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Introduction to Agalan
Agalan (agala + proper -n) translates to English clarity.
How these docs work, and what “good grammar design” means for this language.
On this page
Purpose
Agalan encodes psychological distinctions into vocabulary and grammar so ordinary speech can nudge compassion → rationality → empowerment.
Grammar design
Two supporting goals sit beside the psychology:
- Unambiguous but usable — so automatic tools can understand the language without making ordinary speech hard.
- Singable phonology — syllable shape chosen to be easy to sing.
Agalan keeps three kinds of clarity in ordinary speech.
Syntactic
In a clause, every content word begins with a letter that names its job (subject, object, verb, …), so role does not depend on guessing from English-style word class. Default order is Subject–Object–Verb, but free order is safe because that role letter is authoritative.
zazawan godogol.
Azawan is a dog. The role letter on each word is the job: z- who the sentence is about, g- a kind or property.
Outside a sentence, the bare root with its final letter names the thing by itself.
Referential
Pronouns copy a short start of an earlier word’s root (through the second vowel) and point to the most recently mentioned matching word. A few specials cover speaker, listener, and similar roles. There are no vague English-style it / they where you have to guess which of the many possible things it refers to.
Semantic
Each dictionary sense is one entry. Related senses across fields use an explicit compound: kind first, then the topic after mid-word x (golovexagal love in the crush sense).
Tools those goals make possible
Role letters, closed endings, and spelling that tracks sound mean a program does not have to guess word class, vague reference, or pronunciation. These tools follow the written grammar; they do not define it. Speakers still get free order and a singable shape.
- Inspect — paste a sentence and click or highlight a word to see its job, root sense, and how the clause hangs together.
- Text-to-speech — on that same page, Speak Agalan plays the text. Letter-to-sound spelling plus a small syllable inventory make speech a mapping, not a guess. Show IPA transcribes the same spoken forms.
How to learn from these docs
Grammar pages use Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced sections so you can finish all Beginner material across this folder before Intermediate, then Advanced. Not every page has every difficulty section, so skip that page if it doesn't have the difficulty you are currently on.
Follow the Suggested reading order in the site sidebar (same sequence on every page). Read each page’s Beginner section in that order, then every peer’s Intermediate, then Advanced.
The sidebar Tools list includes Terminology for the English names these pages use for grammar (with a short gloss and a link to the teaching section), plus Lexicon and Inspect for roots and interlinear.
Continue with core.md for clause shape.
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 your feedback and questions.
Speak uses KittenTTS (KittenML) in the browser via ONNX Runtime Web, with token mapping and voice-file loading adapted from kitten-tts-js. The grammar site is built with VitePress; parsing uses Chevrotain and Peggy.