nemune bot") and a bot you might be familiar with if you're in some Toki Pona Discord spaces: kose kata (meaning "note bot"), which is used for storing retrievable information over Discord.
After a couple months, development rapidly slowed down, and interest died as the friend group kind of exploded.
A lot of words in Nemune lack cohesiveness to the rest of the language. There's plenty of words that aren't like ximi at all. Some of these words lack derivations, others have nonsensical derivations, and many are simply in the language because it was a cool concept. These issues greatly harm its philosophical goals.
What will nemune ju do?
New philosophy
Most importantly, nemune ju has a new philosophy. It will be "breaking material concepts into fundamental ideas and human feelings/emotions to understand them in a more personal and profound way".
As I progressed as a Toki Pona speaker in my proficiency journey, philosophy became more and more important to me and my Toki Pona experience. One of the aspects of my Toki Pona philosophy is that I prefer to describe things by function, not composition.
To describe something by composition is to say what you can consider it in a context-free or less contextual environment. A computer is definitely an ilo by composition. This is how most people tend to refer to a computer, whether it be just with ilo, or with various lexicalizations—ilo sona, ilo nanpa, &c. However, this falls into the trap of associating a concept with a particular, consistent way of describing it: lexicalization, precisely what Toki Pona should be avoiding.
To describe something by function is to explain what it does. A computer might be an ilo compositionally, but what does it accomplish with being an ilo? If the computer is your smartphone that you like to play games on, it could itself be a musi. If you use your smartphone to watch YouTube, it could be a sitelen, too. Describing something's function, whether it to be to others or yourself, is more personal and aligns with the theme of "context matters". This goes hand in hand with anti-lexicalization, as a compositional lens inherently warps your speech towards lexicalization since there's only so many ways to compositionally explain something.
Unfortunately, Toki Pona's semantic foundation makes upholding this philosophy hard. Toki Pona prefers to describe things composition first by default, as most of its semantic spaces start from a material concept. It's pretty hard to describe the function of something as palisa without making a statement about its composition, as the composition is built into palisa.
nemune ju will try to realize this philosophy as one of its primary goals in a coherent and intuitive way through relating abstract concepts to physical ones. Semantic space derivations will start from ideas and feelings, not objects. By starting at non-physical concepts, it's much easier to describe the function of something and helps you avoid thinking about its composition, and describing functions leads to more personal interpretation of things.
Semantic spaces in nemune ju will not be defined with English word correlations, as this counteracts the idea of personal interpretations. Concepts will instead be defined with subjective explanations in at least a paragraph. Additionally, it's a secondary goal for every word in nemune ju to be explainable in nemune ju while avoiding using the word that is being defined (except to start the definition). These definitions will cover the feelings that the word describes first, then the ideas associated with that feeling, and finally any physical connections to those feelings and ideas (though not necessary, and generally left undetermined). This causes idiolects to drift based on the speaker's perception of themselves and the world.
Coming to understand experiences and interacting with them, whether it be yours or someone else's, will be an integral part of nemune ju. The subjective explanations of words forces the speaker to understand the language in their own way, such that communicating will be like a journey the speakers take through their perspectives. It's one of my wishes that nemune ju will guide people to understand their world and share that with others.
Aesthetic
nemune ju will feel cute and whimsical in aesthetic.
nemune ju has a new phonology that I think is cute. It makes the phonology of original Nemune more complex, but I like it for its symmetry and palatal sounds.
| Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasals | /m/ | /n/ | /ɲ/ ⟨ny⟩ | |
| Plosives | /p/ | /t/ | /c/ ⟨ty⟩ | /k/ |
| Fricatives | /s/ | /ɕ/ ⟨sy⟩ | /x~h/ | |
| Approximants | /w/ | /l/ | /j/ |
| Front | Mid | Back |
|---|---|---|
| /i/ | /u~o/ | |
| /e/ | ||
| /a/ |
Grammar
Haven't really solidified this one yet. I'll update this post with more information once I've got something down.
Miscellaneous thoughts
nemune ju doesn't want to have an arbitrary limitation on how many words will be in the language. The vocabulary will not be constrained by size; rather, it'll be constrained by cohesion and usability. However, size is still considered as nemune ju as the language wants you to break down concepts into fundamental ideas, so I'm aiming to have no more than a maximum of 200 semantic spaces.
This is a big project I'm undertaking, but I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time. Development might be slow, but I'm going to try my best to work on this as much as I can. Hopefully others can find enjoyment in nemune ju, whether it be discussing development or eventually using the language!