1. KOTEN-1

Requested by no one.

KOTEN-1 is an international auxiliary language by James Rand (/u/nicetonietzche). According to its author, it’s meant to be a subset of a larger language to act as a “foot in the door”, so it’s pretty minimalistic.

Phonology

Consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Dorsal
Stop	p	t	k g
Fricative	f	s
Nasal	m	n
Approximant	w	l	y /j/

There are a few obvious problems with this inventory. Not only is /f/ is pretty uncommon cross-linguistically, there’s a voicing distinction – but only with /k ɡ/! (Not to mention there’s only one minimal pair: namely, kolo and golo.)

 

Vowels

This is a five-vowel inventory with /ɑ ɛ i o u/. This is fine and not much to worry about.

Phonotactics

(C)V(t|n). Allowing final /t/ is a bit unusual, but it’s not terribly hard to pronounce.

Grammar

(the part you’ve all been waiting for)

Koten-1’s root words are predicates. For instance, kane is translated as x1 sees x2, and pana means x1 is big. You can add suffixes to get the arguments to the predicates: kanen means “one who sees”, panan means “something big” and kanet means “something that is seen”.

Sentences are in SVO order:

muten pana

be_a_person-X1 be_big

the person is big

gisan gisa gisat so

give-X1 give give-X2 OBJ_TERMINATOR

the giver gives gifts

Notice the particle so at the end. It’s optional at the end of the statement, but necessary elsewhere. This is the difference between gisan gisa gisat pana (the giver gives big gifts) and gisan gisa gisat so pana (the giver gives gifts and is big). However, the usage isn’t quite consistent – the structurally similar akon fo gisat so pana is translated as “the action of the gift is good” or “being given is good”. In other words, so is used as a conjunction in one place and as a grouping marker in another place. Not to mention that implicitly nesting clauses (in gisan gisa gisat pana) is plain confusing!

Then the author decides that ambiguity is a bad thing and has adverb phrases set off by both an opening and a closing particle (he … lo). Luckily, there’s also a version (li) that captures a single word.

Conjunction works similarly, but the opening particle in this case is pa for “and” and po for “or”. When you’re listing more than two items, the structure is slightly unusual:

muten gisa gisat pa ilon yaman lo

be_a_person-X1 give give-X2 AND be_tool-X1 be_animal-X1 END

A person gives a gift, a tool and an animal

Note than the second and third items in the list are juxtaposed between the conjunction and the end marker.

Koten-1 also allows a few shortcuts; for instance, muten gisa gisat po yaman lo so pana can be abbreviated to muten gisa gisat po yaman so pana (eliding the nested end marker) or muten gisa gisat po yaman na pana (using na to replace all of the end markers).

One interesting feature of Koten-1 is the “attitudinals” which express the speaker’s emotions:

tun ike you are here

ahe tun ike you are here (and I am happy about it)

usi tun ike you are here (and I am sad about it)

This is something that not many auxlangs do as a first-class feature.

Verdict

The idea of a “foot-in-the-door” language is intriguing, and Koten-1 has a few nice features, but the author should clarify the semantics of nested clauses and their interactions with so. The phonology is slightly unusual as well, and I’d consider removing /ɡ/.