Taso — deep dive

2,253 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 figure that is not there

When Sartre walks into the café looking for Pierre, the café itself recedes — chairs, coffee, the waiter, the murmur of strangers — and what stands out, sharp as a figure on a ground, is that Pierre is not here. This is the famous négatité of Being and Nothingness (1943): an absence we do not infer but literally perceive. Sartre’s claim is that consciousness introduces negation into being; without expectation, no absence. Without Pierre having been hoped for, the café would be merely full, not Pierre-less.

Taso is the language designed to speak from inside that perception. Its ~50 roots are a typology of négatités — fifty distinct shapes that absence takes when consciousness reaches and does not arrive. The lesson Taso pushes on: if expectation is the engine that turns a fact into an absence, a vocabulary that names absences with care will turn out, by symmetry, to be a vocabulary that names expectations with care. Speaking Taso, you do not learn to grieve in fifty ways. You learn to notice, in fifty ways, that you have been hoping for something.

Structure

Phonology. 11 phonemes (8 consonants — t k m n s r l h — and 3 vowels a e i, plus o and u in loanwords). Syllable structure (C)V(r/n). Designed to fit comfortably between Welsh and Japanese mouth-shapes; intentionally easier to pronounce slowly than quickly.
Morphology. Isolating. Each root is a single trochaic word.
Word order. Verb-final (SOV), but the verb of every Taso sentence is either a copula of absence (lon, “is-absent-from”) or a movement-of- expectation (tira, “reaches toward”). Presence cannot be predicated directly.
The positive trick. To assert presence, Taso doubles the negation: uki lon nai (literally “the just-missed is-absent absent” — the just-missed is not absent → “I caught the train”). The structure trains the speaker to feel every presence as a near-miss-that-was-not.
Tense and aspect. Three: was-and-is, was-and-is-not, is-not-yet. Pure “is” is not available.

The fifty roots, in seven families

Taso’s lexicon is organized by the vector of expectation — the direction in which the mind was reaching when the absence registered. The families are not official; speakers learn them as the natural shape of the vocabulary.

I. Absences of just-departed (warmth)

Things that were here moments ago. The phenomenology is residue.

aro — the just-departed (warmth of a chair, scent in a room)
nemi — the chair-shaped (an absence that retains the form of what left)
kura — the audible silence (the room after the music ends)
siro — the trailing (a thread of attention still following someone out)
toma — the unfinished sentence (their last word, hanging)
iret — the half-cleared (a tea cup not yet washed)

II. Absences of long-departed (cold)

The residue has cooled. What remains is structural, not sensory.

nera — the no-longer (a demolished building, a dead language)
hela — the outlived (something you survived; a habit you broke)
suma — the silted-over (a friendship faded to politeness)
kati — the museum-piece (preserved by category, no longer used)
ome — the photographed-only (the part of childhood that survives as image)

III. Absences of the never-arrived

What was expected, what was hoped, what did not come.

vihi — the still-coming (a letter on its way, a guest expected today)
uki — the just-missed (the train, the joke, the door closing)
lirin — the long-promised (twenty years of “next year”)
menta — the rumored (an arrival you can’t pin to a date)
karo — the seasonally-late (the spring that runs three weeks late)
enah — the never-was-a-real-plan (the trip you talked about for years)

IV. Absences of the never-known

What lies outside the speaker’s reach in principle, not in practice.

omu — the never-known (alien minds, deep ocean, neighbors’ interior life)
kalit — the language-shaped (concepts you sense exist in another tongue)
resu — the pre-natal (what the world was like before you were in it)
netan — the post-mortem (what continues after you)
hisu — the senile (the part of an old mind that no one alive has been inside)
mira — the never-asked (a question you don’t know to ask)

V. Absences of the withheld

What is present but not extended. The expectation is met and refused.

kelo — the withheld (silence between friends, an unsent message)
rasi — the unsigned (a letter received that doesn’t say who from)
noma — the half-said (a confidence partly given)
trel — the redacted (a deletion you can see the shape of)
selen — the smiled-past (a topic the smile is steering you around)
iho — the unintroduced (the person in the room nobody is naming)

VI. Absences of the never-said

Specific to language and meeting — what was not put into words, though it could have been.

seru — the never-said (what wasn’t named at the meeting)
panu — the tacit (knowledge the expert can’t articulate)
kemi — the protected (what you would not name to spare another)
anom — the obvious-among-us (the thing everyone present knows without saying)
siri — the unwriteable (something language refuses to hold)
maral — the elsewhere-said (something already said in another tongue, not yet in this one)

VII. Absences of the figure-and-ground

Sartre’s family — absences that organize a whole field.

leson — the Pierre-shaped (a person whose absence pervades a room)
kohe — the wrong-corner (where you keep looking; they are never there)
tinen — the appointment-shaped (a time made hollow by who didn’t keep it)
arva — the audience-shaped (the empty seats that change a performance)
harin — the unanswered (a question whose absence-of-reply is itself a reply)
lumi — the absent-witness (the parent you wish had seen this)
nesu — the missing-decade (a period of life with no one alive to ask)

The seven families sum to forty-five. The remaining five are reserved for absences-of-self — omar, the part of you not present in your own attention; kis, the version of you you are not being today; vereh, the self you outgrew; salin, the self you might have been; hoa, the silence between your inner voice and your mouth — and these are the family Taso speakers say takes longest to use unselfconsciously.

How Taso sentences move

Three patterns cover most utterances.

