Welcome to the ROILA Language guide. We will give you an introduction to the language and give you examples of its use. In the following we will use the green color to indicate English, grey to indicate ROILA and yellow to mark a literal translation from ROILA to English. To give you a first flavor of the language, you can explore some example sentences:
You are a good person
Bama wopa tiwil
You good person
I really liked to know you
Pito loki jifi bati bama
I love <word marker past tense> know you
We will continue to specify the language. Please contact us if you have any suggestions or comments.
Alphabet and Pronounciation
This is the table of all letters used in ROILA. Also provided are the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and ARPABET pronounciations.
| letter | IPA pronouciation |
ARPABET pronounciation |
example |
| a | æ | AE | fast |
| e | ɛ | EH | red |
| i | ɪ | IH | big |
| o | ɔ | AO | frost |
| u | ʌ | AH | but |
| b | b | B | buy |
| f | f | F | for |
| j | dʒ | JH | just |
| k | k | K | key |
| l | l | L | late |
| m | m | M | man |
| n | n | N | no |
| p | p | P | pay |
| s | s | S | say |
| t | t | T | take |
| w | w | W | way |
WORD STRUCTURE and pronounciation
The ROILA vocabulary has three word types. We refer to them as CV type words, where C can be any of the 11 consonants and V any of the 5 vowels as indicated in the table above. These word types were empirically proven to perform better on speech recognition as compared to non-CV type words. Here are the three types:
- CVCV
- CVCVC
- CVCVCV
As far as pronounciation goes we do not have any diphthongs, so vowels are articulated in the same way regardless of their position within the word. For the consonants the pronounciation is fairly standard within the english words benchmark.
Vocabulary
The meanings of the words are taken from Basic English a concise version of the English language comprising of only 850 words. A full list of the vocabulary is available as well as a short list.
Grammar
The ROILA grammar is of the isolating type. This means that no affixes are added to words. Instead grammer is represented by adding word markers. In the following English example the suffix “ed” is added to the verb “walk” to signifiy the past tense. In ROILA, this is achieved by added the word marker for the past tense, which is “jifi”. In summary, inflections will be represented by adding words from within the vocabulary to exhibit grammatical meanings. For detailed information about the Grammer, please look at the dedicated grammar page.
I walked to the house.
Pito fosit jifi bubas.
I walk <marker past tense> house.
