Chapter 3

Announce, then deliver

Here is the sentence the language's own twenty-minute introduction leads with. It is about as plain as carpentry gets.

mia roe kiru wolea kati.
1SG INS chisel wood cut.
(I cut the wood with the chisel.)

Take it one word at a time. mia is the speaker. roe is a function word with a single job: it promises that the next thing named will be an instrument. kiru keeps the promise: the chisel. wolea is the wood, the thing the sentence is about to act on. Then, last of all, kati: cut. The verb is the final word, and it lands in a scene with nothing missing from it. Who would cut, with what, into what: all of it stood settled before the cutting was said.

That ordering is the language's one structural rule, and the language states it in a single sentence: whatever modifies, specifies, or relates comes before what it affects. The rest of the grammar is that sentence having consequences. The quality comes before its bearer: welao shelu, good book. The owner comes before the owned: mia shelu, my book. A preposition stands before its noun, so the relation is named before the thing being related. An asking word takes the very position in the sentence that its answer will fill. And a dependent clause comes before the clause that depends on it: the reason before the result, the if before the then.

The if before the then is worth hearing at full gentleness, and the language's shelf provides it, in a rendering of Kahlil Gibran's teaching on giving:

lu thia miso loa. thia shewo loa.
COND 2SG REFL give. 2SG true give.
(When you give yourself, you truly give.)

lu opens a condition, and the condition runs all the way to its own period before the consequence draws breath. Nothing in the second clause asks the listener to go back and repair the first. By the time "you truly give" arrives, the ground under it is already laid.

The rule has already worked at full stretch once in these pages. The boatman scene's narrator opened the report of his own thinking with one word, closed it with another, and only then reached the verb think, which carried its confession of assumption ahead of itself. Every piece of that sentence followed the same ordering as the chisel sentence, because the grammar keeps no second ordering to offer. Phi has no inversion for drama, no idiom that runs backward, no second pattern held in reserve. A learner who can read the chisel sentence has, in one real sense, met every sentence the language will ever show them.

The most common order on earth

The verb-final part of this is not exotic. In the World Atlas of Language Structures sample, 564 of 1,376 languages arrange their sentences subject first, object next, verb last, more than any other single pattern, English's included (Dryer 2013, chapter 81). Japanese keeps this order, and so do Turkish, Hindi, and Korean. Roughly two of every five languages in that sample end their sentences the way Phi does. A designed language that wanted to feel alien had cheaper ways to get there.

What is unusual sits in two other places. First, the world's verb-final languages overwhelmingly put their relators after the noun: in Japanese, the word that does the work of "with" follows "chisel." The same atlas counts 472 languages that pair object-before-verb order with postpositions and just 14 that pair it with prepositions (Dryer 2013, chapter 95). Phi sides with the fourteen, because under its one rule a relator is a modifier like any other, and modifiers come first. A typologist would file the pairing as mixed head direction, and rare; the language files it as consistency. Second, many natural languages bend. Japanese fronts a phrase when the topic or the thread of the discourse asks for it (Imamura 2016); Turkish, its roles secured by case endings, moves a word next to the verb to focus it and to the front to set the topic (Ketrez 2012). Phi does not bend. What the design added to one of humanity's commonest word orders is not the order. It is the absence of a second one.

So the interesting question is not where typology files the rule, but what living under it could do to the person speaking. The tempting answer is that composing every sentence this way trains a more careful mind. It is a particularly agreeable answer for the person who designed the language, which is reason enough to go and look at what has actually been measured.

Thinking for speaking

Beginning in the early 1980s, Ruth Berman, Dan Slobin, and their colleagues put the same wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You?, in front of children and adults in five language communities and collected more than two hundred and fifty tellings of its story (Berman and Slobin 1994). The pictures never changed: a boy, a dog, and a frog that had left its jar. This modest crisis was enough. Narrators ranged from age three to adulthood and spoke English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, or Turkish. Their tellings sorted themselves by language. English speakers, whose verbs fold the manner of movement into themselves (an English creature creeps, tumbles, or swoops instead of merely moving), built what Slobin called "elaborated trajectories of motion." Spanish speakers, whose everyday motion verbs name the path rather than the manner, produced "elaborated descriptions of the static locations of objects" and let the movement happen between the descriptions (Slobin 1996, 78). The preferences were in place in the youngest narrators and held through adulthood; growing up polished the stories without changing their language's slant.

Slobin's name for what the frog stories reveal is thinking for speaking: "a special form of thought that is mobilized for communication" (Slobin 1996, 76). In the act of turning experience into an utterance, a speaker selects the features of the scene that fit what their grammar can readily carry. The grammar does not decide what the speaker saw. It decides what the sentence needs, and so it directs the speaker's attention, during composition, toward what it needs. His summary of the whole research line fits in one sentence: "each native language has trained its speakers to pay different kinds of attention to events and experiences when talking about them" (Slobin 1996, 89). And he bounds the claim in the same chapter: the training is laid down in childhood and is "exceptionally resistant to restructuring" when adults learn a second language (Slobin 1996, 89). The claim ends there: attention while talking.

