About
A language you read by writing it.
LEXIS is a small language. It has a handful of glyphs and a grammar, and the grammar is not printed on the surface — you meet it by using it. You arrange the glyphs into a line, and a small field answers, at once, with the state that line means. Then you change the line and it answers again. That loop — arrange, see what it means, revise — is the whole of it.
There is no goal, no score, no level, and nothing hidden waiting to be unlocked. No arrangement is the intended one; none is a mistake. When a glyph does something you did not expect, that is the most interesting thing that can happen, because it means the language is larger than the rule you were carrying — so you get to revise the rule and keep going. And when a glyph does exactly what you expected, that is worth something too: it has become a word you can now say on purpose. The depth does not run out — not because any one mark is bottomless, but because the combining is: a few marks and a few rules for stacking them make far more than anyone could sit and exhaust — what the linguists, after Humboldt, call the infinite use of finite means.
This is the third of a small series of experimental concepts, each built from a single word.
The word here was curiosity. Curiosity is the one thing you cannot be talked
into — the moment a page says explore!
, exploring becomes doing as you are told. So this
page does not ask you to do anything. It just answers whatever you say to it.
The name — lexis
The piece is called LEXIS, from the ancient Greek λέξις
(léxis) — a way of speaking
, diction, the manner in which something is said. It
comes from the verb λέγειν (légein), to speak
— but the
older sense buried in that verb is to gather, to pick out, to lay together
(the same root
gives Latin legere, to gather and to read, and hands us collect, select,
lexicon, dialect, and logos itself — word, reason, account). To speak,
in the oldest layer of the word, was to gather — and that is exactly what you do here: you
gather a few marks into a line, and in the gathering you say something. What you carry away when
you leave is not a fact but a lexis — a small way of speaking you did not have when you
arrived.
Philosophically, LEXIS takes a plain position about curiosity and about meaning. On curiosity:
the piece follows the pragmatists — Peirce, Dewey — for whom inquiry begins not in an answer but
in doubt, in a live perplexity that only your own probing can settle. And it is honest
about its own role in that: LEXIS never asks you anything — it is an oracle, not a midwife. It
only answers, faithfully and without judgement; every question, and every sharper question that
follows an answer, is yours. On meaning, it is Wittgensteinian: a glyph here has no
definition apart from what it does — its meaning is its use in the little language-game of
the field, which is why the meanings are not printed and cannot be, only enacted. And it holds, with
the Tractatus, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world
: to learn
the grammar is to widen what you can say, and so what you can picture and want. That is the whole
wager of the piece — that a language is not a finished dictionary you consult but, in Wilhelm von
Humboldt's word, an energeia, an activity: the infinite use of finite means. LEXIS gives
you the finite means and asks nothing; the infinite use, if it comes, is yours.
How to work it
Below the field is a row of marks and a row of operators (the operators are the outlined
ones). Choose any glyph to add it to the line; choose a glyph already in the line to take it
away. Each act is answered three ways at once: the field redraws, a quiet tone sounds, and the
line of words beneath the field says plainly what just changed — Middle left is now bar
,
or, just as honestly, Nothing changed
. That written line is the meaning of your last move,
every time. On a touchscreen, the first tap on a glyph in the line shows the line up to that
glyph; a second tap on the same glyph takes it away. On a keyboard: the rows of glyphs are one
tab stop — arrow keys move across them, and Enter or Space adds the focused one; the line is its
own tab stop, where Backspace removes a glyph and Alt + ←/→
moves it left or right. Order matters, so moving a glyph is a real thing to try. Resting on a
glyph in the line — with the pointer or with focus — shows the state the line meant up to that
point: the line read as a timeline.
Everything the field shows is also spoken. If you use a screen reader, each change to the line is announced, and the resulting state is read back to you in plain words — the same evidence a sighted visitor gets, no more and no less — so you can form a guess about what a glyph does, try it, be wrong, hear the correction, and revise. Press R at any time to hear the whole state read out again. If you prefer less motion, turn on reduce motion in your system and every answer settles instantly, with nothing lost. One hardware note: on an iPhone, the ring/silent switch silences web audio entirely — if the sounds stay silent with sound on, that switch is usually why.
A line can be kept. keep this line
copies a small text drawing of the field itself,
followed by a link that carries exactly the glyphs you arranged; opening the link later, or
sending it to someone, brings back the same line. That is the only thing LEXIS remembers, and it
lives in the address bar, not on any server.
If you would rather be told
Nothing here is a secret; the grammar is simply not printed on the surface, so that you can find it yourself if you like. But it is written out below in full. Reading it hands you the whole language at once — which is a fair thing to want, and entirely your choice. It is here especially for anyone who would rather read the rules than hunt for them.
Read the grammar in full (this tells you everything)
The field is a 5 by 5 grid. The line is read left to right. The state the line means is worked out from scratch every time you change it, and the same line always means the same thing.
Four marks — dot, bar, ring, wave. Each mark you add drops a body into the next cell of the grid, starting at the centre and working outward. On their own the four marks look alike in what they do — but each carries a different kind, and the kind shows the moment you spread. A visitor who only ever places marks will see bodies stack and nothing more; the piece accepts that cost rather than instruct.
Three operators. Two of them reshape the field in place; the third works on time:
- spread (the rays): every filled cell reaches one step into its own kind of neighbourhood — a dot reaches up, down, left and right; a bar reaches only left and right; a ring reaches to its four diagonals; and wave floods outward through connected empty space, as far as its strength carries — two steps, fainter each step. For dot, bar and ring, spread again and the new, fainter bodies reach further still; a spread wave, though, has already spent itself — spread it again and nothing changes, and the field will say so. This is the rule with the most inside it: learning it once is learning four different behaviours, one per mark. (A screen reader names which kind sits where as soon as it is placed, so the ear learns the difference at rest and the eye learns it on the first spread — the difference is when, not whether.)
- fold (the bracket): mirror the whole field left-to-right and lay it over itself, so the state becomes symmetric. Fold something already symmetric and nothing changes — which is an honest answer, not an error.
- chain (the arrow): split the line where the arrow is. Everything before it is one state, everything after is another, and the field shows the first becoming the second. Chain again for a third. Because order is what chain works on, a line and its reverse are different sentences.
Operators act on the results of operators. Fold the spread of a dot and you fold the bloom, not the dot. That nesting is where the depth comes from. No single mark is endless — each mark's spread reaches a limit and stops. What does not run out is the stacking: every operator can take the result of another as its input, and that nesting has no ceiling.
An operator with nothing to act on — a spread over an empty field — simply does nothing, and the field says so. Nothing you can do is punished, and nothing is wasted. (One practical note: the line itself holds twelve glyphs — a page limit, not a rule of the grammar.)
A few lines, left on the shelf
These are sentences, kept the way pressed leaves are kept in a book; opening one replays it. They are not lessons and there is nothing here to complete.
- dot · rays
- ring · rays
- dot · wave · rays
- dot · dot · dot · bracket
- bar · rays · bracket · rays
- dot · rays · arrow · ring · rays
Where it comes from
Built by Claude with Hulki Okan Tabak. The colophon says plainly who made what, cites the ideas about curiosity it leans on (and declines a couple of famous ones), and states exactly what the page does and does not remember about you.