kia — hello.
Phi is a philosophical constructed language for practicing mindful and compassionate speech. It asks speakers to attend to the present utterance: what they know, what they intend, and how their words may enter a relationship. Its unhurried quality is freedom from needless haste, not a prescribed speaking speed.
The language has one modifier-first organizing principle, regular forms, a lexicon past a thousand words, a literature shelf of translations and original work, and a published book asking what such a language can honestly claim.
The reader-facing shelves are rebuilt at phi.syrinx.net whenever main changes; the site opens at hello and offers its doors from there. The rest of this page maps the language sources and working records behind them.
| The walk | short_road.md | Phi's main systems at walking pace: about twenty minutes, with working examples along the way. |
| The primer | primer/ | Learn Phi by reading it: a prelude, thirty graded chapters about one household, and a capstone. No prior knowledge assumed. |
| The book | book/ | Narrative nonfiction for a general reader: why the language works this way, and what the sciences of language and mind let it claim. A cold open, fourteen chapters, a close, and a consolidated bibliography. |
| The manual | manual/ | The complete reference: phonology, the particle system, ternary numerals, social practice, source-material boundaries, and translation. For verification and depth. |
| The pamphlets | pamphlets/ | Focused companions to the manual, with extended examples, exercises, and answers. They cover difficult grammar as well as numerals, naming, source material, and Tengwar. |
| The texts | texts/ | Phi's literature: translations answer to their sources, with a visible certification mark after they complete the isolated process. Original works begin in Phi, and the Ring Verse receives a refusal rather than a softened rendering. News from Nowhere keeps its opening chapters together as one book. |
| The lexicon | explorer on the site | Every word and registered compound, with meanings and relations close at hand. |
vocabulary/ and documents/ say what the language is, the manual explains it, the primer teaches it, and the book asks why. texts/ is where Phi is read; the pamphlets are where it is practiced.
| vocabulary/ | The lexicon source: one JSON file per word, with its schema and semantic-domain catalogue beside it. More than one thousand entries. |
| documents/ | Current language documentation, indexed and separated by purpose. |
| documents/modules/ | Eight established vocabulary modules: optional specialist words organized over the one shared grammar, never a separate one. |
| project/ | Operational records for language decisions, current plans, translation certification, publication, and releases. |
| tengwar/ | The current Phi Tengwar specification, renderer outlines, and source font. Retired writing-system studies remain in the archive. |
| kia.md | The site's front page: the invitation and its seven doors, rendered to the index on every merge. |
| canon.md | The authority order when documents disagree, together with Phi's settled language decisions. |
| colophon.md | How Phi is made: the designer, the instrument, and the rules between them. Signed at the end, in the old way. |
| site/ | Maintained website assets for the lexicon explorer and reading shelves. Build the deployable site with python3 scripts/build_site.py; generated output goes to ignored build/site/. |
Machine checks guard the parts of the repository they can establish, and CI runs them on every pull request. The core local checks are:
python3 -m pip install --requirement project/requirements.txt
python3 scripts/validate_examples.py
python3 scripts/validate_sentences.py
python3 scripts/test_sentence_validator.py
python3 scripts/translation_process_status.py --check
python3 scripts/source_reconstruction.pyInstall the pinned dependency once for each Python environment. The lexical validator checks every entry against the executable schema before applying Phi's sound, layout, and corpus rules. It also checks lexical use across active documents. The sentence parser is a separate gate for complete examples in the lexicon and maintained teaching corpus. For the Morris chapters, the source-reconstruction checker selects each chapter from the stored novel and requires the ordered citations to reproduce it exactly. Machines can reject a particle in the wrong place or find a missing source phrase; they cannot decide whether a translation has understood Morris. Literary translations therefore use the isolated process and its generated certification register.
The CI workflow contains the complete recipe. If you change the vocabulary, regenerate the derived reference with python3 scripts/generate_reference.py. Settled language decisions live in canon.md; the current sequence lives in the near-term development plan; broader work and evidence gates live in the status roadmap. The development protocol governs language work, while the publishing strategy holds the longer view.
Phi separates the language from the work that describes it. The language itself is free. Phi's words, sounds, and grammar may be used, spoken, written, and built on by anyone, forever, with no permission needed. The code in scripts/, site/, and .github/ is Apache 2.0. The original project content uses CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: share and adapt it with attribution for noncommercial purposes, and keep derivatives under the same license. The Solarpunk Manifesto source and translation retain their CC BY-SA 4.0 license, while third-party fonts retain their own licenses. LICENSE has the complete boundaries.
lo mia po nuawe thuroa. — We can grow together.