1 Word Order
Strict SOV. Verb-final. Modifiers go left of what they modify.
👩 🍎 👄
the woman ate the fruit
🟥🚗
red car (modifier + noun)
🐕 👨 ⏪🦷
the dog bit the man
2 Discourse Indices
Circles are discourse indices: attach to a noun on first mention, reuse the color alone as a pronoun. Squares (🟥🟦🟩🟨) are color modifiers. The shape difference keeps the two roles visually distinct.
👩🔴 🐍🔵
a womanred, a snakeblue
🔵 🔴 ⏪🤥
itsnake lied to herwoman
Available indices: 🔴 🔵 🟢 🟡 🟣 🟠 🟤 ⚪
3 Embedding
📖...📕 brackets a subordinate clause. A bracketed clause placed directly before a noun modifies that noun. Nest for recursion.
👩 📖🔵 🗣️📕 🍎 👄
the woman ate the fruit [that the snake mentioned]
💭📖...📕
irrealis / counterfactual: "in an imagined world where..."
4 Tense & Aspect
Tense and aspect markers prefix the verb. They stack: tense before aspect. Unmarked = present simple.
⏳👄
is eating (continuous)
🔁👄
eats habitually (habitual)
✅👄
has eaten (perfect / completed)
⏪✅👄
had eaten (past perfect)
5 Connectives & Relations
Four connective symbols linking clauses and phrases.
⏩
and then (temporal sequence)
➡️
directed relation: toward, from...to, belongs to, becomes
⚡
because / therefore (causation)
🔀
between clauses: if...then (conditional)
between nouns: or (disjunction)
Example: 🔴😴 ⚡ 🔴🚶 = "he left because he was tired"
Loanwords
Proper nouns and untranslatable terms are spelled in bubble letters (Ⓐ-Ⓩ ⓐ-ⓩ ⓪-⑨). The whole bubble-string is a single token.
🔴 Ⓛⓘⓝⓤⓧ 🔁🛠️
he works on Linux (proper noun)
Ⓢⓐⓤⓓⓐⓓⓔ 🟰 🤷⏪💭😊😢
saudade ≈ nostalgia (foreign concept)
6 Particles
Logical, modal, and structural operators. 🚫 negates whatever constituent immediately follows it. Position controls scope.
🚫
negation (scope = next constituent)
🔍
question (sentence-final): "this sentence has an unknown; find it"
👀
evidential: direct witness ("I saw...")
👂
evidential: hearsay ("I heard that...")
🧩
evidential: inferential ("I deduce...")
🫵
topic marker; fronts a patient for passive-like readings
🌐
every / all
❗
imperative (postfix, after the verb)
🔓
can / able
🔒
must / necessary
🎲
might / possible
⚖️
should / ought
👉
possession (possessor 👉 possessed)
➕
conjunction: "and" (between nouns or clauses)
⬆️
more (comparative)
⬇️
less
⬆️⬆️
most (superlative)
🟰
equal
Negation scope: 🔴 🚫🍎 ⏪👄 = "he ate the non-fruit" vs. 🔴 🍎 🚫⏪👄 = "he didn't eat the fruit"
Questions
🔍 is sentence-final: "this sentence has an unknown." Yes/no questions leave the unknown implicit. Wh-questions place a bare domain token in situ. No question words, no wh-movement. Placeholders are nominal (👤 📦 📍 ⏰) or relational (⚡ 🔧).
🔴 🍎 ⏪👄🔍
did he eat the fruit? (yes/no)
👤 🍎 ⏪👄🔍
who ate the fruit?
🔴 🍎 📍 ⏪👄🔍
where did he eat the fruit?
🔴 🍎 ⚡ ⏪👄🔍
why did he eat the fruit?
🔴 🍎 🔧 ⏪👄🔍
how did he eat the fruit?
Domain placeholders: 👤 person · 📦 thing · 📍 place · ⏰ time · ⚡ cause · 🔧 method
Nominalization & Modification
No gerund or participle morphology. Bracket a clause to use it nominally or adjectivally. Same strategy as Japanese relative clauses.
📖🍎 👄📕 ➡️ 😄
[eating fruit] is fun (clausal nominalization)
📖🫵 ⏪👄📕 🍎
the [eaten] fruit (adjectival: 🫵 fronts the patient, yielding a passive-like reading)
Design Principle: Periphrasis Over Cases
Instrumentals and benefactives are expressed periphrastically through clause chaining rather than case markers. Anything expressible as a sequence of events doesn't need a dedicated particle. Comparatives use a defined frame: X Y ⬆️ ADJ = "X is more ADJ than Y." Plurals are unmarked; bare nouns are number-neutral, as in Mandarin, Japanese, and Thai.
