kia — hello. Phi is a constructed language built for mindful communication: one grammatical rule, no irregular anything, sounds you cannot say fast, and a shelf of literature already written in it — including the Ring Verse, which the language refused to translate.
If you are new, do not start here. Start with kia.md — five minutes, and it will tell you whether Phi is for you. Or start with the language alive: everything below is rendered to dcellison.github.io/phi on every merge. This page is the map of the repository for whoever comes back.
| The invitation | kia.md | Five minutes of contact with the language. The front door. |
| The primer | primer/ | Learn Phi by reading it: a prelude, twenty-four graded chapters about one household, and a capstone. No prior knowledge assumed. |
| The manual | manual/ | The complete reference: phonology, the particle system, ternary numerals, social registers, transmutation. For verification and depth. |
| The texts | texts on the site | Phi's literature: eight transmutations, from the Metta Sutta to the whole of The Velveteen Rabbit — and the Ring Verse, refused, with the refusal shown line by line. |
| The pamphlets | pamphlets on the site | Deep-dive companions to the manual: relative clauses and embedded speech, explained patiently, with exercises and answer keys. |
Four shelves, four jobs: documents/ is what the language is (the specification), the manual is how it is explained, the primer is how it is learned, and the pamphlets are how it is practiced.
| vocabulary/ | The lexicon — one JSON file per word, the single source of truth for every form, meaning, and design rationale. About nine hundred words. |
| documents/ | Grammar references, the compound registry, the phonology rules, the schema. |
| pamphlets/ | The sources for the texts shelf (eight transmutations, the Metta Sutta through The Velveteen Rabbit, plus the Ring Verse refusal) and the two study pamphlets. |
| canon.md | The authority order when documents disagree, and every settled design decision. |
| web/ | The lexicon explorer — a static, searchable view over the vocabulary. Build and serve locally with python3 scripts/build_explorer.py && python3 -m http.server -d web. |
Everything is validated by machine, and the validation gates every pull request:
python3 scripts/validate_examples.pyThis checks the lexicon against the schema and the sound rules, forbids new minimal pairs, and verifies that every Phi sentence quoted anywhere — manual, primer, pamphlets, the invitation — uses real words. If you change the vocabulary, regenerate the derived reference with python3 scripts/generate_reference.py. Design decisions live in canon.md; the working protocol for creating words lives in documents/development_protocol.md; the longer-term intentions live in publishing.md.
Three answers for three things. The language itself is free — Phi's words, sounds, and grammar may be used, spoken, written, and built on by anyone, forever, no permission needed. The code (scripts/, web/) is Apache 2.0. The content — the lexicon, manual, primer, pamphlets, and documents — is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: share and adapt with attribution, noncommercially, keeping derivatives open; commercial use needs separate permission. Details in LICENSE.
lo mia po nuawe thuroa. — We can grow together.