Olu — “the lexicon as cohort marker”
454 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)
Olu brief · Olu 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 capped itself early. The community now lives with the cap: when new concepts arise, the community compounds rather than coins. Olu is a time-released version of this discipline. The language starts very small (50 root words) and grows by one word per month, with a hard ceiling at 200. After the ceiling, new words can only enter if old words are retired.
The lesson Olu tests: what happens when a language carries legible generational marks? When the year you learned to speak is visible in your vocabulary?
Profile
Olu’s growth is ritual. Each month, the community proposes candidate words, debates, ratifies one. The chosen word’s entry date is part of its identity and is taught alongside its meaning. A speaker who learned Olu in 2030 has a 100-word vocabulary; a speaker in 2040 has a 200-word vocabulary and can read both eras — but the 2030 speaker reads 2040 texts as crowded.
Retirement, once the cap is reached, becomes its own social-political event. Retired words leave traces — they’re remembered as ancestor words, citable but no longer used.
The cohort effect is the point. A language whose vocabulary tells you when the speaker came of age — like fashion, like slang, but slowed down and formalized.
Examples
Imagine the Olu of 2030 contains mero (water-in-a-vessel). In 2035, the community admits threa (water-in-motion). A 2030-cohort speaker, reading a 2036 text, can guess what threa means from context but doesn’t yet have it in their active vocabulary. By 2045, the cap is reached. The community debates: retire mero (which is now subsumed by newer water-words) or retire kosp (a word from 2031 that has faded)? The debate is part of the language’s culture.
A simple sentence in 2030-Olu:
- mero du sun — “water in vessel, drink, morning” → “morning tea.”
The same speaker visiting 2040: their tea sentence is grammatical, just “old-fashioned.” Listeners hear the date.
Future action research
- Anti-jargon deployment. Introduce Olu to a community drowning in acronyms (an early-stage startup, a hospital ward, a research lab). Measure communication overhead before and after. Does the bounded vocabulary force clearer thinking?
- Intergenerational comprehension. Survey speakers of multiple cohorts. At what vocabulary-gap does mutual readability degrade? Map the degradation curve.
- Word-life ecology. Which words survive retirement debates? Are they the high-frequency words, the emotionally-rich, or something else? Power-law dynamics analysis.
- Comparison with Basic English (Ogden, 1930) and Globish. These were bounded vocabularies that didn’t grow. What does Olu’s managed growth teach that static bounds don’t?
- Cultural memory. Interview Olu speakers about retired words. Are the retirements mourned? Do retired words become loaded with nostalgia, the way old slang does in natural languages?