Tetral

Setting
Tetral is an artistic language designed to be used by cyborgs and robots in science-fiction stories. Therefore, it is also highly logical, in order to sound very computer-like. The language is designed around a base-4 numeral system.

Phonology
As previously said, tetral is not language based on phonemes, but rather on base-4 numeral system. So, the four digits are:

The immediate advantage is that tetral is easily encoded on a computer. Since there are many other ways to represents numbers than record it in a computer, there are many way to represent the language. It is a big advantage of tetral : you can commumicate with either speach, wrinting, smoke signals, color code, ... Any form of communication can do, as far as it is possible to represent a base-4 number with it (or even binary).

The tetral language is designed between codons. A codon is a base-4 number with three digits, precedings zeros unommited. Codon is the actual base unit of the language, something whose meaning is somwhere between a phoneme and a syllable. Codons should be made well visible in order to help the reader no to read the codons with one or two digits shifted, which is correct but wouldn't make any sense. In this document I will write codons with the first digit in bold, like this :

001321311103000032103213032133

Basic Grammar
Words are successions of codons. There two types of words : meaningful words and structural words.

As their name suggests, meaningful word are words with a meaning in them, such as 302 302 (tree). Meaningful words are composed with codons that do not reapeat three times the same digit. Thus 000, 111, 222, 333, are forbidden codons to write meaningful words.

On the other hand strcutural words carries nearly no meaning. They are only there to structure sentences and show relations between words. The blank word is to ba taken apart. It is written 000. This is the only word that contains the codon 000, absolutly no other word can contains 000. The blank word is used to separate other words. Other structural words use the codons 111, 222 and 333. The amount of strcutural words is very limited. Here is the list :

333111