Sesowi is meant to be the simplest possible language to learn, that is nonetheless fully capable of expressing any idea. It rides on the principles of simplicity and neutrality: not only is it easy to learn (simplicity), but it is easy to learn for speakers of all languages, and doesn't give an advantage to people with a particular native language (neutrality/universality).
Wait, Hasn’t this been tried before? There have been a variety of attempted IALs (International Auxiliary Languages) over the years, most famously Esperanto. However, these all do not satisfy the basic criteria of universalty and neutrality. Well known IALs include Esperanto, Volupek, Interlingua, Interlingue, Ido, Novial, Lingua Franca Nova, and Idiom Neutral, all of which are essentially simplified versions of Latin. They have their own beauty, but they are far from universal. Even ones attempting to be more global, like Lingwa di Planeta, still have a fundamentally Indo-European phonology and structure. And Lojban is explicitly stated to be impossible to earn perfectly. All of these leave non European speakers — namely the majority of the world — at a heavy social disadvantage. Sesowi is a more global middle ground, positioned somewhere between Indo-European and Sinitic languages, with influence from Dravidian languages.
A basic test of neutrality: A Chinese person, a US American, and a Mexican all learn a language. After three months, are they all at about the same skill level? For all of the above languages, the answer is clearly: no. The Chinese speaker would have much worse proficiency. Simply from the experience of this one hypothetical Chinese person, we can pull up some simple tests that all these languages fail:
These languages claim to be universal but distinguishes between he/him/she/her? That's four pronouns where only one is needed, and only one is used in most major non-Indo-European languages (Chinese, Hindi, Turkish, Bengali, Indonesian....)
There is, however, one language that does satisfy all these criteria, and very well at that: Toki Pona. Toki pona is a work of art done by someone with a deep and universal understanding of languages. However, it has no intention of being an IAL. Toki Pona is not capable of expressing many basic concepts (like “seven”), and its goal is more personal discovery than communication -- for example, it cannot express the concept of a "bad friend", sine a "friend" is just a "good person".
Sesowi grammar is uninflecting and relies on word order and part-of-speech markers. It does away with any grammatical element that is not deemed necessary for communication, e.g. tenses, moods like the conditional, animacy, case systems, and gender. It is phonologically simple, lacking tricky elements like consonant clusters, final consonants, or rhotics. Needless to say, there are no grammatical exceptions, or nonsense around spelling.
Much of the beauty of Sesowi is in its lexicon. Sesowi words themselves are more like a vague cloud of meaning, having a wide range of meanings, and a single word is often not clear without context.1 Importantly,2 these words do not have a specific part of speech, functioning as verb, noun, or adjective depending on grammatical role. There are only a few hundred of these atoms, but the language makes extensive use of compounding to make more complex concepts.
Sesowi eschews the complex ontologies common in natural languages, in favor of context and pragmatics. To observe this, let us demonstrate how many different sub-classes of words natural languages have — sub-classes that are logically organized but nonetheless not necessary.3 We will illustrate this by comparison to another natural language that lacks many of these sub-classes: the English pidgin dialect Cronch, spoken by a small community in Central California.
| Cronch | English |
|---|---|
| He was very stress. It because the meeting was stress. | He was very stressed because the meeting was stressful. |
| A: Sorry for interromp you but there is cat. | B: It’s ok, cats are very interruptive. |
| B: It ok, cats very interromp. | A: Sorry for interrupting you but there is a cat. |
| You want I sombscreen you, or are you already sombscreen? | Do you want me to put sunscreen on you, or do you already have sunscreen on? |
In these examples, Cronch, like Sesowi, uses a single word for each concept, even though the meaning of this word is quite different in each context. For instance, “stress” means either “experiencing stress” or “causing stress”. Nonetheless, the meaning is unambiguous in context, and the “correct” word in standard English does not add to comprehension.
Natural languages usually have such complex ontologies of different types of concepts, and each one is treated differently. Adjectives are neatly bundled into causal adjectives (“stressful”), stateful adjectives (“stressed”) and so on; verbs are marked as to whether they are being performed, have been performed, are intransitive, and so on. However, this logical ontology, which is so natural to the human mind, is not usually necessary, given context! And for a learner, it is just extra burden.
Languages are already full of pragmatic meaning that can only be derived from context, but Sesowi opines that they half-ass their pragmatics. Sesowi fully asses its pragmatics.
