Korē — “what you feel is what you say”
467 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)
Korē brief · Korē 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 is embodied — its vocabulary is grounded in lived experience (food, sleep, water, walking, talking). Korē takes the grounding further and relocates it inside the speaker. The lexicon contains no words for objects qua objects. There are no nouns for “chair” or “rain” or “knife.” There are only words for felt qualities, tensions, and affordances — what the chair does to you, what the rain feels like, what the knife promises or threatens.
The lesson it tests: emotion granularity research (Lisa Feldman Barrett and others) suggests that finer-grained emotion vocabulary correlates with better emotion regulation, mental health, and decision-making. What happens if a whole language is built on that observation?
Profile
~100 root words, all denoting felt qualities. Verbs are felt-transitions (to brighten in the chest, to soften toward sleep). Nouns are felt-states (the settled hold, the bright edge). To refer to an object, a Korē speaker names what the object does in them.
This sounds limiting. In practice it is generative: the same external thing gets different Korē names in different contexts. The same chair is the settled hold when you sink into it after a day’s walking and the held spine when you sit upright before an interview. The language refuses to hand you a stable, decontextualized object.
Korē is naturally close to poetry, therapy, and design — the three domains that already think in affordances.
Examples
Core roots:
- hol — the-settled-hold (a chair, a hug, gravity, security)
- vyu — the-many-touches-gentle (rain, applause, snow, mild criticism)
- sken — the-hollow-pull (hunger, longing, anticipation)
- brem — the-bright-edge (sharpness, danger, clarity, ambition)
- darn — the-thick-warm (a hot drink, a familiar room, a long friendship)
- kuthi — the-thin-bright (winter sun, exact joy, fresh insight)
Sentence:
- vyu lon mi — “the-many-touches-gentle is with me” → “I am being rained on” / “I am being applauded” / “I am being lightly criticized” — context resolves which, and the speaker is committed to noticing that all three share a phenomenology.
Future action research
- Therapy and alexithymia. Korē as a clinical adjunct. Does practice with a Korē-style vocabulary help patients with low emotion granularity articulate and regulate their inner states? Pre/post measurement.
- Cross-cultural emotion mapping. Do Korē learners report shifts in emotion granularity over months? Compare with Feldman Barrett’s measurement instruments.
- Generative AI alignment. A Korē-trained model might be better at empathic phrasing — what it can’t do is gloss past felt experience to abstraction. Run user-preference studies on therapy-chatbot output.
- Industrial design. Ask product designers to evaluate consumer objects in Korē. Hypothesis: they catch affordances and emotional resonances that English-language evaluation misses.
- Mindfulness and meditation. Korē as a vocabulary for body-scan and somatic practice. Compare reported subjective clarity against English-language guidance.