Appendices
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/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/compounds.md | The canonized compound idioms and why each stays compositional |
documents/modifier_first_philosophy.md | The organizing principle, argued in full |
documents/psychological_violence_of_measurement.md | Why the numbers are the way they are |
pamphlets/ | The transmuted texts (the Metta Sutta, the fable, The Velveteen Rabbit, and the rest of the shelf), each with notes and a gap log |
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 restricted numeral systems: the literature on Pirahã and on Australian counting systems shows natural precedent for lives lived without large exact numbers.
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 that Phi's grammar produces naturally (see chapter 22's anger case study).
- 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
psychological_violence_of_measurement.md. - On solarpunk: A Solarpunk Manifesto — an excerpt of which was the language guide's original transmutation 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.