toki pi soweli telo Apmau'mur

by Lucas Ericsson, Miguel Diaz, and Tejas Patel

And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die. Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever.

— Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Apmua’mur is a language about ducks! Every word for a living being is derived from the word “duck” or “uampa.” Originally, it came from a joke in Spanish calling each other “pato”, but it now has become the greatest compliment to call someone a “good duck” or “uampa’tav” in our language.

The main unique parts of this language are its VSO (Verb Subject Object) word order, its reversing of letter order to create opposing concept words, and the conjugation of the tense of a verb goes in front of a verb.

Since “apmau” is the reversed letter order of “uampa” it refers to the opposite concept, and “mur” is the word for “language.” So the name of this language is essentially: “Totally not a duck language.”

This blog post covers the essential ideas needed for learning the language.

Phonology / Romanization

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Vowels	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Open		a

Each phoneme in the language uses the IPA symbol for the sound unless otherwise indicated; the exception to this is the schwa, which does not have a dedicated symbol but is instead used implicitly in certain consonant clusters. It is also used when the glottal stop is surrounded by consonants to ease in pronunciation.

The consonants were picked largely from English, reducing English’s inventory to a more simplified set of consonants, plus borrowing /ɲ/ and /r/ from Spanish.

The vowels consist of the five vowel system with the schwa included.

Grammar

Apmau’mur’s sentences are written in Verb Subject Object (VSO) order. The goal is to place emphasis on the action.

For example:

Tenses

Tenses are indicated by the prefix to the verb. If a prefix ever has a vowel next to another vowel, a glottal stop (’) is inserted.

Our tenses include:

Pronouns

Our personal pronouns are, by default, genderless, and the plural can be created by reversing the letter order of the characters for the singular pronoun. We also differentiate between they for objects and they for people.

Personal Pronoun	Singular	Plural
I	oya	ayo
You	ila	ali
him/her	imya	aymi
it	il	li

For demonstrative pronouns, we have

Demonstrative Pronoun	Singular	Plural
this	tol	lot
that	pol	lop
that (non-physical)	por	rop

Questions

All questions are created by using the word “uj” as “what.” “uj” can also function as a modifier to ask about the property of something else.

Common examples include:

Modifiers and Adjectives

To create new words, one can use two words and join them with a glottal stop (’) with the second word modifying the meaning of the first.

You can see it clearly in this example:

This allows you to take simple starting words and combine them to create a more complicated word. The later words essentially function as adjectives and modify the concept of the original object.

Conjunctions

We have the following conjunctions:

apmau	eng
vim	and
miv	or
tir	because
vim’vat	but

Prepositions

We have the following prepositions:

apmau	eng
pa	in
yu	at
apli	of
ilpa	to
yujol	on
laz	during
yaj	for
jay	with
ei	if
ie	then

Indirect Objects

Some verbs are transitive of degree two, which means that they can have an indirect object. To do this in Apmau’mur, you must use the word “uñe” before the indirect object.

Example:

Opposing Concepts

To generate new words that are of the opposite concept, you can take a word and reverse the order of the characters.

For example:

Or another:

Orthography