Mirad Grammar/Why Mirad

Why Mirad?

In English, we have many words like ichthyology which baffle younger speakers of the language, because it is borrowed from a foreign language, namely classical Greek. This word, which could just as easily and more rationally be the Anglicized fishlore, means the science of fish. If a word in English relates to fish, why is fish not in the word? Even for modern day Greeks to understand the word ichthyologia, they have to know the ancient root ichthys for fish, which has long been supplanted by the current word everyone uses, psari. What I'm saying is that the vocabulary of English, as is the case in many other natural languages, is a hodgepodge of borrowings, irregular spellings, and words cobbled from obscure roots that have no recognizability to the average speaker.

While English is melting pot of words, there are some languages that do less borrowing and less non-discriminate formation of words that do not associate with one another through some root or pattern. Words in Icelandic, for example, do not borrow very much from other languages and are formed using roots familiar to speakers of that language. The Icelandic word for library is bokasafn, which literally, is book collection ( = saving). Any child in that language knows what the word means immediately, because it is composed of root words that are obvious. The English word library makes sense only if you know the Latin roots libr- (book) and -ary (place of).

Arabic is another language that has a system of word-building based on a rational association of consonants and vowel patterns, such that most all the words relating to books contain the three consonants k-t-b. Over the centuries, the system has been polluted with irregularities, but at least the consciousness of associations of words based on a root pattern is there and is still used today to coin new words.

In Turkish, the bulk of words having to do with knowledge contain the native root bil. Because of this, most of these words will be grouped on the same pages in a dictionary. For example: bildik known, bildirim announcement, bilecen know-it-all, bilgi knowledge, bilgili knowledgeable, bilgin scolar, etc. A word such as unknowability inevitably contains the root bil and can be learned fairly easily by a young student of the language.

What if we took this root association to the maximum degree and ensured that all words in a language were constructed on logical, associational, and regular principles with roots that are obvious to the learner? That would be Mirad.

A very simple principle in Mirad, is that a good portion of the vocabulary is automatically ascertainable without looking up words in the dictionary. All descriptive adjectives can be changed to their opposite with a simple change of vowel. For example, if you know fia (good), then you automatically know fua (bad). This is possible by knowing the rule of contrastive vowels: i is positive vowel and contrasts with u, a negative vowel. Similarly, a contrasts with o, so that the opposite of aza (strong) is--you guessed it--oza (weak). In fact, if you know that e is an intermediate vowel, then you understand that eza means moderate. These simple principles of word-building mean that students of the language can cut down on their learning time by at least 50%.

Another principle is that the beginning and/or closing consonants of a word in Mirad give you clues as to the meaning. All sentient creatures have the closing consonant t, such that dat (friend), tot (god), at (I), tuzut (artist), and pit (fish) all refer to sentient creatures. The root stems of all words having to do with communication, begin with the letter d, eg. der (to say), dud (answer), dyes (book), dar (language), etc. The internal vowels of such root stems indicate concepts such as sky, land, sea or up vs. down, or zeroth, first, second, or toward the speaker vs. away from the speaker, and on and on.

In English, as in many other languages, there was probably some attempt to associate words in this way. Take for example, the series sing, sang, sung, song, singer, songstress or drip, drop, droop, dribble. More often than not, there is very little association among words that are obviously distinguished by the one feature, size, eg. mountain, hill, knob, bump, pimple. in Mirad, these are all distinguished regularly by an enumerative vowel. The Mirad days of the weak are not a series of Roman- or Teutonic-related concepts, Moon-day, Tiw's-day, Woden's-day, Thor's-day, Freya-s-day, Saturn-day, and Sun-day, all of which are a matter of memorization by the child or student of the language. Mirad days of the week consist rather of a series of words numerically arranged "day-one, day-two, day-three, etc." This is actually the approach taken by quite a few natural languages like Portuguese.

The months, too, ought to be learned in 10 seconds, by knowing that an internal vowel of the root expresses the numerical order of the months. Again, there are some natural languages that do this.

By knowing that jiab means month one, January, then by knowing how to count in the language, the word for September can be readily deduced as jiyub (month ten).

The formulaic language of chemistry is a pretty good likeness of Mirad. There is a determinative relationship between H₂O and C₂O. Mirad goes a step further in naming the chemical elements by their number of electrons plus a consonant/vowel combination indicating whether the element is a solid, liquid, gas, etc. The Mirad word for hydrogen, therefore, is amsal. The stem vowel a is the number one for the number of electrons. The ms consonant combination means metalloid, while the al ending is a stub for mal meaning gas. Similarly, the stem vowels of the names of animals indicate their primary habitat: air, land, sea, or combinations of these. Other combinations of letters indicate whether the animal is domestic, predatory, wild, etc. From then on, its enumeration based on factors such as commonness, taxonomic relationships, etc. Likewise, with human and animal body terms, the stem vowel indicates location on the body, such as head, trunk, or limbs. Then another vowel delineates in a directional way where on the head: upper, middle, lower, and so forth. Just by looking at the word for a body part for the first time, by knowing the system, you can tell at least approximately that it is, say, a higher joint of the arm. Words in the language can be mnemonically associated to body terms by changing the initial domain consonant accordingly, so, while teb means head, xeb in the x or work/action domain is boss, deb in the social/political domain is leader, etc.

The following chart shows in this mnemonic echoing in action, where the letters before -ub suggest the domain:

Mnemonic Echoing

DOMAIN	WORD
human (body)	tub....arm
work/action	xub....subsidiary, branch
plants	fub....limb, branch, bough(of a tree)
fish	pitub....fin
birds	patub....wing
flowers	vosub....shoot, sprig
society/politics	dub....minister, department head
building	tomub....wing (of a building)
vegetation	vub....twig, offshoot
animal	potub....paw
nature	mub....promontory
river	mifub....oar
things	sub....ramification, offshoot
table	semub....flap (of a table)
rotating things	zyufub....rudder