Two kinds of Phi name

01A content word borne as a name

Phi's established cast bears ordinary words. Someone is walking around being warmth; someone is seed:

The founding pair

The whole system is audible in two lines, identical but for one syllable:

Nothing about the syllables changed. What changed is the sentence's population: ne announced that these particular syllables are someone, and a person appeared where a seed had been. Notice the gloss line change too: seed became thinoe. A name is carried, not translated; the moment a word becomes a name, its meaning steps back and its bearer steps forward.

What follows from this

The word remains in the dictionary with its ordinary meaning. ne selects its proper-name reading. Any listed content word may be borne this way; a current function or other non-content word cannot also be a name.

Phi keeps no separate stock of given names. The dictionary itself is the name-book, and any content word in it may someday be someone.

02A productive Phi-form name

A person may instead assemble or adapt one name-form without creating a lexicon entry:

mia nomei ne samira nai.
1SG name NAME samira be.
(My name is samira.)

samira has three legal open syllables, begins with a Phi onset, stays lowercase, and duplicates no syllable. It has no dictionary gloss or part of speech. The four-syllable saweriko is equally valid because an onym is a designation, not a shared vocabulary item. A bearer may hold personal associations with either form, but listeners cannot treat those associations as shared lexical meaning. Outside an established conversational context, a bare productive onym is not a Phi word; ne is what licenses it as a proper designation.

The charter is deliberately narrow: one token, two, three, or four syllables, ordinary Phi phonotactics, and no duplicated syllable with an onset. The form does not enter the minimal-pair baseline because names are an open class. Similar or shared names are clarified in conversation rather than solved by pretending every person can have a globally unique word.

03A preferred source name

Existing names need not be replaced

A speaker may preserve an existing name in its own language and script outside the Phi passage, choose a single Phi-form onym, use both in their appropriate media, or decline adaptation. Source name outside Phi: Amina.

mia nomei ne hamina nai.
1SG name NAME hamina be.
(My Phi-form name is hamina.)

Neither Amina nor hamina becomes a lexicon word. The source form remains exact because it remains source material; the single-token form is available only when the bearer accepts it. Because Phi-form names are announced rather than capitalized, none outranks the sentence around it. Part 6 takes up the writing rule.

Drill: word or someone

Cover everything below the line. For each sentence, say aloud whether the cast-word is vocabulary or a person, and how you know.

1. mia sulae sulopa nuola.
2. ne siora seniku.
3. muila lo thinoe howela.
4. siora shua.

Answers: 1. vocabulary: I eat warm soup; no announcement, and soup is exactly the kind of thing warmth modifies. 2. a person: siora smiles; ne said so before the name arrived. 3. vocabulary: the earth receives the seeds; plural-marked things in the earth are seeds, not children. 4. undecidable alone: joy comes, or, in an established conversation, siora comes. That undecidability is the reason portable Phi keeps ne; Part 5 explains when conversation may safely rely on shared context instead.