Faleni the easy tongue

sopo hi sena: The Cat and the Moon

The first Faleni reference text. It is an original story, written in Faleni, not translated into it, and it uses no words outside the dictionary and no rules outside the ten. That is the point: it is a stress test. If the language needed a special case to tell a simple story, this is where it would show.

How to read it. Tap any Faleni line to hear it. The English underneath is a literary translation: what the sentence means. Press gloss to see the word-for-word layer, which is generated straight from the dictionary, so it can never quietly disagree with the words the story actually uses.

One thing that will look odd, and shouldn't. Faleni has no tense. sopo ha sane is the cat lives / lived / will live: the story is set in the past by ahe ("once") in the first line, and after that context carries it, exactly as it does in the spoken parts of many natural languages. Faleni also has one third-person pronoun, wi, for he / she / it / they. The literary English picks "it"; the gloss honestly shows all of them.

The story

  1. ahe, sopo li ha sane niju seto.Once, a small cat lived beside a lake.
  2. sopo ha luma, hi mi wi ha leho.The cat was black, and its eyes were green.
  3. noti a, wi ha kali nosa sa.Every night it walked down to the water.
  4. noti ta, wi ha mi sena niwi seto.One night it saw the moon in the lake.
  5. sena ha lame hi lufo.The moon was round and white.
  6. sopo ha mepa: wu ha suma le.The cat was certain: that is a big fish.
  7. wi ha luje u, hi wi ha me kahe suma.It was very hungry, and it wanted to catch the fish.
  8. wi ha kate niwi seto.It jumped into the lake.
  9. sa ha lika u.The water was bitterly cold.
  10. sopo ha he kona suma.The cat found no fish.
  11. sena ha he niwi seto.The moon was not in the lake at all.
  12. sopo ha kihu sa, hi wi ha lete hi moli.The cat left the water, wet and miserable.
  13. siwo lawo ha kiso niwi suni niju seto.An old bird was sitting in a tree by the lake.
  14. siwo ha fa: sena ha he niwi seto.The bird said: the moon is not in the lake.
  15. sena ha niwi soku.The moon is in the sky.
  16. sopo ha fewa: wa ha mi sena niwi seto jesa?The cat asked: then why do I see the moon in the lake?
  17. siwo ha fewo: seto ha kule soku.The bird answered: the lake shows you the sky.
  18. seto ha he soku.The lake is not the sky.
  19. sopo ha mepe.The cat understood.
  20. nima, wi ha mi soku, eno wi ha mi seto.Now it looks at the sky first, and only then at the lake.
  21. wi ha luje ale, api wi ha mese nima.It is still hungry, but it is wiser.

The line to remember:

  1. sena niwi seto ha he sena lole.The moon in the lake is not the real moon.

What the story proves (and what it doesn't)

It proves the small things a language has to do without special machinery, and Faleni does them with the ten rules and nothing else:

The story needed Faleni did it with
Setting a scene in the past ahe ("once"): a word, not a tense
"every night", "one night" a plain modifier after the noun: noti a, noti ta
Reported speech a colon. There is no quotative particle to learn.
A question inside the story jesa in the slot where the answer would go
Two clauses in one sentence a comma and hi / api / eno
"wet and sad" hi again, the same word, no agreement to make
A moral, stated flatly he before what is denied

It does not prove Faleni can do everything a literary language does. There is no vocabulary here for texture, no word for shimmer, bitterly, or miserable, which is why the English above is richer than the Faleni. That gap is real, and it is a vocabulary gap, not a grammar gap: every one of those is coinable (Coining words) or buildable from parts. The design bet is that adding words is cheap and adding rules is expensive, and a story is the first honest place to check that bet.

Try it yourself

Copy any line into the translator and take it apart. Then try writing the next paragraph: the cat has learned something, and the bird is still in the tree.

When you want a different shape of Faleni, read Asking the Way, a dialogue rather than a story.