1. The presence assertion (double negation)

aro tomo lon nai. mi anom. “The just-departed of home is not absent. I am-with the obvious-among-us.” → “I am home, and you know what that means.”

The Taso speaker cannot just say “I am home.” They must say “the absence of home is not absent from me, and the home-fact is the obvious-among-us between us.” A sentence about being-home is structurally a sentence about the kind of absence that has paused.

2. The grief / waiting sentence

leson koren tira mi. aro tira nera. “The Pierre-shaped reaches toward me. The just-departed reaches into the no-longer.” → “I miss him. Today is the day his warmth crossed over into history.”

Taso names the moment when aro (warmth) becomes nera (cold). Mourners report this transition is real and was previously unnamed.

3. The expectation declaration

vihi a! karo tira. “The still-coming, ah! The seasonally-late reaches.” → “Morning! Spring is still running late.”

A Taso “good morning” marks the day as not-yet-lived. Vihi a is the standard greeting in dawn light.

A short text — letter to the no-longer

mama, vihi nai. uki tinen sina. seru pi sona suli — nera-tira nai. aro vereh mi. kati ome lon. harin tira mi a.

Gloss:

Mother, the still-coming is not (i.e., this letter will not reach you). The just-missed appointment is yours (the one we made for after I grew up). The never-said of the big knowing — does not reach into the no-longer (the things you didn’t put into words have not been lost, they’re still shaped here). The just-departed of my outgrown-self is here (I carry the warmth of who I was when you were here). The museum-piece of the photographed-only is absent (the photographs are not the relationship). The unanswered reaches me, oh (I am writing into the unanswered, knowing it is what answers).

A first-draft letter from a Taso grief workbook. The translation into English distends to four times the length because English has no way to carry the nuance between nera, kati, and ome; we are forced to spell out “the museum-piece of the photographed-only” as a stuttering compound, because no English word marks the difference between what survives by being categorized and what survives as image.

What Taso teaches its speakers

1. Absence is structured, not flat

Native speakers report that within six months, the word missing in English starts to sound the way fish would sound if it were the only word for salmon and shark. Once you can distinguish aro (the just-departed warmth) from nera (the long-cold) from omu (the never-known) from kelo (the withheld), “missing” feels like a category error.

2. Expectation is what you are responsible for

Sartre’s deepest move: Pierre is absent because I was looking for him. Wellington and Valéry are also not in the café; they are not absent. Taso takes this seriously. To name an absence is to confess an expectation. The language has no way to gesture at absence in the third person without revealing whose hope was disappointed. This is uncomfortable.

3. Grief has a transition word

The shift from aro (warmth still present) to nera (no longer present at all) happens, in natural grief, slowly and unevenly. Taso names the transition itself — aro-tira-nera, “the warmth reaching into the no-longer.” Speakers say being able to say this is the most useful thing the language gives them.

4. Negative space in design

Architects and product designers who have used Taso for evaluation work report — anecdotally, the sample is small — that they catch a class of problems they previously missed: what is missing that the user is expecting to be there? Taso’s vocabulary breaks “missing” into types (the just-missed button, the withheld confirmation, the never-introduced affordance), and the typology turns out to be a checklist designers did not have.

Cross-linguistic kin

Taso’s roots correspond loosely, and incompletely, to a network of natural- language absence-words. The mapping is partial in every direction.

Welsh hiraeth maps best to a blend of nera + enah + salin — the no-longer plus the never-was-a-real-plan plus the self-you-might-have-been.
Portuguese saudade maps to aro + lirin — the just-departed plus the long-promised.
Japanese fuzai (不在) is the bare formal “absent” without affective loading — closest to lon itself, the copula. Japanese also offers mono no aware (a poignancy of passing things), which is aro-tira- nera, “the warmth reaching into the no-longer,” exactly.
Russian toska is omu + salin — the never-known plus the self-you- might-have-been.
German Sehnsucht is salin + enah — a longing for the self you might have been and the never-was-a-real-plan that never quite became one.

Each natural language has carved the territory differently. Taso’s grid is deliberately rectangular where these are organic, so it lets you ask, for any natural word, which cells does it cover and which does it miss?

Where it strains

Speaking Taso for an hour about ordinary affairs is exhausting. The grammar of presence-as-double-negation slows ordinary description and makes everyday conversation feel ceremonial. Most pilot speakers code-switch out for cooking and shopping.
The double-negation positive can collapse into ambiguity in fast speech. Speakers have begun to drop the second negation in casual register; the prescriptivists object; the descriptivists shrug.
The vocabulary is heavy with sorrow. Speakers who entered Taso during a bereavement say it gave them new traction; speakers who entered Taso healthy say it made them sadder for the first three months, then steadier thereafter.
The fifty roots are a strong claim about how absence carves up. A future ethnographer who reads Taso and disagrees with the cuts is the intended reader. The grid invites argument.

Open questions

Does six months of Taso practice change diary entries during bereavement? (Pre-registered diary study, sample 30, control matched English diaries.)
Do designers reading the same product spec in Taso and English flag different absences? (Within-subject, counterbalanced.)
Can an LLM fine-tuned on Taso-shaped text produce better “what is missing from this draft?” critique than a baseline? (Easy to test; would be a small, charming benchmark.)
Where does the Sartrean intuition fail? Are there absences that don’t arrive through expectation? (Trauma absences — the missing year nobody expected to lose — may be a different family. Taso’s grief-counselors argue that omar extends to cover this; the question is open.)

Sources

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