One Language, Undivided

It was an eerie yuletide night. The Christmas ale began to make my brain dance jigs. I sat by the fire with my novel, and found myself zooming out and comprehending the words on the pulp in nonlinear sequences. I enjoy doing this for fun, as an amateur oracle might enjoy tossing tea leaves. These wanderings of the mind and spirit are highly productive of new, penetrating revelations.

Have you noticed how words and sounds often have two meanings with similar roots or spirit behind them? The number one, our primary number, implies that some person “won” a competition. Two English words rise from one sound and one spiritual idea, the idea of priority or preeminence. There are many examples of this elegant design. My favorite synonym for lazy is idle—a word that conspicuously includes the word “dull” in its pronunciation. You can see the artistry in that. The eye dulls when I’m idle.

Unfortunately, that harmony is altogether too rare in English. Often the words and sounds embedded within other words have meanings that contradict or rupture the spirit of the larger word.

“Sin” might belong in the word “person”, but I still don’t hear Mother Nature purring about people.

I don’t enjoy cold hamburgers, but I have to say “burr” every time I say the word.

And I can tell you that driving on the streets of Cleveland is no treat, but I keep seeing the word “treet” on partially snow-covered street signs.

I finally came to the realization that the English language is full of puns that distract the mind and dilute the meaning of words. When I read books (or street signs), I feel as though I’m being punished by the puns at every turn. It’s an infestation of bad puns! As with any infestation, the solutions are to clean the building or build a new building. Because England is quite resistant to the idea of letting Doctor Lawrence repair the lingo, the best option seems to be the creation of a new tongue.

In 2025, I begin creating a whole new tongue, a project so laughably large that its deadlines could be measured in decades. The work begins with answering a few important questions:

• What shall be the purpose of the new language? That question I have already answered—our new tongue must be unified in purpose, spirit, and design. Every letter, sound, and word must add up to a common goal and lead to perfection.

• What written characters shall the language use?

• What shall the characters or letters mean independently of the words they’re used in?

• What ideas or basic words shall the monosyllabic sounds portray or represent?

These questions alone could take years to address. I don’t yet understand the origins of all the letters used in English, so I know that creating a new alphabet is an undertaking requiring years of work at a minimum. It seems to me like I should understand the Latin alphabet before attempting to create a new set of characters, or deeming the Latin characters underserving of my tongue. Thus, I have been carefully pondering each letter and its meaning since the 1st of January. When I drive or read, I look at S and mull over what it means. What sibilant, snaky shenanigans could this letter represent? Indeed, the letter associated with the shady serpent inhabits many words that reflect its personality, such as “so” and “sin” and “sad”. So on and so forth for every letter, I pondered their shapes and their ramifications.

Once I understood the majority of the characters in English and their function, I was ready to determine what the characters in my language need to be and accomplish. That is one of the quests I embark upon in 2025. That quest is very much related to the goal of identifying and cataloguing the most basic ideas and concepts that form human experience.

Before I can assign meanings to any characters, sounds, or words, I must determine what those basic ideas of human experience are. For instance, every living language has a positive/negative root set, such as the yes and no of English. Every living language has words and sounds that communicate the concepts of good and evil. Every living language has words to name time, God, nature, water, air, earth, and fire.

The perfect language shall use the sounds that represent its basic ideas as building blocks that are never out of place. For example, the word or sound “no” should never appear in a word with positive connotations, unless the designer wishes to oppose those positive connotations in some way. I find it highly confusing, for instance, that a “Notary” graces documents with an official stamp of “yes”. Something is fissured or ruptured in the language in this instance. A notary is a person who gives an official “yes”—therefore the word for notary should not start with the word for “no”.

Another example: why does the word “yesterday” start with “yes”? Should we say yes to today or tomorrow? Maybe some people want to say “no” to what they did yesterday? Shouldn’t we allow them to call yesterday by its true name? What does yesterday really mean? Something that we’ve passed, or something in the past? My ears shouldn’t associate the “yes” with the past. I want to associate “yes” with the present.

In the perfect, unified language, every phoneme shall have a meaning that fits its sound and contributes to the words in which that sound is a part. The speakers and writers and hearers of that perfect language shall have perfect unity of purpose, ideal, and vision.

My current struggle moving forward is to create better suffixes that give us clarity and coherence. The current suffixes of English seem to be littered with ego and ambition. I don’t know who AL is, but he seems to end a lot of crucial words. We should all be critical about that and ask ourselves why that suffix is so monumental. Before I publish the first lessons of our language on Vocal Media, I plan to research this AL and discover whether he deserves such an honor.

That’s another issue to address—the personal graffiti strewn throughout our English. As tempting as it is to profit from this endeavor, I do not think we shall allow people named Tim to bid on the concept of time and plant their flag on it in our language. We might even revert to calling time by its Greek name, Chronos, in an attempt to free our clocks from the tyrannical grasp of Tim-consciousness.