Hesi — “words are expensive; spend them well”
461 words. Part of the Conlangs as Tools project, edition v1.2 (2026-09-27).
Brief drafted by Doruga (Pete’s mobile-companion agent), edited by Peter Kaminski, 2026-05-28.
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© Peter Kaminski · CC-BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)
Hesi brief · Hesi deep dive → · project home · all files (.zip)
Languages: Toki Pona · Taso · Kipona · Ren · Maku · Sito · Olu · Vesi · Korē · Drosa · Hesi
What it explores
Toki Pona slows speech: the small vocabulary forces deliberation, and speakers often report that a Toki Pona conversation has a different tempo than an English one. Hesi takes the lesson and pushes it to the limit. In Hesi, silence is the unmarked communicative state. Speech is the exception. Words are deployed sparingly, on purpose, and carry weight.
The lesson it tests: many contemplative traditions — Quaker meetings, zazen, Trappist orders, certain Indigenous decision-making practices — treat speech as the costly act. Hesi is what happens if a community formalizes that into grammar.
Profile
The headline mechanic is a daily word budget. Each speaker has, say, 50 words per day in spoken Hesi. Unspent words don’t roll over. A few free particles (yes, no, here, please, thank-you) don’t count.
Silence is grammatical. A gap of fifteen seconds in a Hesi conversation is not awkward; it is content. Listening is the unmarked activity. Hesi has forms for acknowledged silence, generative silence, and closing silence, distinguished by posture and gaze.
Hesi distinguishes spoken weight from written weight: letters, books, and notes operate on a separate, much larger budget. Written Hesi is verbose relative to spoken Hesi.
The budget is the discipline. The cultural effect is a community of listeners.
Examples
A Hesi conversation might look like this over two hours:
[twenty minutes of shared silence, walking] Speaker A (six words): the lake is clear at dawn [ten minutes of silence] Speaker B (four words): yes — the swans returned [thirty minutes of silence, sitting] Speaker A (eight words): I thought my mother would have liked this
Eighteen words. Two hours. Both speakers go home with budget unspent and no felt absence — the conversation was full.
A formal greeting in Hesi takes one syllable: ha. To say more than ha on arrival is to mark the encounter as urgent.
Future action research
- Meditation pairing. Run Hesi-practice retreats. Measure attention, listening accuracy, and reported well-being against ordinary retreats.
- Information density. Do Hesi sentences carry more information per word (Shannon-style)? Sample utterances; measure.
- Pair-bonding and long relationships. Long-married couples often communicate efficiently with few words. Is Hesi a formalization of an already-observed pattern? Interview studies.
- Tech. Build a messaging app with Hesi-style daily token budgets. Observe how people change what they send. Hypothesis: signal-to-noise improves; loneliness may also rise. Both deserve measurement.
- Workplace protocol. Hesi-style meeting protocols: every participant has a fixed budget for the meeting. Decision quality, meeting length, participation equality — compare with standard meetings.
- Risk audit. Hesi could become a status-stratifier (those with communicative resources can afford to listen; those who must advocate for themselves cannot). Any deployment should anticipate this and build accommodations.