Sito — “the hands know the words”
441 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)
Sito brief · Sito 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’s sitelen pona showed that a logographic, visual writing system can be intuitive, fast to learn, and aesthetically alive. Sito takes the modality further: it makes the body the primary medium. Gesture is the language; speech is optional, secondary, and decorative — used for darkness, distance, or low-vision contexts.
The lesson it tests: how much of language is available to gesture if you stop treating gesture as accompaniment and start treating it as the spine? Existing signed languages are full languages — Sito does not claim to be unique in that — but Sito is designed to be co-acquirable by hearing people as a community lingua franca, not as a substitute for natural sign.
Profile
~150 lexical gestures, deliberately anatomically minimal: one or two hands, sometimes a head tilt, sometimes a gaze direction. Grammar runs on gesture-sequence and body-orientation (toward addressee, toward referent, toward absent-referent). Sito has a quiet register (small movements, shoulder-height) and a loud register (large movements, full-arm). The quiet register works for crowded trains; the loud register works at distance.
Sito is intended for spatial computing and shared physical contexts where voice is awkward — meetings, libraries, hospitals, hikes.
Ethical note: Sito should be designed in dialogue with Deaf communities, not in isolation from them. The goal is bridge, not replacement.
Examples
A small vocabulary, written here as gesture-glosses:
- eye-trace (index finger traces own eye outward) → “I see / I notice”
- temple-tap then open-palm → “I think / I offer this thought”
- two-fingers walking on forearm → “go / move / proceed”
- cupped-hand toward chest → “give to me / receive”
- flat-palm down on a surface → “settle / rest / let-this-be”
- raised-thumb tilted slowly side-to-side → “uncertain”
Sentence:
- eye-trace → two-fingers-walking-on-forearm → flat-palm-down → “I saw it go, and now: let it rest.” A goodbye-with-acceptance, in three gestures.
Future action research
- Spatial-computing primacy. Sito as the first-class input for shared VR/AR spaces. Usability and adoption studies in collaborative tools.
- Hospital and library deployment. Pilot Sito in environments where silence is socially required. Compare communication efficacy with whispering and texting.
- Motor cortex and acquisition. fMRI studies on adult Sito learners. Does gesture-primary acquisition recruit different networks than late-second-language speech acquisition?
- Cross-cultural gesture audit. Some Sito gestures may collide with existing taboo or culturally-charged gestures (the OK sign, beckoning palm-up vs. palm-down). Pre-deployment audit per region.
- Sign-language partnership. Collaborative research with ASL/BSL/JSL communities. What does Sito borrow well? What does it get wrong? How can it serve as a bridge between hearing and Deaf communities without diluting either?