Shallow Fith

Shallow Fith is a minor conlang project by Jörg Rhiemeier. Shallow Fith is a human-usable proper subset of Fith, a stack-based conlang by Jeffrey Henning. 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.

In Shallow Fith, most stack conjunctions are disallowed and the remaining ones heavily restricted:

• 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.

External link

• Shallow Fith (archived)