Kamelo: A Rule-Based Constructed Language for Universal, Logical Communication

[-]Screwtape7mo60

I love a good conlang. This one feels like an interesting start, though I'll be upfront and say I don't think this is a bottleneck on anything AI related.

Some thoughts and questions, in no particular order:

"Here's how words are made" is a start. What's the grammar like? I think that's where a lot of ambiguity creeps in to language.
Am I allowed to stop an encoding partway? For instance, am I allowed to say kakasu meti su to just mean noun, it's a fruiting plant in the Rosaceae family, or do I have to keep going to be grammatically correct?
I kind of like the idea of a tree structure that gets more specific as you go. Five phonemes seems too few though- I like what you're doing with the consonant/vowel setup, but extra options seem very useful for compactness and there's more options.
Related- do you mind doing the IPA for the phonemes? I'm curious whether for instance "ti" is pronounced like "tired" (tɑɪəd) or like "tin" (tɪn) or "me" is pronounced like "meet" (mit) or "met" (mɛt)
How do pronouns work?

It's reasonable not to have answers for these yet, I don't know what stage of conlang creation you're on.

[-]Saif Khan7mo30

Hey, Thanks so much for diving into Kamelo, you’ve nailed exactly the kind of questions I’m wrestling with.

Grammar & Ambiguity

You're totally right — grammar is where ambiguity really enters. Right now, Kamelo doesn’t have a fixed grammar yet. But the idea is:

Word order is generally SVO (subject-verb-object), like English.
Modifiers (adjectives, adverbs) follow what they modify.
Punctuation-like tokens may act as "semantic closers" to end a branch of a conceptual tree.

Stopping Mid-Structure

Yes! You can stop mid-encoding. That's a key principle: Kamelo is compressible based on shared context, like how we say "the fruit" instead of "a Rosaceae angiosperm of genus Malus". The idea is to transmit enough meaning for the moment, and go deeper if needed.

That’s why a base like
kakasu meti su
("noun, fruiting plant, [Rosaceae]")
could be totally valid in conversation, and even shorten further in high-context.

Phoneme Clarification (IPA)

This is still flexible, but currently considering:

Syllable	IPA	Notes
ka	/ka/	like "car"
me	/me/	like "meh"
ti	/ti/	like "tea"
su	/su/	like "soo"
lo	/lo/	like "low"

The goal is max distinctiveness across modalities — so these sounds are spread in mouth shape, tongue placement, and timing (good for speech-to-sign or tactile mapping later).

Pronouns

Pronouns aren’t fixed "words" like in English. Instead, they act like references. For example:

ka → "living entity"
Then you can say lo after that in the same convo to refer back to that entity.

So something like:
ka ti = "the dog"
lo me = "it is happy"
(Assuming me = happy or emotive state)

They behave more like pointing mechanisms in programming, and are scope-bound to context.

Final Thoughts

You're spot on: 5 syllables is limiting — Kamelo is intentionally extreme, like a design provocation. It pushes me to see how much abstraction and compression can be done before the system collapses. Future iterations might have 12–20 syllables for balance.

[-]Viliam7mo20

How would a language like this survive a change in ontology? You take a category and split it into 5 subcategories. What if two years later you find out that a sixth subcategory exists?

If you update the language, you would have to rewrite all existing texts. The problem would not be that they contain archaic words -- it would be that all the words are still used, but now they mean something different.

Seemingly similar words (prepending one syllable to a long word or a sentence) will result in a wildly different meaning.

[-]Trevor Hill-Hand7mo20

Reminds me of Solresol, except being a 5-tree makes it so it could fit a pentatonic scale, which is fun.

[-]Saif Khan7mo10

Yesss! Solresol is definitely a spiritual cousin — and you're right, the pentatonic scale connection is super interesting.

Kamelo using 5 phonemes intentionally echoes both:

the pentatonic musical scale (so it could be spoken, signed, or played as music),
and tree-based semantic logic, where each level refines the concept more.

Solresol mapped syllables to meanings too, but Kamelo’s twist is:

Tree depth encodes specificity.
Context compression is built-in (like pronouns or omitted branches).
Designed from the start to be machine-readable, signable, musical, and tactile.

So theoretically:

A blind person could feel a string of raised tactile glyphs.
A deaf person could see it signed.
A device could parse and translate it.
And a musician could sing meaning.

[-]Hruss7mo20

Is there a way to learn this language? I imagine it would be much more difficult for beginners to have to understand an arbitrary tree structure than individual words

[-]Saif Khan7mo21

Yes, It is more difficult to understand arbitrary tree structure but the goal is make the tree more and more logical and less and less arbitrary, we need a perfectly logical tree that could describe every meaning (if possible) or atleast as close as possible. When its more logical it'll be easier to learn and hard to master.

Level	Encodes	Example Segment
L1	Word type	`ka` = Noun
L2	Noun subtype	`ka` = Proper noun
L3	Domain	`su` = Species
L4	Biological class	`me` = Plant
L5	Subclass	`ti` = Fruit
L6–L8	Meaning specificity	`su-ka-ka-me` (apple)

LESSWRONG
LW