Principles

1. Words must be easy to pronounce, phonics are priority #1.

2. One letter, one sound -- even if the letter assignment is a little unorthodox to some language traditions. Courage!

3. Words must be easy to hear / distinguish, with as few minimal pairs as possible and no minimal pairs for very close sounds, for example no minimal pairs permitted between the "s" sound and the "z" sound.

4. Words will be syllable-reduced, ideally to two syllables for the most common words and hopefully at most three or four syllables. Words with many syllables increase confusion and uncertainties about stress patterns, as well as become more difficult to say. Let's not cart around 5+ syllable monstrosities from the ancient past "just because." We will be creating syllable-reduced, distinct roots so that when we add suffixes for common things, the resulting words are not gigantic and are still easy to parse.

5. Sounds in common for the same principle across languages will be highly weighed to hopefully provide intuitive phonology. We want to use sounds that subconsciously remind the learner of a word in the European languages, if at all possible.

6. We will brutally deform words to conform to the principles if needed, even risking easier initial recognition. We have the full suite of European languages to pull sounds and words from, let's not be gutless.

7. Grammar should be intuitive and easy

8. Gender-neutral but with gendered forms available for precise communication

9. Grammar must be fully regular

10. Grammar must be fully expressive, including a perfective

11. Grammar should try to innovate and create forms not currently present but that would be useful to people

12. Content words will be four fundamental types: adjectives, verbs and nouns with a lesser group of adverbs / prepositions

13. Derived words should always give clear indication what the base word is (no derivational changes that make the base word mysterious). We will try to preserve the root word when we add affixes so you can build your vocabulary and understanding of the words in a logical, semantically intuitive manner.

14. People should be able to glance at the words in a sentence and know what they are and how to use them, in this scheme it means:

    • Adjectives with -i

    • Verbs:

      • Intransitive verbs marked by -u

      • Transitive verbs marked by -a

      • Transitive-stative verbs marked by -e

    • Nouns with -o

    • Adverbs with -e (note: this is not 100% strict)

15. Adjectives are permitted to be used as adverbs if you want / if they make sense, otherwise add -e to the adjective

16. No diphthongs, all vowels are single and pronounced on their own

17. No giant compound words should be used, try to keep it to one or two affixes

18. Stress should be predictable and consistent to everyone

Alphabet and Pronunciation

The sound inventory is somewhat reduced from most European languages and simple sounds are used for the core letters. Noticeably absent are diphthongs. One letter, one sound.

However, if you ever see a word with two vowels in a row, you can make a diphthong of the two vowels if you wish -- go ahead, it's fine. If not, that's fine too. No one will misunderstand or mind.

The vowels are very flexible, and can accept close pronunciations that vary depending upon the speaker, it is perfectly fine to have some variation. One stylistic suggestion is to pronounce vowels in front of a consonant in a "checked" style, i.e. slightly lower and less raised than when the vowel is free or precedes another vowel -- but you are welcome to do what you want.

Notable decisions are the inclusion of the semivowals w, y and consonant z. These are simply suggestions for sounds and syllabic purposes -- no minimal pairs will ever exist between w/v, v/f, w/u, s/z, i/y or other close sounds -- it is forbidden. They are used to suggest the most correct way to pronounce a word and to be clear about where syllables fall. For example, if you cannot pronounce /z/ but fall back to /s/, it will be completely okay.

Another example: if you were to encounter the word, "manio", you might be tempted to make the "i" its own syllable, thus: man-i-o. However, we use "manyo" (morning) so that you can have clarity about syllables, MAN-yo. Similarly for "situation" sitwo -- we avoid situo because it could encourage the syllable pattern si-tu-o, instead you gain greater clarity and you can know it is SI-two. We deform natural words without reservation because it is more important to have clarity at the written level for learners, who may be coming from different language traditions.

Stress

Stress falls on the segment before the last consonant of the root. Due to the limited amount of affixes the stress pattern for most words will never change and the words thus become very easily recognizable and easy to remember how to pronounce. Some affixes will move the stress, some will not but all affixes will explain how they impact stress patterns.

Examples of stress with affixes

• frendo "friend" / frendotat "friendship" / frendotiv "friendly" / frendotivitat "friendliness" (rare two affixes)

• parlare "to talk" / parla "talk" / parlanik "speaker/talker"

• Doiclant "Germany" / Doiclantien "German citizen" / Doiclantienin "the German citizen's"

Stylistic Considerations

There are certain principles that are important to this project, or for any derivative or continuation of Proyo. When creating new content, remember that (at least, for this project) these principles are important:

• It is better to make something easier to say and hear than to make something recognizable. Deform if you have to and don't feel bad about it. We couldn't find a good deformation for "to interest" so we went with "huva", inspired from Estonian.

• It is better to be simple than be clever. It is also better to be clear than to be too minimalistic. (For example, infinitives "may" be unnecessary, but a good number of natural languages seem to have kept them around for some reason, perhaps because they are a useful way to differentiate between an active verb and a hypothetical? So we included them. Foreign learners of Proyo (i.e. everyone) will find it easier to read the sentences as a result.

• Syllable reduction is wonderful and useful roots should try to be two syllables in length. It's better to have an easy-to-say, short root that people have to learn rather than a clever derived word from an existing Proyo word *unless* it makes a lot of sense to derive from an existing word. We want concise, easy-to-say words. We get to be petty gods and recreate the world in our favor, let's not be gutless.

• Be strict about roots, put them solidly into one category whether noun, adjective, verb etc -- but then for the affixes, the affixes will be encountered enough that it is not important that the affixes show the grammatical category; people will learn what they mean by repetition easily enough. In fact, try to pick grammatical affixes that have unique sounds that are easy to say and hear and let them terminate in any consonant that you want. This helps Proyo replicate the splendor of natural languages, which have a wide array of great sounds -- just be aware that voiced consonants at the end will be de-voiced by a good number of speakers (e.g. d > t.)

• Affixes should never modify the root, the root stays sacred so learners can learn etymology by repetition, and affixes should try to add only one syllable to the root. Affixes should also never modify other affixes; all derivations should keep all data.

• Try to avoid having the affix modify the stress on the original root, but if you must, be very clear about this in the affix definition. Stress / accentuation changes in languages (in general) are hard for foreign learners, we should try to not modify them at all, if we can.

• If you are in doubt about how to create a new root, look at what the natural languages do and simply replicate their usage pattern. If their verb is transitive, have yours be transitive. This will help learners. It is not worth being clever if you are too exotic (and thus too strange to learn.)

• You may redo parts of the vocabulary (nothing is sacred!) if you feel like it, if you and your group prefer another word. As mentioned above, we would encourage you to make ease of hearing and pronunciation your primary objective.

• It is better to have a new word rather than a monstrously long derived word that perfectly follows the logic system. Long words are hard for people and this project aims to make all useful words easy to say. If this means making a new, short word for a common item as a synonym for a long, suffixed word -- that is what we will do. Affixes are intended to be mostly one or two additions to a word to get something intuitive (rarely three or greater).

Next: Grammar