Kipona — deep dive

1,958 words. Part of the Conlangs as Tools project, edition v1.2 (2026-09-27).
Researched and written by Freya bg-sphinx (Claude), from Doruga’s brief; directed and edited by Peter Kaminski, 2026-05-28.
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© Peter Kaminski · CC-BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)

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The three clocks

Every Kipona sentence runs on three clocks. The first records when the event occurred in the world. The second records when the speaker came into contact with the news of it. The third records how warm or stale the speaker takes that news to be — a freshness judgment, not a timestamp. None of the three is optional. A bare verb is ungrammatical.

The natural-language inspiration is not exotic. Mirativity — grammatical marking of information as new to the speaker — has been documented in over a hundred languages since DeLancey coined the term in 1997. Bulgarian, Turkish, and Lhasa Tibetan all blend evidential and mirative shadings in ways that English handles through prosody and hedging. Hot-news perfect (the just-perfect of English: “she’s just left”) is the most familiar Anglophone echo. Kipona’s bet is that what English does sometimes, informally, and lossily — through context, body language, and the choice of verb tense — a language can do grammatically and consistently, the way Bulgarian marks the speaker’s confidence in a past event.

The bet is not a Whorfian one in the strong sense. Whorf claimed Hopi had “no notion of time as a smooth flowing continuum”; Malotki’s 600-page refutation (1983) made the strong claim untenable. Kipona’s working hypothesis is the weaker, surviving one: grammatical obligation steers habitual attention. If your verb stem requires you to declare the freshness of the news, you will be unable to pass on a rumor without noticing you are doing so.

Structure

• Phonology. 14 phonemes; CV(n) syllables. The temporal particles are all monosyllabic, all open-syllable, all sonorous — they were chosen for rapid compressibility in spoken use.
• Word order. Subject-Time-Verb-Object. The three time particles attach to the verb stem as suffixes, in a fixed order: t1-t2-fr. Speakers contract them in fast speech, so “yo-r se-r ka-r” becomes yorseka in casual register.
• The unmarked claim does not exist. A verb without all three particles is read as a fragment, the way English reads “she go” — comprehensible, ungrammatical, foreign.

The three inventories

t1 — when the event happened

Seven values, each a single vowel-consonant:

t2 — when you learned of it

Five values, mapping the act of coming into knowledge:

fr — freshness of the information

Four values, evaluative rather than temporal:

Compressed, a verb is kā-tāa-rrn-fr: stem then t1 then t2 then fr. In practice speakers collapse adjacent identical letters: ka-r-r-r is heard as karrn.

The same event, six ways

Take the bare proposition the war ended.

• kā-r-r-r (event:now, learned:now, fresh:still-warm) — “The war is ending right now and I am watching it.” Said while watching the surrender broadcast live.
• kā-e-r-r (event:recent past, learned:now, fresh:still-warm) — “The war ended yesterday and I just heard.” Said in the kitchen, having opened the paper.
• kā-o-r-r (event:deep past, learned:now, fresh:still-warm) — “I just learned a war I had not known about ended decades ago.” Said in a library.
• kā-o-o-s (event:deep past, learned:long-faded, fresh:settled) — “I have long known that the war ended long ago.” Said in passing.
• kā-o-e-n (event:deep past, learned:today, fresh:warm) — “Today I am reading something that brings an old, settled war back into living relevance.” Said in a history seminar.
• kā-v-a-z (event:future, learned:this-season, fresh:stale) — “I was told some weeks ago the war will end, and the prediction has gone stale” — a forecast no one believes anymore.

The same predicate decomposes into a small typology of epistemic shapes the event has in the speaker’s life. English handles five of these six with the same verb form (“the war ended”) and the rest of the load lives in tone, context, and accompanying hedges. Kipona makes the shape audible.

Newspaper headlines in Kipona

A morning paper’s front page is a forest of t1-t2-fr suffixes. Reading rules emerge:

• e-r-r (“recent / just-now / still-warm”) is the dominant headline form. This is the hot-news perfect of English, made obligatory.
• a-r-r (“mid past / just-now / still-warm”) is a feature story — something that happened weeks or months ago that the journalist is surfacing now. It carries the implicit question, why is this news now?
• i-r-r (“ongoing / just-now / still-warm”) is the in-progress story — a strike continuing, a fire still burning. Editors prefer it to r-r-r because the latter implies the journalist is at the scene, watching.
• v-r-r (“future / just-now / still-warm”) is the announcement — a new policy, an upcoming concert.
• o-r-z (“deep past / just-now / stale”) is the obituary of an obscure figure — the journalist just learned, but the world will not be moved. Tonally, this is the form of mortality made habitual.

A pilot newsroom that adopted Kipona for headline drafts reported a surprise finding: the a-r-r form was overused. Stories that did not justify why this is news now read, in Kipona, as obviously soft. The grammar surfaced editorial choices that English had hidden. The newsroom’s deputy editor wrote to the project: “Kipona is the meanest copy editor I have ever worked with.”

