Hilinqwo is a written and spoken language derived largely from the Indo-European and Semitic antecedents of most Western languages. Its semantic structure comes from Roget's Thesaurus.

The basic objectives of the language are as follows:

  • Strict rules, no exceptions, and would-be exceptions are codified as new rules.
  • A vast body of elements that can be used to create words either explicitly or through common usage.
  • A phonetic alphabet.

This opus is the product of over a decade of work in my spare time. I did not decide that the world needed yet another constructed language (and it probably doesn't); it just "happened" from my interest in word etymologies. I believe that this work, which will never be "complete," will eventually be the one of the largest, if not the largest, wiki-based constructed languages.

Major Features of Hilinqwo

Etymology: Hilinqwo features a vast library of elements based largely on the proto-Indo-European roots. This proto-language split and evolved into Latin, Greek, Germanic languages, Sanskrit and others. Hilinqwo also makes use of the Semitic roots. A small but relevant number of elements come from other sources. If a word of any language can make it into English, odds are it can easily be the inspiration for a Hilinqwo element. There is a preference in root selection: Proto-Indo-European first, then Latin, then Greek, then other languages.

Elemental structure: Hilinqwo words are built from a collection of elements of varying types. Raw Hilinqwo elements are not allowed in Hilinqwo text. All wildcards must be replaced with the appropriate endings, and raw suffixes (replacing the hash mark with nothing) are meaningless.

Regularity: The grammar is completely regular, with simple rules and no exceptions. In the cases where exceptions might be needed, the exception is codified as a rule.

Alphabet and glyphs: The alphabet of Hilinqwo uses the entire 26-letter standard Roman alphabet plus some non-standard Latin letters. Every letter has its own rules for pronunciation, and there are ways that certain letters work together. Diacritics are not used; there are letter combinations for phonemes that are diacritics in other languages.

Flexible word order: Syntactical position is denoted by inflections.

Gender: Hilinqwo uses an epicene grammar: Only specific elements have gender. As a general rule, elements that don't need gender don't have gender.

Synonymism: At best only minimal synonymism with no exact duplicates. Words that appear to be synonyms generally have a functional difference.

Starting Points

Start with the Introduction.