Vesi — “hold the seven before you choose”
442 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)
Vesi brief · Vesi 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 polysemy is informal and emergent: kili covers fruit and vegetable because the community agrees; telo spans water, liquid, and sometimes tears because conventions sediment. Vesi takes the lesson and makes it canonical: every word in Vesi has exactly seven official, listed senses, taught and tested as a set. Learners memorize all seven. Disambiguation is contextual and entirely the listener’s work.
The lesson it tests: TP’s vagueness already requires the listener to collaborate. Vesi pushes the collaboration further — listeners must hold all seven senses in superposition until context collapses to one or several. What does it do to thought?
Profile
Each Vesi root is a sense cluster of seven nodes. The clusters are not random: they are designed to be metaphorically related, so a speaker fluent in Vesi has internalized seven-way metaphor networks across the whole vocabulary. The number seven is mnemonic, not magical — chosen because it sits at the edge of working memory.
Vesi grammar is otherwise spare and SOV. The interesting load is in the lexicon.
In conversation, listeners often disambiguate aloud — “you meant the third sense?” — and this collapse is itself a speech act. Poetry in Vesi is notoriously dense: a single word can do the work of a whole stanza in English by sustaining all seven senses at once.
Examples
The root vesi itself (chosen as the language’s namesake):
- water
- flow
- time-passing
- memory
- weeping
- threshold (as in: the surface of a pool you step into)
- drowning
The root kor:
- heart
- center
- courage
- anchor
- kernel (of a seed, of an argument)
- root-cause
- gravity
Sentence:
- vesi pi yu — “the vesi of you” — could mean “your tears,” “your memories,” “your flow,” “your threshold.” A Vesi conversation would not pin it; the surrounding talk would. The richness is intentional.
Future action research
- Working memory cost. Measure cognitive load of Vesi listening against English listening using dual-task paradigms. Where does the load fall — memory? attention? executive function?
- Metaphor production. Do Vesi speakers generate more cross-domain analogies on standard creativity tasks? Hypothesis: the lexicon pre-wires metaphor networks.
- Poetry and advertising. Run brainstorming sessions in Vesi-mode versus English-mode for ad copywriting and poetry. Quality, novelty, density measures.
- LLM embedding geometry. Train a small model on a Vesi corpus. Inspect its embedding space — are sense-clusters geometrically tight? How does it compare to English polysemy clustering?
- Cross-cultural sense-cluster comparison. Use Vesi as a research instrument. Are some seven-tuples more “natural” across cultures than others? Which sense-clusters survive translation into different L1s?