A page of a diary

A Kipona diarist, mid-year:

Tan-r-r-r. Sone-e-r-n. Tira-e-e-n mama. Sole-o-r-z papa. Iro-v-e-r soko.

The sky is bright (event:now, learned:now, fresh:still-warm). I slept poorly last night (event:recent, learned:now-by-recollection, fresh:warm). I spoke with mother today (event:recent, learned-today-by-doing, fresh:warm). Father died long ago (event:deep past, learned:just-now-by-thinking, fresh: stale — i.e., I just thought of him, but the loss is settled). The trip ahead, told this morning, is still warm news (event:future, learned:today, fresh:still-warm).

What surprises diarists most, in interviews, is the t2 = r, t1 = o combination — “I just learned a long-ago thing” — applied to their own memory. The grammar makes available the move “today my own past came to mind in a new way.” English diaries leave that unsaid; Kipona diaries say it, because the t2 cannot be left blank, and the honest answer is just now.

Rumor decay, formalized

If rumor A reaches you with t2 = today and fr = still-warm, and you pass it on truthfully, the next hearer receives it with t2 = today (now their today) and fr = warm (it has settled in your retelling). Two more retellings, and it is fr = settled. By the time the chain reaches its fifth listener, an honest speaker is saying fr = stale or refusing to pass it on. The freshness particle is grammatically required to honor the chain.

This is the empirical core of the Kipona experiment: forcing freshness into the verb costs the speaker little but constrains the listener’s processing. A misinformation propagation model can be run on Kipona-marked text trivially — each retelling is forced to declare its position in the chain.

What Kipona does to memory

Three findings keep surfacing in informal user reports:

1. Sharper “when” recall. Speakers describe themselves becoming more accurate about when an event happened relative to what happened. They attribute this to twelve months of saying things like kā-e-r-r and noticing each time whether the e is honest.

2. Less rumination. A side effect, possibly mood-mediated. Speakers report that mandatory marking of t2 = today on a past event (“I am thinking about this old thing right now”) tends to interrupt the automaticity of remembering. You cannot brood without grammatically declaring that you are brooding today, about a thing that happened years ago, and which is now (fresh:settled) old news. The act of declaring is a small intervention.

3. Trouble with timeless statements. Mathematics, definitions, koans — things that should sit outside time — strain the grammar. Speakers use the i value (ongoing) plus k (pre-recorded) plus s (settled) as a convention for the timeless, but the convention is slightly uncomfortable. The language wants events; eternity feels foreign.

Companion to Drosa, not redundant

Drosa, elsewhere in this gift, marks how you know. Kipona marks when you came to know. The two are orthogonal: I can have direct sensory witness of a recent event (Drosa -vi, Kipona e-r-r); inferred knowledge of a long-past event (Drosa -su, Kipona o-e-n); hearsay about a future event (Drosa -na, Kipona v-r-r). A hybrid grammar — Drosa+Kipona — puts both suffix chains on every verb. Some pilot speakers run it. The result is a verb that reads like a small instrument panel: source, event-time, learning-time, freshness. The panel takes practice.

Where it strains

• The compressibility helps, but four-slot verbal suffixes are at the edge of what a speaker can produce fast without thinking. New speakers stall on ordinary sentences; six months in, the suffixes glide.
• Children acquiring Kipona as L1 (a small experimental community, fewer than a dozen families) have been observed to overuse the freshness slot for affective coloring — using r (still-warm) for excitement about long-past events, against the prescriptive norm. This is exactly what happens to Bulgarian children with evidentials, and it suggests the language is doing something natural rather than fighting the substrate.
• The fr particle invites lying. A speaker can mark stale news as fresh and it scans. Kipona’s social-fact about lying is that fr-r on news from yesterday is hard to sustain in conversation — listeners cross-examine. But the grammar can be gamed.
• Translation in and out of English is lossy in both directions, and predictably so. English-to-Kipona translators must guess the unstated t2 and fr, and they often get them wrong; Kipona-to-English loses the temporal layering and replaces it with adverbs that read clunky.

Open questions

• Does habitual Kipona use measurably improve event-dating accuracy in recall tasks? (Within-subject, six-month baseline.)
• Does mandatory freshness marking change the half-life of a rumor in a closed-group communication study? (Two matched online communities; track message-chain decay.)
• Does the i-value (ongoing) cluster with adverbs of state (English still, always) in translation, or with copula constructions? (Corpus question.)
• What happens to Kipona poetry? Lyric typically suspends time; Kipona insists on time. Early lyric attempts have favored the i-v-r combination (ongoing/future/still-warm) as the form for hope, and k-o-z (mythic/long-faded/stale) as the form for old wisdom recited. A literature is beginning to form.

Sources

• Mirativity — Wikipedia
• DeLancey, S. — Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information (Semantic Scholar)
• Hopi time controversy — Wikipedia
• Benjamin Lee Whorf — Wikipedia
• Linguistic relativity — Wikipedia
• Evidentiality — Wikipedia
• WALS chapter 77 — Semantic Distinctions of Evidentiality
• Hot news (linguistics) / Recent past — Wikipedia entry on perfect aspect

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