Reference notes
Appendix C: Resources for Further Study
Inside this repository
The manual is the teaching path; these are the working documents behind it.
| Resource | What it gives you |
|---|---|
/canon.md | The authority order when documents disagree, and the settled design decisions |
/vocabulary/ | The lexicon itself: one JSON file per word, the single source of truth |
documents/README.md | The index of current language documentation, separated by purpose |
project/README.md | The index of operational records, release manifests, and publication planning |
project/roadmap.md | The status of the long-term plan, its dependencies, optional evaluation work, and the next development packages |
documents/grammar/particle_reference.md | Every particle, slot by slot |
documents/grammar/complementizer_reference.md | The clause-frame system |
documents/grammar/numeral_reference.md | The complete ternary system |
documents/reference/compounds.md | The canonized compound idioms and why each stays compositional |
documents/design/modifier_first_philosophy.md | The organizing principle, argued in full |
documents/design/psychological_violence_of_measurement.md | Why the numbers are the way they are |
texts/ | The literary shelf: nine close translations, eleven transmutations, one original Phi dialogue, and News from Nowhere in its own book directory |
pamphlets/ | Focused companions to the manual, with extended teaching, exercises, and answer keys |
manual/part7_reference/ | The one-page grammar and the generated lexicon listings |
scripts/validate_examples.py | The validator; also neighbors <word> before coining |
archive/ | The language's history, preserved and clearly marked as non-canon |
Linguistics for the curious learner
- Leipzig Glossing Rules (Max Planck Institute) — the annotation conventions this manual's glosses are based on.
- WALS, the World Atlas of Language Structures (wals.info) — explore how natural languages distribute the features Phi uses: word order, evidentials, classifiers, numeral systems.
- Describing Morphosyntax (Thomas Payne) — the standard field guide to grammatical concepts, useful for going deeper than Appendix A.
- The Art of Language Invention (David J. Peterson) and the Language Creation Society (conlang.org) — the craft and community of constructed languages.
- On numeral systems: WALS documents decimal, vigesimal, mixed, other-base, body-part, and restricted systems. Language-specific work on restricted numeral lexicons requires careful interpretation and does not license claims about a community's cognitive capacity or values; see
documents/design/psychological_violence_of_measurement.mdfor Phi's evidence boundaries and research links.
The philosophical roots
- Metta Sutta (Sutta Nipāta 1.8) — many translations freely available; compare any of them with lothea thole.
- Nonviolent Communication (Marshall Rosenberg) — the observation-feeling-request structure deliberately chosen in chapter 22's anger transmutation; Phi can express the pieces, but grammar does not choose them for the speaker.
- Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka & Goddard) — the semantic-primes research that shaped Phi's early vocabulary planning.
- On peace linguistics: the field founded around Francisco Gomes de Matos's work on communicative peace.
- On sufficiency and scale: E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful; on the critique of quantification, the literature on Goodhart's law and audit culture pairs well with
documents/design/psychological_violence_of_measurement.md. - On solarpunk: A Solarpunk Manifesto by The Solarpunk Community. The literary shelf translates its complete 2019 English text proposition by proposition, while the language guide retains one paragraph as an earlier compositional exercise.
Practicing
There is no substitute for the practices of chapter 23: the morning sentence, the three-line journal, the weekly transmutation. The language's own texts are its best curriculum: read the Metta Sutta aloud until the refrain says itself, then read the fable until the wager scene parses without thinking. When both are easy, you are no longer studying Phi. You are speaking it.