History

Ze, as the title of the website suggests, is a language of a single word. It can be considered the successor of v,
another one word language i made. Ze was made because i was annoyed by the lexicalisation issue with minimalistic constructed languages (conlang for short), such as Toki Pona. Toki Pona has other issues such as the vocabulary getting more and more words (even if these are considered uncommon) such as linluwi for internet... And even if you don't use these and only the original 120/123 words from the book called Toki Pona: The Language of Good, when interacting with media made in the language, you will encounter words such as majuna. But hey! That word isn't even part of the original 120/123 OR the 137 from the second book! So you will have to look it up and possibly even memorise it. Rinse and Repeat. And this is how your vocabulary grows. I estimate mine to be around 200 at this point! Tokiponists have told me that this is "not a big deal", but when you consider that the very thing that makes the language fun and special is its core minimalism and you WILL eventually have to memorise the other words if you want to use the language in any way outside of personal use, it is a very huge thing to worry about. Let's not ignore the fact that the community seems to deny and if they don't, they instead hate lexicalisation (a phenomenon in linguistics where a compound turns into single coherent word) in the language like it isn't a thing when they use fix phrases like kama pona (welcome from "come well") and jan pona (friend from "good person") These very issues made me quit Toki Pona. Even by the time the first book was published there were apparently other words in use that only got included later on in the second book. (These are also the issues i found with v because the only compound that makes sense in the language is "vv" which can and will be lexicalised through use. This was what caused Ze to be born.)

Toki Pona's prime is still raging with it being as popular as ever. However, this causes someone like me to ask whether the fame really is deserved (spoiler: it isn't). I learned the language in 2023 and it was way harder than i expected it to be, but i managed. It's also very bad at expressing stuff, but at least it's very fun to use. Then esperanto came in 2024 after a failed attempt with Duolingo in 2022 and i found it weirdly easy. But.... then came the issues (uuuuugh)! First and foremost, the most obvious is that the language is painfully eurocentric with the only thing about the language that isn't is its agglutinative grammar. (Plus i didn't like seeing a million people criticizing it when i tried searching about anything in the language because i simply did not have the will to listen to these people or see them when i was trying to use the language goddamit.) The community also feels and IS way older than i am, so it's weird. Less of a no go then Toki Pona anyway, but this fact is still very iffy. To be fair, i like the grammar behind both of these languages, and, seeing how they actually achieve what they try to do, I would pick Esperanto. I love the agglutinacy of the grammar and the way word building works, and i'm actually happy that it exists despite its flaws, and I do think it's worth learning long term. I did criticise it heavily several times but that was when i got impacted by the criticism surrounding it too much, even if it's justified. Sometimes it turns into outright vitriolic hate which is scary to witness... But then again, these are mostly only internet things and in my real life experiences when i talked to others about the language have been positive.

Inspired by the fact that i felt kind of bored of and angry at Toki Pona because it failed to meet the goals it aimed to achieve and its flaws, I (Mimeshrine) made my own.....again, in 2026.

The language is obviously not meant to be expressive of everything, as it is a system of mere emotive expression. However, unlike other languages, it can be learned in under a minute if you're fast enough, and in a little more if you're not! Set yourself a timer (only if you want to of course), and scroll down to see the learning section!

Learning

Ze is pronounced /ze/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which in English can be approximated as zay.

The word ze is very context dependent and its meaning depends on tone, body language or punctuation in writing. It can express any emotion using the previous things i've listed.

Repeating the word itself does not change the meaning of said word, it only creates two separate phrases.

That's it! Now you can speak the language! Go have fun (or something)!

The language's goals and how it achieves them properly

Now that the learning part is out of the way, the reader might question how anything else other than emotions are expressed. That's the best part. They're not! The closest thing to communicating ideas is how you feel about said ideas, not what the ideas are themselves.

Ze can be thus used as a way of paying for attention someone else's emotions, given that both parties use the language when expressing their raw feelings. It may also improve your perception of someone else's feels by the language cutting away all words needed to describe said sensations and forcing the speakers to pay attention to eachother's facial expressions, tones and body.

One might argue that people will expand the language and add more words to it. But if they wanted to, wouldn't they just use a different linguistic system anyways? Anyone can see that ze is NOT designed for universal communication or any type of communication outside of personal emotions. If they wanted a language that could do those they would simply retreat to their own.

As someone else pointed out when i showed them the language, ze could've simply had the word mean anything, depending on context. However, that would make the language even more useless than it is, and besides, it's been done before (see ∅∅mniPantoglyph (https://00mnipantoglyph-lang.netlify.app)), so I just simply wanted ze to be different.

The same person also asked me why the only word in the language isn't just a single sound. Great question. That's due to the fact that if it were, it would be way easier to mistake it for a sound of, for example, pain, rather than a voluntary utterance of emotional self expression.

And now, one of the main goals of the language, the heavy resilience against lexicalisation. When you have only one word with no grammar, when not even compounding makes the meaning any different because they will be understood as two different sentences, what is there to cause lexicalisation exactly? Small linguistic change could occur however. Maybe /ze/ could become something like /sij/ or /dzex/. But even then, the language would still be intelligible with its original version as published here.

Someone may also say that the language technically doesn't only have a single word because it can be interpreted in a way where different tones give the word different meanings, thus making the vocabulary count higher than one. But to that i say, would they still say the same towards, for example, the english word good? Because this very word also has different meanings based upon context. Good! with a rising tone can be interpreted as a happy acknowledgement. Good?! with a "shaky" tone can be interpreted as a question where the person who said it questions the seriousness of the sentence or the sanity of the person they just responded to. And so on and so forth. Yet, none of these are considered separate words by, as far as i'm aware, any dictionary, or any linguist. So ze still retains its only word!

If i had to seriously categorise this conlang into the given categories that already exist for invented languages, i would say ze is engineered, minimalist, philosophical AND artistic constructed language.

The logo

We have come to the last section of this page. The logo of the language (seen at the top of the page) consists of an arrow pointing at the inside of a circle. The circle represents the speaker, while the arrow points at the speaker's emotions. The logo is meant to be simple by design.

Website made by Mimeshrine in 2026. - Ze!