Ageben Introduction
Ageben (agebe + the name ending -n) translates to English clarity.
Ageben has two kinds of goals: psychological goals, which say what the language is for, and structural goals, which shape how it is built. This page covers the structural goals and how to work through these docs.
On this page
Purpose
Ageben's psychological goals are compassion, rationality, and empowerment: it builds psychological distinctions into its vocabulary and grammar, so that ordinary speech nudges you toward them. Why Ageben explains those goals, tours the features that serve them, and says what the language does not claim.
If you want an easy start before the grammar, Claritish teaches a few Ageben words you can drop into English today.
Structural goals
Three structural goals shape how the sounds, words, and grammar are built:
- Unambiguous but usable: every sentence has exactly one reading, precise enough for a program to understand, without making ordinary speech hard to say.
- Singable: syllable shapes are chosen to be easy to sing.
- Reusable: a small set of patterns does many jobs. The same few endings, the same vowel series, and the same scales return across the grammar, so each pattern you learn keeps paying off on later pages.
The first goal shows up as three kinds of clarity: in how a sentence is built, in what a pronoun points to, and in what a word means.
Syntactic
In a clause, every content word (a word built on a root, such as a noun, verb, or adjective) begins with a role letter: a letter that names the word's role in the clause (subject, object, verb, …). English often makes you work out a word's role from its position; in Ageben you read it off the first letter. The default order is subject, object, verb, but you may put the words in any order, because each word still carries its role.
Referential
English it and they can point to almost anything mentioned earlier. In Ageben, a pronoun copies the whole stem of an earlier word (the word without its role letter and ending) and points to the most recently mentioned word with that stem, so a fixed rule picks the one thing it means. A shorter role pointer names someone by the part they played in a recent event (the latest doer, the other one). A few special pronouns cover the speaker, the listener, and similar roles. When you need to keep several referents apart, you can give each a tag (A, E, O, U), and when the talk is about one thing, a topic is set overtly and one pronoun always means it.
Semantic
Each dictionary entry has one sense. When a meaning is related to a word but belongs to a different area of life, it gets its own compound instead of becoming a second sense: the area first, then the kind. For example, love in the crush sense is its own compound, not a second meaning of love. The compound pages teach how to spell these.
Tools those goals make possible
Because of role letters, a small fixed set of endings, and spelling that matches sound, a program can read a word's role, what a pronoun points to, and how to pronounce it straight from the writing. The tools only label what is already there: the sentence you write is the whole language, with its free word order and singable shape intact.
- Inspect: paste a sentence and click or highlight a word to see its role, its root's sense, and how the clause fits together.
- Pronunciation: the same page shows an IPA: line that transcribes the text as spoken. Since each letter has one sound and syllables come in only a few shapes, pronunciation follows directly from the spelling.
How to learn from these docs
Grammar pages are grouped in the sidebar as Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. Finish every page in the Beginner group, take its review, then do the same for Intermediate, then Advanced.
Follow those three groups in the site sidebar. Intermediate and Advanced start collapsed; the group that contains the page you are on opens.
Start with phonology.md for letters and word edges, then word-endings.md for citation endings (by then you can already say your name as a greeting), then clause.md for clause shape, speech-moves.md for turns, and dependents.md.
When you finish a group, take its Review at the end of that group (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). Each review has one item per page at that level, and each answer links back to the section it tests.
The sidebar Tools list has Terminology, which gives the English names these pages use for grammar, each with a short gloss and a link to the section that teaches it. It also has Lexicon, for looking up roots and dictionary compounds and respelling an English name, and Inspect, for word-by-word breakdowns.
The sidebar Cheat Sheets group has a printable lookup page for each part of the grammar, for looking up a form you have already met. Two of them line up what each letter means across those parts. Ageben → English is the spelling index for short closed words. Each row is tagged B, I, or A for its level and links to the section that teaches it.
The sidebar Saying it in Ageben group answers English jobs (because, by Friday, walked) with forms taught on the stage pages. Use it after those pages, in any order.
Tables: Use, English, Same root as, and Cue
Inventory tables on grammar pages use these columns:
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Ageben | The word or letter you write. If Same root as is blank, this is the citation form (how the word is written on its own, outside a sentence). The in-clause spelling, with its role letter, appears only when Same root as names the everyday kind. |
| Use | What the form does: its job in the sentence (subject, question, because joining two sentences). This is the rule. |
| English | What you would say: the sense to produce or understand. In translation practice, a person's English is their name (Azozon), not the virtue word the name is built from. |
| Same root as | The everyday kind of the same root, written as a citation (-l), shown when the row's English is a different word from that citation's English: the wall root for a row whose English is because, or the eye root for see. Blank when the English already is the citation (a row whose English is climb for the climb root). Not every table has this column. |
| Cue | A memory aid for the letter, vowel, or picture behind the row. |
Cue is optional. In a cue, ≈ means "sounds like." When Same root as is filled in, Cue does not repeat the everyday English; it only says why that picture fits.
Above each Practice checkpoint is a word bank with two tables. New words (English, Ageben, Cue) lists the words that checkpoint introduces; when Ageben is not the citation of the English, the cue names the citation's sense (👁️ from eye). Review (English, Ageben) lists words from earlier checkpoints.
License
These grammar pages, the lexicon, and the language materials are by humblevladimirthegreat and are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Software and tooling that accompany them are under the Apache License 2.0.
Reuse of particular grammatical ideas, lexicon entries, or a derived language is allowed. If you publish a derived language, a fork of the grammar, or a substantial adaptation, mention Ageben in the introduction (or equivalent front matter) as the source or inspiration.
Do not present a fork, variant, or other project as the official Ageben project or as a drop-in substitute for these docs. Calling an unchanged copy of this language Ageben is fine. Calling a substantially different language Ageben as if it were this project is not. The licenses do not grant trademark rights and do not allow implying endorsement by the licensor.
Suggested attribution: Ageben by humblevladimirthegreat, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank ClearerThinking.org and their book The 12 Levers for being a helpful compendium of scientifically validated personal growth techniques and noting their safety conditions.
I would also like to thank the Conlangs community on Reddit for their wealth of resources, ideas, and support for conlangers everywhere.
I also thank all the beta testers and reviewers for their feedback and questions.
The grammar site is built with VitePress. Parsing uses Chevrotain (with chevrotain-allstar) and Peggy. Lexicon search uses MiniSearch, and the English helper uses Compromise and data derived from Open English WordNet.