Read Phi's rule through that frame and the design's ambition becomes precise, and precisely bounded. What the grammar fixes is the performance itself: the chisel sentence can only be spoken instrument first, and Gibran's line only condition first, so a Phi speaker utters the relations before the content they govern, every time, whatever their mind is doing meanwhile. What the design hopes is that producing that order, sentence after sentence, invites the attention Slobin describes: toward which word will modify which, what depends on what, what frame the coming content will stand in. That is a hypothesis and nobody has studied a Phi speaker, so chapter 11 is where it gets weighed against the whole record. Slobin's own caution leans against it, since the habits he documented were laid down with a first language in childhood, and every adult who comes to Phi arrives already trained by another grammar.

The silent gesture

If a grammar's training ran deeper than speaking, it should survive the removal of speech. That experiment has been run, and its result sets a useful boundary.

Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked forty adults recruited at urban universities in Chicago, Madrid, Beijing, and Istanbul, ten each native speakers of English, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish, to watch short videos of simple events and describe them using only their hands, no speech allowed. Forty more reconstructed the same events by stacking picture transparencies on a peg while the experimenter pointedly paid no attention: a task with no communication in it at all. English and Spanish order their spoken sentences actor, act, patient; Chinese splits by the kind of event; of the four groups only Turkish speaks with the act last. Yet in silent gesture every group strongly preferred one order, actor, patient, act: nine of every ten gesture strings carried it, and the stacking task leaned the same way at four trials in five (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). The abstract states the result plainly: "the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior." In these two tasks, a lifetime inside English word order had not rearranged how English speakers laid out an event once the words were taken away. A strong preference is not a law, other orders occurred, and the authors offer their explanation, a natural sequencing for representing events, only as a speculation. The result keeps its size: two tasks, four languages, one heavy shared lean.

A later study narrowed the finding further. English and Turkish package motion differently, and when speakers of the two languages gesture while speaking, their hands follow their grammars. Şeyda Özçalışkan and colleagues had the same people describe the same motion events in gesture alone, and the difference vanished from the predominant patterns: the silent gestures of English speakers and Turkish speakers were, in the abstract's word, identical in how they packaged and ordered the elements of motion (Özçalışkan, Lucero and Goldin-Meadow 2016). The full results are a shade less tidy, as full results tend to be: two rare response types still differed by group, and the authors allow that one of them may be English showing through. The headline covers the common case. Language shapes the gesture that travels with speech; take the speech away, at least in these tasks, and most of the shaping leaves with it.

For Phi, that boundary matters, and it is the useful kind: whatever the chisel sentence's order does, these tasks put it inside language rather than behind it.

The experiments also reveal a smaller, stranger fact. The order the silent gesturers preferred, actor before patient before act, is the chisel sentence's own arrangement, the pattern the study's authors note is "analogous to the subject-object-verb pattern found in many languages of the world" (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Asked to lay out a simple event without language, most people in these tasks laid it out the way Phi's rule requires. The preference has its own boundary: give pantomiming gesturers an event whose two participants could each be the doer, a woman pushing a boy rather than a woman pushing a cart, and the shared order loses its majority (Hall, Mayberry and Ferreira 2013). So actor-patient-act is not the mind's single default; it is a strong human preference for the plainest events. Even at that size it takes something away from Phi rather than adding something: the order cannot be a special training if untrained gesturers already prefer it. What it leaves is smaller and still worth having. The rule does not fight the grain. Phi asks its speakers to build every sentence in an order untrained hands already prefer, and to do it deliberately, sentence after sentence.

The rehearsal

Say the chisel sentence once more at speaking pace and hear the preparation in it. The speaker comes first, the tool is promised and named, and the wood is laid on the bench. Only when every piece is in place does the last word fall, and it falls like the act it names. Actual carpentry may still go badly, because grammar has never steadied anyone's hand. None of the waiting changes the wood. What the sentence holds open, for exactly as long as it lasts, is the moment before the act, made audible every time. Phi declines to let that moment go unspoken. The sentence is already better prepared than it had to be, and that much is true before anyone measures anything.

References

Berman, Ruth A., and Dan Isaac Slobin, editors. 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Order of subject, object and verb. In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, edited by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. wals.info/chapter/81.

Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Relationship between the order of object and verb and the order of adposition and noun phrase. In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, edited by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. wals.info/chapter/95.

Gibran, Kahlil. 1923. The Prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. The lines are from the teaching On Giving.

Goldin-Meadow, Susan, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander. 2008. The natural order of events: how speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(27): 9163-9168. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0710060105.

Hall, Matthew L., Rachel I. Mayberry, and Victor S. Ferreira. 2013. Cognitive constraints on constituent order: evidence from elicited pantomime. Cognition 129(1): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.05.004.

Imamura, Satoshi. 2016. A corpus-based analysis of scrambling in Japanese in terms of anaphoric and cataphoric co-referencing. Research in Corpus Linguistics 4: 39-49. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.04.05.

Ketrez, F. Nihan. 2012. A Student Grammar of Turkish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Özçalışkan, Şeyda, Ché Lucero, and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Does language shape silent gesture? Cognition 148: 10-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.001.

Slobin, Dan I. 1996. From "thought and language" to "thinking for speaking." In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, 70-96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Phi sources

The Phi material in this chapter comes from short_road.md, documents/design/modifier_first_philosophy.md, and manual/part4_grammar/ch10_mindful_sentence/03_modifier_first_principle.md. The Gibran example is in texts/prophet_excerpts.md.