Framish came about mostly through doodling shapes close together, then trying to interpret them and their possible relations to each other. I enjoy this way of conlanging: I invent the words intentionally, but more abstract grammatical features feel like discoveries or accidents. I have not written about this language sooner (started in 2024) partly for fear that analysing it would change that process. I love trying to use a conlang before I describe it, and seeing where that leads me.

For that reason, I will try not to be exhaustive here. Fortunately, many things are quite stable by now; let me start with those.

Words and framing

Framish words occupy space on a square tiling, and are made of square cells like pixels on a screen. Each cell can be full (black) or empty (white, or any other colour). Every word has the same basic shape: a square with an area of 49 cells.

Sometimes, this basic square can be stretched out to a bigger frame to accomodate for other words. Their size depends on what's inside them, but both length and width always remain odd numbers. Also, I'll be using four different colours instead of white from now on, so you can distinguish words more easily (the colours do not carry meaning themselves).

Framing is recursive: you could continue embedding frames inside frames indefinitely, although it probably won't look pretty. Here, I tried to translate that eyestrain as a stylistically awkward chain of prepositional phrases.

The most frequently used frame is the existential word, meaning 'existence, exist, there is, reality, real'. This is also the sentence marker: all sentences have it as their outer frame - including the above examples.

I think I originally gave all sentences a border, and only later reinterpreted that as a word; but it's not unmotivated either. When you put a word inside the 'exist' frame, you quite literally bring it into existence, like putting down a tile on the board of a game. Declaring that a thing exists is what causes it to exist in the 'universe' of that sentence, which is a lot smaller than the universe proper: it consists only of things that were relevant to writer and reader.

Not all words can become frames, though a lot of them can. It depends on how much space a word offers and/or how much sense it makes. For instance, 'room' and 'mouth' have hole-looking areas that could be expanded, 'person' and 'tree' do not. Still, I sometimes have 'person' enclose certain body parts in the facial area, like the mouth (you met the cookie eater earlier), the eyes, the nose, and the brains too.

Proximity

Despite the namesake, Framish lets you do more than just draw increasingly bigger boxes around other boxes. Sometimes, relations between words are expressed by placing them near each other. Note that you can read from left to right or right to left: at least for now, reading direction does not matter.

In the last two examples, I state that two things exist. But I also imply something more: since the words were written near each other, the things they refer to are near each other too.

This works differently for words referring to more intangible, abstract or non-physical things: happiness or existence cannot be near something in the way trees or caves or I can. In such cases, the interpretation gets more metaphorical: the physical proximity of words represents a conceptual proximity (relatedness) between things.

Ligatures

So far, all words have been separated from each other by lines of empty space. This is the rule. Yet under certain conditions, words can be combined into ligatures. The process is a bit like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together: you’ve got to look for matching sides.

If two neighbouring squares have an identical side, they can ‘share’ it. This may look nice and/or suggest that the two words form one concept.

Here, the vertical ordering of glyphs is beginning to matter: you couldn't put the waves above the hovercraft without altering the meaning.

Ligatures also happen between a frame and its content, but only when all their sides match and fitting them together does not cause either word to (almost) disappear. One such word is 'human body': it can become the frame for a head-looking thing.

'Equals' does the same, but with two words at once. It looks like two rectangles connected by one pixel in the centre, and can be drawn horizontally (I) or vertically (H). You may read these 'equals'es from left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top.

More will come later.