Chapter 01
Sounds
Twenty consonants, six vowels, one letter per sound — and the order of the alphabet is itself part of the grammar.
Luryt is written in plain Latin letters, and the spelling is perfectly phonetic: each letter always makes the same sound. A handful of letters do not sound the way English trained you to expect — they’re flagged below.
The alphabet has a fixed canonical order, and the language leans on it constantly: it numbers the consonants for the counting system (chapter 06) and orders the vowels into scales (chapter 05). It is worth absorbing early:
p b m f v t d n q s z l c w x j k g r h · i y e a o u
Twenty consonants sit in five countable banks; the six larger resonators are the vowels that carry the language’s grammar.
- 20 consonantsone letter per sound
- 6 vowelsone fixed grammatical order
Consonants
Vowels
Six vowels, all “pure” — no gliding, as in Spanish or Japanese. Because vowels carry so much meaning in Luryt, this guide gives each one a fixed color and uses it wherever a vowel is doing grammatical work.
Syllables & stress
Every syllable is a consonant plus a vowel, optionally closed by a final consonant — ka, rim. No syllable starts with a vowel, and consonants never cluster. The result is a steady, drum-like rhythm: ka·pi·rim, zi·fe·n.
Stress is automatic: always the first syllable of the root — which, given the word template, is always the second-to-last syllable. pi·rim → pirim; ka·pi·rim → kapirim. Free particles are little words with their own stress, so ka pirim (“people, as a group”) and kapirim (“a crowd”) sound different.
Chapter 02
Two kinds of words
Grammar words are normally two letters; num is the sole longer fixed atom. Vocabulary words are built from a four-letter root, with slots before and after.
Everything you will ever read in Luryt is one of two things:
1 · Particles. Little two-letter words — consonant plus vowel — that do the grammar: pronouns, tense, negation, quantifiers, question words. ji “I”, te “now”, na “not”. They never take prefixes or endings; they are atoms. (One longer fixed word exists: num, the numeral marker — chapter 06.)
2 · Content words. The open-ended vocabulary: things, actions, qualities. Every content word is built on exactly one four-letter root (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel), wears exactly one final consonant as its ending, and may stack two-letter prefixes in front:
The large center chassis is always the root. Small modules can stack before it; one final peg declares the result’s grammatical kind.
- (cv)*optional prefixes
- cvcvexactly one root
- m · t · n · s · l · rpick one ending
Only the six consonants m t n s l r may end a content word — which is exactly what makes words machine-readable.
Reading a word is an algorithm
Because of these shapes, any word segments itself, with no dictionary needed:
First check the list of longer fixed atoms — currently just num. kapirim is not one, so parse it as a content word. Peel the last letter — m, a legal ending. The four letters before it — piri — must be the root. Whatever is left — ka — must be prefixes, read off two letters at a time. Done, and there was never any other way to cut it.
One convention to know: writing like piri‑m with a hyphen is just this guide making the seams visible. On the page, Luryt writes each word solid: pirim.
Chapter 03
The six endings
Where English has “speak / speech / spoken / speaker”, Luryt has one root and six regular endings.
The final consonant tells you what kind of thing a word refers to — noun, verb, adjective and so on, except more precise. Linguists would call it the word’s head; you can think of it as the word declaring its own part of speech:
| Ending | Kind | What it makes |
|---|---|---|
| ‑m | Entity | a descriptive thing — “an X, some X” (no particular one) |
| ‑t | Referential | an identifiable thing or set — “the X (we know which)” |
| ‑n | Event | a verb — “to X, X happens” |
| ‑s | Property | an adjective — “X-like, having X” |
| ‑l | Manner | an adverb — “in an X way, X-ly” |
| ‑r | Relational | a link — “of X, X’s, related by X” |
The ending changes how a root enters a sentence; the root’s semantic neighborhood stays intact.
- ‑mentity
- ‑treferential
- ‑nevent
- ‑sproperty
- ‑lmanner
- ‑rrelational
Every root accepts all six. Take zife, the root for speech, and turn the dial (glosses are one natural reading of each form):
| zifem | an utterance; a piece of speech |
| zifet | the utterance (the identifiable one — one or several) |
| zifen | to speak |
| zifes | talkative; speech-like |
| zifel | verbally; in a speaking manner |
| zifer | of speech; speech-related |
Chapter 04
The meaning grid
A root’s two vowels are map coordinates: domain × aspect. Thirty-six cells cover, roughly, everything.
