Part 4 · grammar — Chapter 11 · nouns

The words of the arts

Phi was built with an Art Nouveau pillar, and its arts vocabulary is a working studio: a music family, two instruments, a full bench of maker verbs, and the words for what making is for. This section opens the studio.

The music family

Music keeps one sound the way life does: meliho (sing), melira (song), meliphe (music). Around them stand sulai (musician), haoni (voice), shonuwa (sound), and telui (rhythm), with the registry's haoni welisha (voice-color) for timbre.

mia meliphe sheluo.
1SG music listen.
(I listen to music.)

shia melira meliho.
3SG song sing.
(They sing a song.)

meliphe siora loa.
music joy give.
(Music gives joy.)

The instruments

Phi has coined exactly two instruments, and each is named for its own voice: kuma (drum), the deep grounded syllables of struck rhythm, and phui (flute), a breath through a small opening. Between them they divide the musician's work: the drum carries rhythm, the flute carries melody. Playing either one is ordinary wile (play):

sulai kuma wile.
musician drum play.
(The musician plays the drum.)

Further instruments arrive the way these did, named for their voices, when the household genuinely meets one. Until then, canon is content with breath and heartbeat.

Harmony

Concord has a verb of its own, and it is intransitive, because harmony is something voices do together rather than something done to them:

lo haoni lei.
PL voice harmony.
(The voices harmonize.)

shemoli (harmonize, transitive) tunes one thing to another; koru (harmonious) describes the result; and sena (pattern) is telui's spatial sibling, repetition laid out in space rather than time.

The makers

The making verbs are carved, and each names a different hand: kealo (create) brings the new into being, pilewa (make) transforms material at hand, theko (craft) is skilled shaping, kire (shape) forms and also draws, selomi (weave) works threads, and its own entry extends it where every language eventually goes:

mia nophi selomi.
1SG story weave.
(I weave a story.)

Every work these verbs produce is named by the rule you already know: a weaving, a shaping, a singing, each the event noun of its verb. This is settled canon, and it is why Phi has no word for poem, painting, or sculpture: each would name a container where Phi names an act. A poem is melira, song, because Phi's page is a score for the voice; the texts are written to be read aloud, and the language never forgets it.

What the making is for

shela (art) is the category, mioru (beauty) what it expresses, lunai (vision) what guides it, and the far end of the studio opens onto the square: pharuki (celebrate), kela (rejoice), holia (festival, joy where thorea is ritual), rotiku (dance).

sila holia thilonu.
community festival prepare.
(The community prepares the festival.)

sila mua holia rotiku.
community LOC festival dance.
(The community dances at the festival.)

Opposite all of it sits maeli (quiet), whose quality noun is silence, the canvas every sound is painted on. The studio's grammar is four sentences long: the maker makes, the work is the making, the music gives joy, and the silence around it is part of the music. Phi keeps the arts the way it keeps everything else, as verbs the whole household can do.