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Fith
Shallow Fith

 

Shallow Fith   Advanced

Shallow Fith is an interlanguage humans and Fithians could use to communicate with each other.  Basically, it is a proper subset of Fith, with strict limits to stack depth and with most of the stack operators removed.  The Shallow Fith sentences could be parsed as SOV/postposition/noun-adjective sentences by humans and as very simple LIFO sentences by Fithians.

We are leaving the ground of Jeffrey Henning's original creation here; this is my own invention.  In the fictional universe which Fithia is part of, Shallow Fith has a well defined purpose: that of an auxiliary language meant to facilitate communication between humans and Fithians.

As said above, Shallow Fith is a proper subset of Fith, which means that any grammatically correct utterance in Shallow Fith is also correct in Fith, having the same meaning in both. Shallow Fith, however, differs from Fith in being more restrictive in grammar, in order to restrict the depth of the stack during sentence parsing.  (Hence the name Shallow Fith.) In fact, the stack depth is restricted to such a degree that human minds can learn to comprehend Shallow Fith in real time.

Shallow Fith eliminates most stack conjunctions and heavily restricts the use of the remaining ones:
du must immediately precede a verb or a postposition, thus acting as a reflexive pronoun only;
shen must also immediately precede a verb or a postposition;
e and frong must immediately follow the clause they pop from the stack.

All other stack conjunctions are omitted from Shallow Fith. Furthermore, lingering is not allowed. Sentences must linearly follow each other, as in human languages.

To a Fithian, Shallow Fith seems like poor style, something like child-talk, lacking any kind of stylistic sophistication. To a human, however, this is what makes it understandable in the first place. And after all, no-one really asks about beauty in this kind of language. It is just a practical tool for a practical problem.

© 2005 by Jörg Rhiemeier.  All rights reserved.  Used by permission.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
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