I
One shape, one sound.
Seven shapes. Each is a circle changed one way, and each is a noise a person can make without being taught. Draw what you hear. Say what you see.
A whole tongue built from one circle, changed seven ways. A five-year-old can hold all of it.
Every shape is the same circle with one thing done to it: made small or big, sealed shut, given a tail that climbs or hangs, given a stick that stands or drops. Each one is a noise nobody has to be taught. Tap a shape to watch it drawn. The colors run red to violet in the order the shapes are learned, and that order never changes anywhere in Oo.
Four of the shapes open the mouth (o O 6 9) and three close it first (0 d p). Every sound in Oo is one closing shape, or none, followed by one opening shape. Four times four is sixteen, and sixteen is the whole language. The small number in each corner is that sound's counting mark, which matters in Law VII and nowhere else.
| onsetvowel | o | O | 6 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | 0ouh | 1OAH | 26oo | 39ow |
| 0 | 40omuh | 50Omah | 606moo | 709mow |
| d | 8doduh | 9dOdah | Ad6doo | Bd9dow |
| p | Cpopuh | DpOpah | Ep6poo | Fp9pow |
There is no conjugation, no gender, no plural ending, no irregular verb, and no exception to any of the following. A child who knows these seven things knows the grammar completely.
Seven shapes. Each is a circle changed one way, and each is a noise a person can make without being taught. Draw what you hear. Say what you see.
The doer comes first, then the doing, then the thing it is done to. do 6dO 06 is I want milk. The order never changes.
Say a word two times and it means many of it. 0Oo is a child. 0Oo 0Oo is children. do is me; do do is us.
0O O is a big mother. dopo OO is a good person. The same rule covers every describing word, so there is only ever one rule.
O is big. 0o O is not big. The mouth closes before it refuses, which is what the shape already shows.
Up and down. At the front of a sentence they are time: 9 is before, 6 is after. At the end they are voice: 6 asks a question, 9 carries feeling. One idea, four jobs.
There are sixteen sounds, so every sound is one of the sixteen counting marks. Two of them make a word, which is why there are exactly 256 words in the core tongue. A child never has to know this. A machine never has to be told.
Counting costs nothing extra. The sixteen sounds are the numbers, in the order they are learned, so a child who can say the sounds can already count to fifteen. Put a sound in front of a thing and it counts the thing: d6 06 is ten cows.
Oo has no question words to learn. Law VI does the work: name the thing you are missing and let your voice go up. That is the whole system.
| o 6 | what? | thing + rising |
| dopo 6 | who? | person + rising |
| 99 6 | where? | place + rising |
| O6 6 | when? | day + rising |
| d6 6 | why? | do + rising |
| O 6 | really? | big + rising |
These sixteen one-sound words are the floor of the language. Nearly every longer word is built out of them, and the reason is always written down.
Every word is one or two sounds, never more, and every word carries the reason it is that word. Search in English or in Oo.
Nothing by that name yet. The tongue is young.
These are not words. They are what the seven laws make on their own, out of words a child already has. Anyone who knows the roots can build them without being told.
Read left to right, one sound per shape. The gray line underneath is how it comes out of a mouth.
This part is for the grown-ups and the machines. Sixteen sounds means each sound is a hexadecimal digit, and a two-sound word is exactly one byte, so the core tongue holds precisely 256 words and every one of them has an address. Nothing about this is visible to a child learning to say milk.