Lingua-U and Jai’ai are closely related parts of one project: an effort to explore how sound, symbol, meaning, and embodied experience can be brought into a coherent framework. Lingua-U provides the underlying symbolic architecture. Jai’ai extends that architecture into the body, treating Lingua-U not merely as something to understand intellectually, but as something that can also be practiced, sounded, moved through, and physically inhabited.
Lingua-U
Lingua-U is an emerging system for exploring relationships among sound, symbol, meaning, and contemplative practice. It begins with the physical structure of human speech.
The current system organizes speech sounds through a symbolic architecture grounded in phonetics and phonological structure. Rather than assigning meanings to sounds purely through intuition or tradition, Lingua-U begins by asking what the vocal tract is actually doing. Features such as openness, position, obstruction, and voicing become parts of a structured symbolic system through which relationships among sound and meaning can be explored.
Lingua-U grew out of earlier experiments with constructed language, sacred sound, and the ternary symbolism associated with Yang Xiong’s Taixuanjing. An early version was presented in 2010, and the system has since been repeatedly reconsidered and rebuilt. Its present form is more firmly grounded in contemporary phonetics, sound symbolism, explicit derivation rules, and methods that allow its architecture to be tested, questioned, and revised.
One useful way to think about Lingua-U is as an operating system for symbolic practice. The framework can potentially support different applications: contemplative exercises, constructed languages, poetry, visual systems, and other ways of exploring how meaning is formed and experienced.
Jai’ai
Jai’ai is the emerging embodied theory and practice of Lingua-U. It asks what happens when structures first discovered in speech are replicated through the whole human body.
The first Jai’ai experiments begin with Lingua-U’s vowel system. Distinctions such as openness and the forward, centered, or withdrawn position of the tongue are translated into corresponding distinctions of bodily frame, posture, and weight. A practitioner can sound a vowel while performing its associated form, allowing voice and body to express the same underlying Lingua-U structure at the same time.
In this sense, Jai’ai is more than a movement practice inspired by Lingua-U. It is an attempt to make Lingua-U proprioceptive and embodied—a way of learning its symbolic distinctions through direct physical experience and of exploring what it means to inhabit meaning rather than merely analyze it.
An Invitation to You
Both Lingua-U and Jai’ai are works in development, and both are open to serious participation. Lingua-U especially welcomes contributions from linguists, phoneticians, semioticians, conlangers, scholars of sound symbolism, and people with expertise in Sacred Word traditions, mantra, liturgical language, or contemplative uses of speech and sound.
Jai’ai welcomes practitioners and theorists interested in somatics, Taiji, qigong, Chinese internal martial arts, subtle-energy traditions, movement education, and embodied learning. We are interested not only in people who want to practice the forms, but also in those who can help test, challenge, refine, or extend the theoretical framework behind them.
The aim is not to protect a finished system, but to develop one carefully. If your background gives you a useful perspective on language, symbolism, sacred sound, movement, or embodied meaning, there may be a place for your contribution.
AI tools were used in the research, testing, editing, and visual development of Lingua-U and Jai’ai, with all final concepts, interpretations, and published materials reviewed and directed by the author.