Pahana

Overview

Pahana is a machine-parseable, natural-language representation, encoded in a pronounceable form. It consists of a dictionary of ground-words and building-words. All ground words are semantic units and these can also be combined with building words, in accordance with certain rules, in order to form new semantic units.

Consonants

type       hard soft range(English)
---------------------------------
labial     p    m    bmpw
dorsal     k    h    cgkqx (silent or glottal-stop)
dental     t    n    djlnt
fricative  s    -    sfvz

Vowels

   a   ah - uh
   e   eh
   i   ee
   o   oh - oo

Syllables

   pa ka ta ma ha na
   pe ke te me he ne
   pi ki ti mi hi ni
   po ko to mo ho no

Word construction

A word always begins with a short consonant (p,k or t) and short consonants may only begin a word, that is, may not occur within a word.

Building words are distinguished from ground words by the suffix -s.

A building word which ends in -a or -e takes one semantic unit A building word which ends in -i takes two semantic units A building word which ends in -o takes two or more semantic units

Syntax

There are two types of words in pahana:

1. ground words
2. building words

A ground word is a word whose meaning does not depend on any other words in a sentence. For example, "car" is a ground-word. "Happy" is also a ground-word.

A building word is any word which is not a ground-word - it is a word whose meaning depends on the words before it in the sentence.

Pahana is a postfix-language, meaning that it works like Reverse Polish Notation or a stack-based computer language. Each building word in Pahana requires a specific number of semantic units.

A semantic unit is a ground word, or a syntactically valid combination of ground words and building words.

Examples

General notes on grammar:

   - Adverbs and adjectives are not distinct when used as building words

Ground words

http://www.wordfrequency.info/files/entriesWithoutCollocates.txt

Compounding:

An adjective-noun pair or adverb-verb pair can be formed from two such ground words by simple concatenation. So fast can be joined to car for fastcar or hard can be joined to run for hardrun. This reduces the need to pepper sentences with the "of" building word.

Building words

Walk before you fly... http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13853/13853-h/13853-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7841/pg7841.html

does-os
    X Y does-os -> "Y does X" where X is any activity, particularly verbs. 
    "Run John does-os" -> John runs.

of-os
    X Y of-os -> "Y of X", e.g. "house of red", "red house of-os"

since/when/after/if-os
    X Y if-os -> "If Y, then X"

so-that-os (in order to)
    X Y so-that-os -> "so that X, Y"; "Y so that X"; "Y in order to X"

decl-os
    X Y Z decl-os -> "X does Y to Z"
    X: noun
    Y: verb
    Z: noun

who-os
    X Y who-os -> "Y who does X"

Adverbial Clauses

Group 1 - Y is the dependent clause

Time 
    X Y when-os -> "X when Y is/has come"

Conditional 
    X Y if-os -> "X if Y"

Reason
    X Y because-os -> "X because Y"

Concession
    X Y although-os -> "X although Y"

Place 
    X Y where-os -> "X where Y is"

Manner
    X Y like-os -> "X like Y"; "X similar to Y"

Group 2 - X is the dependent clause

Purpose
    X Y so-that-os -> "X in order to Y"
  
Comparison
    X Y as-much-as-os -> "X as much as Y"

Result
    X Y so-much-so-that-os -> "X so much so that Y"; "X with the result that Y"