Here is the language’s boldest idea. In a root cv₁cv₂, the consonants are free — they just make roots distinguishable — but the two vowels are chosen from two fixed menus:
The first vowel picks a domain — which slice of reality the root lives in:
The first root vowel chooses one of these rows. The scene colors follow the vowel key used throughout this guide.
- iPersonbody, mind, experience
- ySocietygroups, institutions, culture
- eLifeanimals, plants, ecosystems
- aPhysicalmatter, space, energy, weather
- oArtefacttools, machines, buildings
- uAbstractideas, language, logic
The second vowel picks an aspect — what about that domain the root is pointing at:
| i | Individual | the basic things and actors |
| y | Config | parts, wholes, groups, layouts, structures |
| e | Process | activities, changes, doing |
| a | State | stable conditions and qualities |
| o | Relation | links and roles between things |
| u | Quantity | measures, magnitudes, degrees |
The same basic token is viewed as a unit, an arrangement, a process, a condition, a link, or a measurable amount.
- iIndividualthings and actors
- yConfigparts and layouts
- eProcesschange and doing
- aStatestable conditions
- oRelationlinks and roles
- uQuantitymeasures and degrees
So before you have ever seen a word, its vowels have told you its neighborhood. pase must be a physical process (it means “to move, flow”); byru must be a social quantity (“wealth, money”).
The language currently defines one root per cell — 36 core roots. Click any cell:
Choose one domain row and one aspect column. Their intersection is the neighborhood in which a root lives.
Rows = first vowel (domain) · columns = second vowel (aspect). The vocabulary will grow beyond these 36, but every future root will still sit in one of these cells.
Chapter 05
Particles: fifteen families
Particle families use two-letter words in matched sets of six. The fixed atom num sits outside those families.
Here is Rule 3 in action. A particle family takes one consonant and crosses it with the six vowels in canonical order — i y e a o u — and the vowel order always traces a meaningful progression. Learn the T-family’s consonant and you already know all six time words:
One consonant, one scale: past → future → outside time.
Each vowel advances one station: remote past, recent past, the present, near future, distant future, then outside the timeline.
- tilong ago
- tyrecently
- tenow
- tasoon
- tosomeday
- tutimeless
One family you can see
The K-family changes how units are arranged. The vowels sweep from one singled-out unit, through increasingly large groups, to many units spread apart:
Put a free K-form before the complete noun phrase it configures, or attach it to a root as a prefix: ka pirim “people as a group” · kapirim “a crowd.”
- kisingled
- kypair
- kefew
- kagroup
- komass
- kuscattered
Fifteen families are defined so far. Five consonants (b v z l x) remain reserved — three of them already earmarked (b mood, x subordination, z reflexive & discourse reference). Here they all are, grouped by what they do.
Chapter 06
Numbers
Every nonnegative integer is one marked run of compact base-100 syllable blocks.
The counting system reuses the canonical orders from chapter 01. Number the twenty consonants 0–19, and the first five vowels 0–4 (u sits this one out). Each value from 0 to 99 therefore becomes one syllable:
block value = 5 × consonant + vowel
So 27 = 5 × 5 + 2 = consonant №5 (t) + vowel №2 (e) → te. And 99 = 5 × 19 + 4 → ho. The whole hundred, at a glance:
Pick one of twenty consonant positions, then one of five vowel positions. The pair is a single pronounceable syllable.
- 20 consonantsvalues 0–19
- 5 vowelsvalues 0–4; u sits out
Seventy-five of the hundred number syllables also name defined particles; the remaining twenty-five are reserved but currently unallocated — te is both “now” and 27 — so counting is announced by the fixed marker num (a clipped form of nunu “number”): num te = 27, num pi = 0, num pa pirim pasen “three people go”. A bare syllable like pi stays a particle (“just starting to”).
For 100 and above, put two or more of those blocks after one num and read them left to right as base-100 places: num py pi = 100, num py py = 101, num py pi pi = 10,000, and num me do ly jy = 12,345,678. A multi-block numeral cannot start with pi, but zero blocks stay inside or at the end. There is no maximum number of blocks.