🔴 🍴 ⏪🤲 · 🔴 🍎 ⏪👄
he held a fork. he ate the fruit. (instrumental implied)
🔴 🏠 ⏪🏗️ · 🔵 🏠 ⏪🤲
he built a house. he received it. (benefactive implied)
🟥🚗 🟦🚗 ⬆️💨
the red car is faster than the blue car (comparative frame)
Compound Abstractions
Build abstract nouns by composing concrete emoji. Same strategy as Chinese characters and Old Norse kennings.
⚖️📜
law (justice + document)
⚖️🧠
ethics (justice + mind)
🧠🔭
epistemology (mind + telescope)
👑🌍
sovereignty (crown + territory)
⚡⚖️
responsibility (cause + obligation)
🤷⏪💭😊😢
nostalgia (strange past-memory bittersweet)
Poetry
The system's natural poetic modes: Hebrew parallelism, kenning verse, imagist juxtaposition, and classical Chinese compression. Poetic register permits ellipsis, looser relational readings, and freer use of ➡️.
Psalm 24, Hebrew parallelism
🌍 ➡️ 😇 · 🌐🌊 ➡️ 😇
😇 🌊⬆️ 🌍 ⏪🏗️
😇 💧⬆️ 🌍 ⏪📌
The earth is the Lord's, and all the seas. He raised the land above the waters. He set the earth on its foundations.
Kenning verse, Old English style
⚔️💦 🐋🛤️⬆️ ⏪🌧️
🌌🕯️ 🗡️😴 ⏪👄
🦴🏠🌐 🟤➡️🟤
Blood rained on the sea. The sun died. All bodies to dust.
Imagist, after Pound
👻😶👤👤👤 · 🌸🌸🌸 🖤🌿⬆️
Apparitions in a crowd. Petals on a wet, dark bough.
Classical Chinese, five-character compression
🌙⬇️ 🐦🗣️ 🌿🌸
🌧️🌙 📍🛤️⬆️ ⏪🔔
Moonset, bird cry, spring blossoms. Rain-night, the road, a distant bell.
Full Example: Heraclitus, fragments 53 · 60 · 123
⚔️ ➡️ 🌐📦👉👨 · ⚔️ ➡️ 🌐📦👉👑
⬆️🛤️ ⬇️🛤️ 🟰
🌿 🫣 🔁❤️
"War becomes father of all. War becomes king of all. The way up and the way down are the same. Nature loves to hide."
Try Decoding
Three passages, graded by difficulty. All are decodable from the grammar above. No outside knowledge required, though recognizing the source is half the fun. Note how naturally the system handles Hebrew parallelism: the original poetry already operates by semantic repetition-with-variation, not by sound, so nothing is lost in transcription. English verse, built on stress, meter, and rhyme, fares worse: only its imagery survives the crossing.
① Easy
REVEAL ANSWER
Proverbs 15:1
"A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger."
☁️🗣️ soft word · 🔥😡 anger · 🔁⬇️ habitually lessens
🪨🗣️ hard word · 🔥😡 anger · 🔁⬆️ habitually increases
② Medium
🌐📦 👉 ⏰ ⏳📌
👶 ⏰ ➕ 🗡️😴 ⏰
🌱 ⏰ ➕ ✂️🌿 ⏰
REVEAL ANSWER
Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot."
🌐📦 everything · 👉 ⏰ has a time · ⏳📌 is-fixed (continuous + anchored)
👶 ⏰ a birth time · ➕ and · 🗡️😴 ⏰ a death time
🌱 ⏰ a planting time · ➕ and · ✂️🌿 ⏰ an uprooting time
③ Hard
👤 😇🌃 ➡️ 🚫❗🚶
👴 ☀️🔚 📍 ⚖️🔥
💡👉🗡️😴 ➡️ ❗😠
REVEAL ANSWER
Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
"Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
👤 one (generic) · 😇🌃 good night · ➡️ toward, here "into" · 🚫❗🚶 do not go
👴 old age · ☀️🔚 close of day · 📍 at · ⚖️🔥 should burn
💡👉🗡️😴 the dying of the light · ➡️ toward, here "against" · ❗😠 rage!
Known Limits
Bounded native lexicon. Emoji vocabulary is bounded by the Unicode set; growth requires committee approval. Bubble-letter loanwords help, but overuse degrades the system into transliterated English.
Underdetermined compounds. ⚖️🧠 could mean "ethics" or "judging minds." Convention resolves this. No speech community exists yet.
No pragmatics. Sarcasm, indirectness, politeness registers require speakers, not a grammar.
No sound. Rhyme, meter, alliteration are structurally impossible. The native poetic mode is visual parallelism and compositional metaphor.
Deep modality degrades. 🎲🔒⏪✅🫵👄 is parseable but hard to read at speed. So is English "might not have been being eaten."