Marq's Website

Essiel

Justifications

• Why are there only two verbs?
  • The only method by which anyone can gain anything to express is thru experience of some sort. Essiel clearly reflects this fact.
• Why is there no verb "to be"?
  • The verb "to be" makes it possible to state that one thing is another thing and thus it opens the door to express a whole array of misguiding equivocations that have little or nothing to do with Reality. Because Essiel attempts to serve as a catalyst to Enlightenment by forcing Right Understanding and Right Mindfulness, it does not include a word that can be so easily abused. The closest one gets in Essiel is su, meaning "an identification with".
• Why are the Essiel 2nd person pronouns interrogative? Why doesn't Essiel have any 3rd person subjective pronouns?
  • The only person who can authoritatively state what he experiences or of what he is aware is he himself. Since the 2nd person is being addressed, he can be petitioned for a declaration of his experience, but it makes no sense to dictate to him his experience. Since the 3rd person is neither speaking, nor being addressed, there is no sense in mentioning him as the subject.
  • This charactistic of Essiel contributes to the extreme difficulty that one would experience if one attempted to argue in pure Essiel, because no person can easily assert something that someone else can authoritatively deny. This difficulty in arguing is what one would expect from a language with Essiel's stated raison d'être.
• Why are the orthography and phonetics as they are?
  • Beyond the ideal of being systematic, I figured that the orthography and phonetics of a language such as Essiel wouldn't have any particular characteristic following from the reason for the existence of such a language and thus they would be arbitrary. So, I put together an orthography and a phonetic system that I hoped would be easy to learn.
• Why can tense only be expressed as memory, intention or anticipation?
  • Because one does not experience the future until it occurs, he can not authoritatively talk about it, however, he can authoritatively state what he intends or what he anticipates, even if it does not eventually happen.
  • The only ways that one can be aware of the past is thru memory or analysis of things experienced in the present. One can state authoritatively what he remembers, even if his memory is faulty, and thus this is the way that the past is expressed, if at all, in Essiel.
  • This restricted manner of expressing time as a function of immediate experience keeps the speaker in (or brings the speaker back to) the present moment, where he is more likely to attain Enlightenment.
• Why isn't there a separate word for "therefore"?
  • There isn't any word in Essiel that explicitly defines a causal relationship between two events because these relationships are often obscure, overcomplicated and misunderstood. However, if it is necessary to express causation, one may imply it with the word mai, meaning "and". Just as the word "and" indicates causation in the sentence "I flipped the switch and the light came on", but not in the sentence "I went to the store and he went to the bowling alley", the word mai in Essiel only indicates causation if the causal relationship is obvious.
• Why are there no words to indicate possession or ownership?
  • Ownership is an illusion; it the result of an agreeement between people or mere belief of one person that something rightfully belongs in the possession of someone or some group in particular. This illusion has no basis in Reality and exists only in the mind or minds of those who hold such a belief or agreement, respectively. Even when signed pieces of paper exist to enforce the illusion of ownership, it is still an illusion. Even the concept of possession is an illusion formed by the constant proximity of one thing to a person or to a location which the person frequents. The closest one gets to expressing possession in Essiel is expressing ku (nu) ka, "a desire for (the lack of) that which is perceived to be".
• Why does there seem to be a shortage of words describing emotion?
  • A lack of words with which to describe emotions helps to prevent mental abstractions from interfering with the experience and accurate perception of the emotions experienced and thus forces the focus of one's attention onto the emotion itself, which is useful in transcending the grip that one's emotions can have on him.
• For that matter, there seems to be a shortage of Essiel words in general. What is the reason for this?
  • Just as a lack of emotional words can force one's attention onto the emotions themselves and thus help him transcend them, a lack of words for differentiating sensations or actions in general forces one to focus on the individual sensations or actions themselves and thus to understand them more fully and transcend whatever effects they may have on him.
  • Tho'ts are a constant distraction from Reality. By reducing the words with which one can express his tho'ts to a small collection that almost forces one to think clearly, if not transcentally, Essiel acts as a catalyst for Enlightenment.

Last Updated: 2009-05-02

The author, Marq Thompson, wished the content of this website to be uncopyrighted after his death.