Inside an entity noun phrase, configuration, quantifier, and pointer all come before the exact number; relational words and then property words come after it: [k] [q] [d] [num cv+] [relation‑r] [property‑s] noun. For example, dy num pa pirit means “these three people” and dy num pa vosas koryt “these three broken houses.” Keeping every NP particle before num and using a content word — relation, property, or noun — to close the CV run makes both numeral boundaries visible.
Try it
Chapter 07
Sentences
Canonical event clauses put grammar particles first, roles after noun phrases, an optional manner before the event tail, and the event word last. Other predicate types have patterns below.
A pivoted event clause has a canonical track. Up front, in a fixed order, come the little operators — a question word with any questioned role, then time, phase, frequency, degree, and polarity — followed by an optional unmarked pivot, any other role-marked or spatial phrases, one optional ‑l manner, optional narrow na, and the event word at the end:
Optional operators and pivot come first. Participants and spatial frames precede an optional manner and narrow negation; the event module closes the clause.
- [w (+r)] [t] [p] [h] [m] [n]optional operators
- [pivot] · NP + roleparticipants
- [manner‑l] [na]event tail modifiers
- event‑ncloses event clause
A questioned non-pivot keeps its role directly after the W-word. The pivot may be omitted when every participant is role-marked. Manner and narrow na occupy the fixed tail immediately before the event. The smallest pivoted event clause is two words.
Start minimal, then add dials
Operators bind everything to their right, so where you put one is its scope. Moving na past a quantifier flips the meaning:
On the left, negation takes scope over “all,” so some may still pass. On the right, “all” is already established when negation stops the action.
- na · qo pirim · pasennot all people go
- qo pirim · na · pasenall people do not go
Put one event manner next to the event
An optional root‑l manner comes after the pivot and every role-marked or spatial phrase, then before narrow na and the final root‑n event. It modifies that event, and only one manner fills the slot. The front operators keep their established order and rightward scope.
Noun phrases: configuration, quantifier, pointer, exact number, relation, property, noun
Inside a noun phrase, an optional free K-family configuration comes first, then the quantifier (Q-family), demonstrative (D-family), optional exact number, optional relational words, optional property words, and noun: [k] [q] [d] [num cv+] [relation‑r] [property‑s] noun. K configures the participants selected by everything that follows it; Q can quantify the following pointer-and-cardinality frame, and only one free K fills the outer slot.
Who did what to whom: role markers
Instead of case endings, Luryt puts a small R-family particle after a noun phrase to mark its role — agent ri, recipient ry, object re, instrument ra, location ro, path ru. One argument — the pivot, usually the doer — may stay unmarked in the pivot slot; every other argument carries its role:
The builder can be the unmarked pivot. The house is tagged as what is affected; the tool is tagged as the instrument.
- jipivot · unmarked
- koryt rehouse · object
- tokim ratool · instrument
Space: no verb “to be” required
The S-family places a figure relative to a ground — si inside, sy on, se beside, sa around, so outside, su among. For plain location, that’s the whole sentence:
The S-family keeps the figure constant and changes its placement. The same relation can describe a static scene or trace a path.
- siinside
- syon
- sebeside
- saaround
- sooutside
- suamong
That relation can then sit at three different levels in a clause:
The same scene becomes a location, an event setting, or an oriented path depending on how the spatial phrase is closed.
- di pirit · si · di korytstatic location
- ji · si di koryt ro · zifenevent setting
- ji · go si di koryt ru · pasenoriented path
Questions
Content questions start with a W-family word. If that word asks for the event pivot, it stands alone; if it asks for another participant or the event setting, its R-family role follows immediately. Yes/no questions are just intonation. Answers can be a single polarity particle:
Describe a subject with one property
A simple property clause needs no word for “be.” Put one pronoun or complete noun phrase first and one root‑s property last. Optionally place one M-family degree immediately before it: subject · [m] · property‑s. M grades only that final property, which applies to the whole subject including its K, Q, D, exact-number, and modifier material.
Degree and polarity keep fixed local order. One optional M-word sits directly before the property. Put one of ni ny ne na no nu before the whole clause for broad polarity: [n] · subject · [m] · property‑s. For narrow negation, put only na after the subject and before optional M: subject · na · [m] · property‑s. These are alternative positions; do not combine or stack them. The scope order is front N, complete subject, local na, M degree, property.