Sesowi is a creole language that evolved in the early 2090s in Nigeria as a trade language, largely between the two largest languages of that country, namely Naijá and Mandarin. However, since the port of Lagos is the largest single hub in the global shipping market, it naturally draws influences from other common languages used by maritime traders, like Spanish, Telugu, and Ilocano. The phonology of this language is more or less that of Naijá, though consonant clusters and finals have been dropped along with the voiced fricatives and affricates from contact with Chinese, and [f] has been dropped from Philippine languages.
As is common to creole languages, Sesowi has a relatively small core vocabulary, of only around 200 words. However, its Chinese substratum leads to two interesting results: first, like Chinese, it extensively makes use of compounding, to form many longer words; and second, the core words in Sesowi are all exactly one syllable. Despite these two similarities to Chinese, however, the effect ends up being quite different – unlike Chinese, the core vocabulary is very small, so Sesowi words / sentences tend to be more syllables than Chinese; but since it lacks the extensive use of affricates and triphthongs from Chinese, each syllable is much faster to say. The result is something like Greek — a barrage of quickly uttered syllables.
Like its parents, Sesowi has no inflections, and does not differentiate gender or animacy (so he/she/it/this are all the same). In common with Dravidian languages, Sesowi does not differentiate between tenses and modal verbs.
Sesowi has no adjectives; similar to Tok Pisin, it forms them entirely with relative clauses. In fact, according to a strict interpretation, Sesowi has no parts of speech except for nouns and quantifiers. According to a looser interpretation, it has two prepositions, a handful of modal verbs, and a special verb to introduce relative clauses.
Speakers should have similar proficiency, regardless of their background, so one group does not have an unfair advantage.
When speaking this language, a given word should be as hard to confuse as possible.
Learning and mastering this language should cause delight, even at the expense of small amounts of added complexity. Overall, people will learn a language much better if they are motivated to! Were the language purely dry, why would anyone want to learn it? It should be a pull to people who don’t NEED it.
Compounds introduce complexity because they require memorization. Therefore, whenever possible, we should rely on generative processes to express concepts. This has the downside that it becomes harder to express subtleties of meaning, but we can make up for this with a well-developed and well-decomposed system of modification (adjectives etc.) Using this principle, a word like sprint should probably be expressed as run very-fast or similar, rather than having its own bespoke word. We lose the additional connotations, but they are subtle enough that we probably don’t lse very much. But what about a word like run ? Is running different enough from walking that it should get its own word, or is it just walk fast? And is walking different enough from going that it should be go footly or should going and walking be the same (as in German)? These are trickier cases, especially that of running, but I would bias towards adjectival phrases.
every element of a sentence should add information. No element should be required by grammar if it does not add meaning. Consider a sentence like “les chiennes rouges sont allées”. All of these endings do not add meaning, but are required. As a result, their only function is to make it harder to master the language.
When something can be inferred from contexts, most natural languages opt for economy and omit extra words. For instance, Chinese does away with the 了 when the past tense is implied by “yesterday”, and Indonesian does the same, implying all tenses. This makes the language fractionally faster to speak, but noticeably harder to learn. Therefore, the present language opts for some redundancy. For instance, all three tenses are marked with a modal, whereas most natural languages would make one of these the default – for instance Nigerian Pidgin, where omitting the “dey” makes it past tense.
It’s ok for two words to sound similar. But if they also mean similar things, then this is a recipe for confusion! For instance, when learning Mandarin I would constantly mix up lǜ (green) and lán (blue). These don’t even sound very similar! But they both start in /l/ and a dark vowel, and it was (and tbh is) quite confusing for me. Similarly, the basic numbers liù (6) and jiǔ (9) are still confusing to me, even though the don’t sound that similar – but they both end in -iu. English is no better,4 with “fifty” versus “fifteen”, and “can” vs. “can’t”. The conclusion is that words that have similar meanings, e.g. colors, numbers, animals, etc., should also sound as different as possible. This is somewhat unintuitive, because one might have the intuition that similar things should sound similar! But this leads to confusion.
In a given context, a word should have an unambiguous meaning.
Across contexts, the same word can mean many different things! For instance, in English, a person has skin, a tree has bark, cheese has a rind, bread has crust, and a dirt pond has a film. These should all just be “skin”. (or surface?).
the speaker should be able to tell what a sentence is about as soon as possible. In other words, be the opposite of German verbs.
this language should be easy to type on any keyboard, and shouldn’t use weird characters like periods as letters. Therefore, omit all diacritics. (Esperanto, Volüpak, ido, interlingua, interlingue, and lojban all fail at this).