Tanpun

Introduction

This is a highly experimental engineered language, ultimately focused on flirting with ambiguity and a lack of grammar. It is spoken by no one because it is set in the real world and not set for a fictional people.

Phonology

Consonants

Consonants are fairly minimal. This table contains the written letter and the sound it makes.

Hi

Labial	Alveolar	Velar
P /p/	T /t/	K /k/
M /m/	N /n/	Ng /ŋ/
W /w/	S /s/	Y /j/

Not found in this table is the glottal stop, which is written with H.

Vowels

Vowels contain a standard five vowel system generally, viz. A /a/, E /e/, I /i/, O /o/, U /u/.

Phonotactics

Syllables go in the format of CV(C) (consonant vowel consonant). Consonants can include glides, but not in coda positions. Vowel slot can include diphthongs, and diphthongs can have all permutations. Vowel length is not a feature. When a syllable ends with a particular consonant and the next syllable begins with that same consonant, gemination is produced. This is not strictly phonemic but instead a contextual feature.

Stress

Stress falls on the last root of the word.

Orthography

Being an engineered language, it has many choices for orthography. By default it is written in the Latin script, but it can be written in various other scripts, however those such scripts do not have an official or standardized orthography. Latin however works as described above.

Spaces

Spaces are somewhat optional, many sentences could go without spaces. For example, is the sentence Tianmentouh which means "it is good". This also can be written "Tian mentouh". Spaces are intended to disambiguate nouns and other things, all different grammatical objects or entities. Copular sentences are the only sentences which can go wholly without spaces in theory. Spaces are up to the author.

Syntax

Roots

The primary atomic element in Tanpun are roots. A root is in essence, a CVC syllable which represents a semantic concept and does not have an inherent part of speech aside from pronouns, numbers, and conjunctions. For example, the root "piur" means fire, burning, to burn, flame, and other such things; that list is not exhaustive.

Prefixes

Roots can take prefixes. Prefixes are inseparable from the root and the prefix modifies the root in a specific way, such as negation, position, temporal deixis, definiteness, number (singular vs plural), and honorific. A root with prefixes is analogous to a phrase in Early Middle Japanese.

The mechanics of root combinations

Roots combine in a semantic way, later roots within a word constrain earlier ones, and the first root of the word is considered the most fundamental. For example, the 'word' teksik decomposes into tek-sik, whose roots are art/science/skill and soul/mind/intent/brain respectively. The first root comprises the type of object, and the second root clarifies the domain. This word would thus mean possibly psychology, mental faculty, or soul technique. To make it more narrow, more roots would be added, or possibly choosing a different root like lok, which means discourse or study, instead of tek, but such a thing depends on what is intended.

Generally, later roots can be understood as constraining the previous roots by domain, i.e. "in terms of" or "with respect to" or other equivalent phrases.

Words

Words are defined in a strongly atypical way. A word represents a singular grammatical argument, concept, object, entity, idea, and any such thing. Noun phrases are generally considered to be within the same word, as well as adjectives and other modifiers.