Table of Contents
Ouxu is an artificial language designed to emphasize subtext. Compared to other artificial languages, Ouxu promotes expression of nuances of meaning through word order, word choice, and word construction. The syntax is designed to allow many different ways to express the same idea, and each different way suggests slightly different feelings or inferences.
It may be good for literature. Anyway, it seemed like a fun idea!
Ouxu is:
Simple in spelling and pronunciation, with few sounds compared to English.
Poetic in sound—at least according to my taste.
Fairly free in word order.
Noun-based. The vocabulary consists of nouns and affixes, plus a modest number of particles. Relations that other languages draw using verbs are drawn instead using a system of inflections that act sort of like case markers.
Industrial strength, usable for any language purpose (provided you're good at making up compound words). The grammar and vocabulary cover everything needed. The dictionary is available in human-readable and machine-readable formats.
Slightly large for an artificial language, with 1612 dictionary entries.
Original in its vocabulary. The word meanings were chosen after semantic analysis from scratch, rather than drawn from word lists of other languages, so the distinctions drawn do not correspond to those of any other published language. The word forms were selected by an optimization program that trades off simplicity versus distinctness.
In linguistic terms, Ouxu can be described as:
Agglutinative, with compounding and derivational and inflectional suffixes. Most words are inflected.
Left-branching in the morphology and grammar. Although there are no verbs as such, if there were then the underlying basic word order would be SOV (subject-object-verb).
In my mind, Ouxu is the opposite of another language of mine, an unfinished one that belongs to the logical language family. The design goals as well as the basic word order and other linguistic choices are all opposite. To me, logical languages feel strict and awkward because of their precision; Ouxu is designed to feel loose and comfortable.
In this book I make up technical senses for a lot of words. Some of them are already technical words from linguistics, and I am using them differently. Sorry, I hope it's not too confusing!