rock

tune rock

The Chanted Tune

Introduction

Tune Tree is the first Tune. It has nine sounds and one syllable shape. It gave way to Tune Rock, which grew to seventeen sounds and a closed syllable, and Rock in turn gave way to Tune Moon.

Tree is a chanting language. It is built for song, for humming, for keeping a beat, and for plain statements. It is not built for careful talk. Anything that needs precision needs Rock or Moon.

Every sound in Tree is one a body makes without a tool. Two hums, three drum hits, one breath, three vowels.

Sounds

Nine sounds.

mark	sound	note
i	keep	high, out, bright
a	far	level, surface, warm
u	moon	low, inner, dark
m	mark	the good hum
n	note	the bad hum
p	play	the lip hit
t	time	the tongue hit
k	king	the throat hit, a rock chipping
h	heal	the breath

Vowels are the Spanish i a u.

The hum. m and n are the two sounds you can hold with your mouth shut. They carry polarity. m is good, warm, toward. n is bad, cold, away.

The beat. p, t and k are the three places you can stop the air and let it go. Lips, tongue, throat. They are the drum kit.

The breath. h is grammar rather than vocabulary. It carries the three roles and appears nowhere else.

Syllables

Every syllable is CV. No clusters, no codas, no two vowels together.

mi ma mu
ni na nu
pi pa pu
ti ta tu
ki ka ku

hi ha hu

Fifteen lexical syllables and three grammatical ones. Eighteen in all, and that is the whole sound of the language.

Words

A word is a root of one, two or three syllables, and an optional role syllable on the end.

ma        maha    mahi    mahu
mata      mataha  matahi  matahu
matanu    matanuha  matanuhi  matanuhu

There is no compounding. Tree says one thing per word. Where Rock joins atoms to build a longer term, Tree takes a new word.

The Three Roles

Tree marks a role with a whole syllable, because a bare vowel is not a syllable Tree can say. The breath carries it.

suffix	role
-ha	entity	the thing form
-hi	action	the process form
-hu	feature	the property form, and how one word modifies another

tamaha = house
tamahi = build
tamahu = built

tamahu kunaha = the built dog
nataha kunahi tamaha = the person sees the house

Leaving it off

The suffix is optional. In chant it usually comes off, and the role is left to context and to the beat.

nata kuna tama

That is a line you can drum. Say the same thing carefully and the roles come back.

What Tree Cannot Do

Tree has three roles. Moon has five. The two that are missing had not been invented yet.

• No relation form. Moon has -e for links. Tree uses an action word in series: nata tamahi kuna puts the person at the house by saying the being-at.
• No operator form. Moon has -o for negation, conjunction, question and the rest. Tree has none. Negation is an ordinary word. A question is a tone of voice.

This is the ceiling. Tree can say what is, what happens and what something is like. It cannot cleanly say not, or, if, or of.

Rules

Four rules decide whether a root is a Tree word. Each one is in code/sound.ts and code/calculate.ts reports what each one costs.

rule	what it says
breath-is-grammar	h never appears in a root, only on the role syllable
no-triple-consonant	no consonant carries three syllables in a row
no-repeated-close-vowel	no i beside i and no u beside u, a beside a is fine
no-opening-echo	the first two syllables never repeat

Three of those are worth saying more about.

Breath is grammar. h carries the role and nothing else, so every h in a chanted stream is the end of a word. That is what makes Tree parseable when it is sung with no pauses.

The echo is reserved. A root whose first two syllables repeat, mama or kuku, is the intensive. Fifteen shapes at two syllables and two hundred and twenty five at three are held back for it.

m and n are the exception to clarity. They are the one pair in Tree that is easy to confuse, and Tree leans on that pair rather than avoiding it. mata and nata are meant to be a minimal pair, because good and bad are meant to sit that close together. Every other consonant is far from every other one, which is what a three vowel, five consonant system buys you.

Word Counts

Roots, before and after the rules.

syllables	letters	pattern	raw	clear	held back
1	2	CV	15	15	0
2	4	CVCV	225	170	15
3	6	CVCVCV	3,375	1,980	225
		total		2,165

Surface words, counting the bare root and the three role forms.

root syllables	bare	ha	hi	hu	all
1	15	15	15	15	60
2	170	170	170	170	680
3	1980	1980	1980	1980	7,920
					8,660

Tree is small enough to keep whole. Rock has to be generated and Moon has to be hand tuned, but every Tree word that survives the four rules is in the lexicon.

The one syllable roots are the closed class. Fifteen words for the things a language points with: this, that, me, you, one, two, yes, no.

Beats

Tree is chanted, so what matters is how long a word runs.

beats	shapes	count
1	CV	15
2	CV+hV, CVCV	215
3	CVCV+hV, CVCVCV	2,490
4	CVCVCV+hV	5,940

Dropping the role syllable takes a beat off. That is the main rhythmic move in the language: the same thought at three beats or at four, depending on the line.

How Tree Became Rock

Two changes.

The beats fanned out. Voicing and frication arrived, and they arrived on p, t and k and nowhere else.

Tree	Rock	what happened
i a u	i a u	held, all three
m	m	held
n	n	held
p	p b f v	voicing, frication, both
t	t d s z	voicing, frication, both
k	k g x j	voicing, frication, both
h		lost

Five lexical consonants became fourteen. The vowels did not move at all: it was Moon, much later, that split them.

The breath was lost. It was grammar, so it died with the grammar. The role syllable hV wore down to a bare vowel, and with it the only h in the language went.

mata + hi    ->    bat + i    ->    bati
CVCV + hV          CVC + V

Rock has no h. Moon has one, but it is a weakened k, not this one.

Files

file	what it is
code/sound.ts	the inventory, the rules, the sort order, and the correspondence to Rock
code/calculate.ts	generates every root and word, reports what each rule costs, writes base/
code/fold.ts	carries Rock back to Tree and writes base/ancestor.csv
sounds.md	what each of the nine sounds means
words.md	the concepts Tree has words for

Generated data:

file	what is in it
base/root/{2,4,6}.csv	roots, by how many letters the root has
base/word/{2,4,6,8}.csv	surface words, by word length, so the number is twice the beats
base/ancestor.csv	the Moon lexicon carried all the way back

pnpm --dir deck/tune exec tsx make/v3/rock/code/calculate.ts
pnpm --dir deck/tune exec tsx make/v3/rock/code/fold.ts

fold.ts reads ../rock/base/ancestor.csv, so run the Rock fold first. See ../readme.md for the whole order.

The Ancestral Lexicon

Tree's lexicon is not invented separately. It is the Moon lexicon carried back through Rock, which is the only way the three can stay consistent.

All 5,276 Rock words fold to Tree with nothing strained. They land on 69 of Tree's 170 two syllable roots, about 41%.

That ratio is the point. Nine sounds could not hold six thousand meanings apart. kana in Tree stands behind garden, spirit, count, zero, aggregate, object and vehicle in Moon, and the splitting of the sounds is exactly what pulled them back apart.

A Rock word of two atoms comes back as two Tree words, because Tree does not compound. Of the 5,276, six hundred and eighteen are a single Tree word and the rest are phrases.

License

MIT

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