Ren — “things are slowed-down verbs”
422 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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Ren brief · Ren 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 lets parts of speech flex — the same word can be noun, verb, modifier. Ren takes the next step: it removes the noun category entirely. Everything in Ren is a verb, a relation, or a process. A “stone” is “the long-settled.” A “river” is “the keeps-flowing.” A “person” is “the deciding-walking.”
The lesson Ren tests: process philosophy (Whitehead), Buddhist anatman, and some strains of cognitive science argue that the noun-bias of Indo-European languages produces a corresponding object-bias in metaphysics. What happens if a language refuses the bias?
Profile
Ren has ~200 verbal roots — none of them name an object. Nominal expressions are built by adding participle markers that “freeze” a verb into a referent. kal- (to settle) → kal-i (the settled-thing). But the participle never fully escapes the verb beneath it; the metaphysics of Ren is one of continuously slowed processes.
Identity itself is grammatical: “I” is jen-i, “the-currently-deciding- walking.” Past selves are jen-iko (“the-once-deciding-walking-now-stilled”).
Ren is hard to learn. The hard part is unlearning the impulse to reach for a noun.
Examples
- kal- — to settle / kal-i — the long-settled → stone, sediment, decision
- vey- — to flow / vey-i — the keeps-flowing → river, current, narrative
- jen- — to decide-and-walk / jen-i — the deciding-walking → person, agent
- lum- — to glow-from-within / lum-i — the glow-from-within → fire, star, insight
- gar- — to hold-without-gripping / gar-i — the holding-without-gripping → container, parent, gravity
Sentence:
- jen-i mi kal-i vey-i la sona — “the deciding-walking [I] settled-thing keeps-flowing [river] in la knowing” → “I, watching the river, came to know.”
The verb-first grain of every utterance pushes the speaker toward dynamics and away from static description.
Future action research
- Cognitive framing. Standard psychology tasks (e.g., the essentialism-bias studies in developmental psych) rerun with Ren speakers. Do they show reduced essentialism about social categories?
- Self-concept. Interview Ren-speakers about identity. Do they describe themselves more episodically (a string of decisions-and-walks) than essentially (a noun, a kind)?
- Buddhist & process-philosophy collaboration. Use Ren as a research medium for traditions that hold no-self / process-primary metaphysics. Does the language help articulate what English struggles to?
- Machine learning. Train an LLM on Ren-shaped data. Does its internal representation of objects shift toward dynamic, time-indexed embeddings? (Compare frozen and unfrozen states.)
- Object permanence reframing. A small experiment with bilingual children (Ren-English) on classic Piaget tasks. The hypothesis is gentle and falsifiable — but worth testing.