The clause still licenses one property predicate and at most one local M-word. Multiple property predicates and time, phase, or frequency operators remain outside the specified grammar. M is not licensed inside a noun phrase or comparison. A property word inside a noun phrase instead restricts the noun: di vosas koryt hatas. asserts only hotness, of this broken house. Property polarity and local M do not automatically extend to static-location clauses; a comparison takes one front polarity particle of its own (see “Comparing things”).
Comparing things
Comparison uses the C-family before a property word, with re marking the standard (“than …”):
A questioned pivot is bare; any other questioned event role follows the W-word. C-family words place a property on a scale from less through equal to more.
- wo · zifen? / wa · re · ji · nifen?pivot / patient question
- ci · cy · ce · ca · coleast · less · equal · more · most
Linking: and, or, but
The F-family links two of the same kind — two noun phrases or two full clauses — with one relation each: fi “and”, fy “and then”, fe “or”, fa “but”, fo “so”, fu “or else”. Each conjunct keeps its own particles; a role marker after a linked pair marks the whole pair; chains read left to right.
Same particle, two altitudes
Remember ka from the very top? K-family words work at two levels: as a free particle before a noun phrase they configure its selected participants; glued on as a prefix they build a new word. This particle-and-prefix duality is a design principle the language intends to extend to other families later:
Chapter 08
Read your first sentences
Everything below uses only what you’ve seen. Translate in your head, then check.
Chapter 09
Take a word apart
The segmentation algorithm from chapter 02, running live. Type anything.
It reads from the outside in: recognize a legal ending, reserve the four cells before it for the root, then split the remainder into two-cell prefixes.
- 1 · endingpeel the final consonant
- 2 · roottake the previous four letters
- 3 · prefixesread what remains in pairs
Chapter 10
Quick reference
The whole language on a card — and an honest note about where the map ends.
Word shapes
- Particle-family form: cv — two letters, atomic
- Longer fixed atom: num — numeral marker
- Content: (cv)* + cvcv + m/t/n/s/l/r
- Stress: second-to-last syllable
- Number block 0–99: cv, value = 5·C + V
- Cardinal: num cv+, blocks read left-to-right in base 100
Endings
- ‑m a thing · ‑t the thing · ‑n to do
- ‑s -like · ‑l -ly · ‑r of
Root vowels
- 1st: i person · y society · e life · a physical · o artefact · u abstract
- 2nd: i individual · y config · e process · a state · o relation · u quantity
Particle families
Canonical event-clause order
- [w (+r)] [t] [p] [h] [m] [n]
- [pivot] · NPs+role/space · [manner‑l] · [na] · event‑n
- NP: [k] [q] [d] [num cv+] [relation‑r] [property‑s] noun · roles follow the complete NP
- Property: [n] · subject · [m] · property‑s or subject · [na] · [m] · property‑s · one polarity position · one local degree · no copula
- Compare: A ca PROP‑s B re “A is more PROP than B”
- Link: X f‑ Y, same kind only (two NPs or two clauses) · fi fy fe fa fo fu = and · then · or · but · so · or‑else
- Path: figure g (s) place ru verb
- Operators scope over what follows them
Edges of the map
Luryt is a live project, and its spec is candid about what is settled and what isn’t. Deliberately still open:
- More prefix families — only K- (grouping) is fully defined as a prefix so far; time, voice and valence prefixes are anticipated.
- The earmarked families — b mood, x subordination, z reflexive & discourse reference — have jobs but no forms yet.
- Subordination — no “because / if / that”-clauses yet; the F-family links, but does not embed. Correlatives (“both … and”), ellipsis, and configuration over a whole coordination are also open.
- The lexicon beyond the 36 core roots (one extra root, nife “eat”, floats around examples provisionally).
- Full syntax for complex sentences: subordination, focus, relative clauses, and extraction from inside static-location or path-ground phrases.
- Direct event-level use and ordering of free K-family modifiers relative to the canonical operator track. NP-internal K already precedes Q, D, and the exact number.
- Time, phase, and frequency placement and scope over simple property clauses. The unmarked pattern, property-local M degree, broad N-family polarity, and narrow na polarity are fixed.
- Non-event syntax of manner -l content words, and uses of relational -r outside the entity-NP restriction block — explicit possessors, relational predicates, and relation direction.
- Negative numbers, fractions, decimals, and ordinals.
Which is to say: if you learn this page, you know the entire language — for now.