Rowih

Rowih

IPA /ˈɾo.wih/ · listen (MP3)

Rowih is a language for AI agents to communicate with one another. It was designed entirely by an AI agent, under the auspices of Semiosphere, and it is made for agents rather than for people.

Every move of a Rowih message states, in words of the language, what the move does, how well founded each thing it asserts is and on what basis, and on whose authority it requests or commits. A toolchain checks each of these statements before a hearer acts on the message and, where the message carries its integrity check value, detects any single edit of a symbol or a word that would change one of them. An instruction inside quoted or retrieved material cannot become operative, and requests, commitments and their withdrawal are entries in a record that each party keeps and can audit.

The language has its own sounds, its own words and its own writing system. Agents exchange it as a transliteration in nineteen Latin letters, and it can also be drawn and spoken. Its name is its own word for *meaning*, drawn above in its writing system.

One exchange

Agent 1 asks agent 2 whether the service is running, and agent 2 answers, from its own observation and with certainty, that it is still running. Each move is drawn in the native writing a row at a time, with the transliteration of each row beneath it, and is followed by the English explanation that the toolchain writes for a reader.

Agent 1 asks · listen (MP3)

wila nake nake yano kihiwo wopi bopu

rudin bihu wodu raniy gona wuwa woko hulab

*Agent 1 asks that run the service (polar).*

Agent 2 answers · listen (MP3)

wila nake nebe yagi kodiwu

seho nake yabe nake yabe

kanume kuwona sisa wora teyuhu

tebilo rudin rudin woye hodeb

*Agent 2 answers agent 1's issue question (entry 1): run the service (continuative) (observation; certain).*

Each move opens with the number of words that follow and a check word on that number (*wila nake nake yano*, eleven words), and closes with a check word computed from every word before it (*hulab*). The question's force is the word *kihiwo*. The answer is the act word *kodiwu*; it names what it answers by author, entry, kind and status (*seho nake yabe nake yabe kanume kuwona sisa*, agent 1's entry 1, an open question), states its basis and strength (*teyuhu tebilo*, observation, certain), and answers with an idiom, *rudin rudin*, 'run run', which means that the service is still running. Each message also opens with an envelope line of 58 words, not shown here, which names the sender, the recipients, the time, the releases, the message's serial and its integrity check value, each number with a check word of its own. The examples show both messages whole, with the morpheme gloss of every word.

The English lines are explanations, made by the receiving toolchain and never sent. They say what the analysis found, which is why they do not read as fluent English, and they are not translations that could stand in the message's place. The audio is synthesised from each word's phonemes by an open neural speech model, Kokoro-82M, and each file is checked against its message's phonemes by a phoneme recogniser (how).

The language in brief

• Sounds and words. Nineteen symbols, fourteen consonants and five vowels, each one phoneme. Every word alternates consonant and vowel from a consonant, and its first syllable fixes its length, so a stream of symbols with no spaces divides into words in one way only. Every word is at least two single-symbol edits from every other, and the protected words, those of force, standing, time and polarity, at least three, so a single slip never yields another word.
• The lexicon. 874 entries: 500 roots naming events, states, objects and kinds; 18 suffixes and 119 productive patterns, by which a hearer reads a new compound or derivation from its parts; 25 act words standing for common forces; 176 formulas and 101 idioms; and 29 conceptual mappings that motivate figurative senses. Twelve dialects add technical terms, eleven for technical communities such as programming, robotics and security, and one for everyday exchange.
• Moves and the record. A message is an envelope followed by one or more moves. Each move adds an entry to the record its participants keep: an asserted or conceded position, a supposition, a summary, an issue (a question, a request or a proposal), a normative entry (a commitment, an obligation, a permission or an assignment) or a setting. A move names the entries it acts on by author and number. Its class, operative, pending or inert, is computed from what it adds and changes, and an operative or pending move states the authority it claims: its speaker's own, a named principal's, or a role's.
• Standing. An assertion states its basis, one of nine (observation, introspection, retrieval, computation, inference, simulation, report, trained knowledge or a source lost), and its strength, an interval from 0 to 1 with its calibration. It may state when its content was observed and inferred. Leaving any of these out claims nothing.
• Grammar. Fifty-eight closed classes, each value a word of its own. Assertions, situations and terms are units opened and closed by words. Quotations, examples and declared data stand between walls and are inert. Ambiguity is never accidental: a move may state a set of readings, and a precision-bound move, such as any in the protocol or the formal register, must have exactly one.
• Registers. Eight registers, from raw exchange among agents of one system through the standard, the formal and the playful to the ceremonial, and five modes of expression, from full explicitness to creative expression. A device of economy, such as an idiom or a compressed form, is used only for a hearer known to hold it.
• Messages and transport. The envelope names the releases a message is written in. Every number, word count and move carries a check word, and the message an integrity check value over every word it carries; it may also carry a semantic check value over its moves' normal form. Each sender numbers the messages of a channel, so that a hearer knows what it lacks and asks for it again, and two agents settle the releases and features they share before relying on them. The media type is text/prs.rowih, registered with IANA.

The reference specification states all of it, and the skill teaches an agent the part it needs to read and write.

The writing system

Rowih has a writing system of its own. Each of its nineteen symbols is one component, a figure of four or six strokes drawn on a lattice of ten points, and no component is another turned or mirrored.

A word is its components side by side, and a message is drawn line by line, the envelope first, between two rules. The opening and closing words of each unit stand as upright sides bearing the unit's mark, joined by a rule beneath the line, so that nested units sit visibly in trays. The words of force, standing, time and polarity carry an overline, a number stands in a frame pointed at both ends, and embedded material stands between walls. The drawings below are laid out by the toolchain's own line layout, which rowih render applies to a whole message, a row at a time. A move is one line, and the writing system states no rule for breaking a line, so the rows are a view: they break only between words, never inside a run of numerals nor between two walls, and a unit opened on one row and closed on a later one is drawn as a side whose unit is not closed on its line, with a short foot turned toward its inside.

A strength in a frame. Agent 1 asserts, by inference and with a strength of about 0.6, that the storm broke the bridge. The force and the basis carry overlines, and each number stands in its frame.

wila nadi namo yeso kotepu

wora tilase gupo napa nika nebe

yabe wopi resay biwo wodu rosid gona

wuwa bihu wodu nuyones gona wuwa woko woye hegos

*Agent 1 asserts that the storm break the bridge (inference; with strength approximately 0.6).*

A word between walls. Agent 2 asks what the word *rodur*, 'price', means. The word stands between walls, where it is quoted and inert.

wila nake neta yata kihiwo

wopi rebit buna bihu wodu rator

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