The full Europan Epigraphic Catalogue has over ten thousand entries, which for the size of the corpus is a notably small vocabulary, but still big enough that a large number of them will almost certainly never be deciphered. The following selection of important vocabulary items should be enough to give a general impression of the language. Each entry gives:

Verbs predominate over nouns in this selection not because there are more of them but because they tend to be both more linguistically interesting and easier to assign a definite meaning. Many nouns are like E#B6CB38 : we know it refers to some basic means of transport, but we can't be sure whether it was the equivalent of a pony, rickshaw, or jetpack.

E#00E4E0 = THE . Commonly (though much less commonly than in English) used as a specifier, implying that the parent noun is a particular one identifiable to all. A descriptor attached below this word is interpreted as a restrictive relative clause: SIBLING→THE→dance , “the sibling who is dancing”. Also used as the argument of a verb, where it can function as a third‐person pronoun (“he/she/it/they”) or perhaps “the one(s) in question”.

E#06CDA5 = CONTENT (that is, the meaning of a message). An important technical term in the computational semantics of the layer‐one texts, but common in layer three as well thanks to idioms such as: speak →become→ perceive →obstruct ↓ ↓ ↓ YOU CONTENT ME “I don't understand what you mean”, and ME←equal→CONTENT→ SMITH , “My name is Smith/What Smith means is me”. The word can also nominalise a clause (compare INSTANCE ): good→CONTENT→speak→YOU is “You speak the truth”.

e#072440 = good . On its own this means “(is) correct, ethical, honest, robust, reliable”. Senses like “nice, pleasurable” require an identified point of view or an evidential tag (see infer ): FOOD←good→feel→ME is translatable as either “I find the food tasty” or “I like the food”.

e#0c5b80 = function . This is occasionally seen as a descriptor meaning something like “useful, in working order”, but most of the time it fits into a serial verb chain to carry an instrumental argument such as function→BEAK , “with/using one's mouth”. When used with no argument it tends to add an implication of artificial assistance: go→function is “travel, go in a vehicle”.

e#0de7df = suffer . A disbenefactive, often used in serial verb chains to carry the argument that we would make the object: BUG←attack→suffer→ME , “An insect is biting/stinging me”. Like its antonym benefit it may introduce an argument that is little more than a bystander: ME←suffer→open→FACE→OFFSPRING→YOU , “Your child is happy, to my inconvenience/Your child is too happy”.

e#0fa5f0 = own , used for extrinsic possessives such as “my food” (whereas intrinsic associatives like “my child”, “my tentacles” use a specifier construction). It functions as a positional verb (compare contain , underlie ) – “I have food” is ME←own→stand→FOOD . In English “have” can mean simply “hold” with no claim of ownership; that sense is covered by other positionals or simply handy→FOOD .

E#18A564 = PEBBLE . More accurately a “smooth, rounded, nonconductive solid object”, whether that's a bead, button, or pearl; one of a family of words that are used rather like pronouns (or at least, like the pronouns in languages like Swahili that have a large number of noun classes). flow ←move→ deflect ↓ ↓ PEBBLE PROSOMA →ME “Washed by the current, it (the pebble‐like thing) bounced off my head”. There are some two dozen similar generic words for “elongated object”, “conductive object”, “hollow object”, and so on, all distinguished as casually as English distinguishes between “people”, “things”, and “stuff”.

E#1D1688 = FOOD . The word is an extremely general term for nutrition or fuel, and different verbal constructions are used to distinguish the kind of FOOD you actively catch and swallow, the kind you suck through your gills, and even (in one layer‐two text) the kind that powers a mechanical device. The standard translation for “I am eating” would be ME←BEAK←accept→move→FOOD .

e#1d42b8 = great (not to be confused with massive ), which can occur as a plain verb or descriptor meaning physically/socially imposing. It also functions as a general intensifier ( go→great means something like “charge”), though verbs are more frequently intensified simply by doubling them up ( go→go , “rush”).

e#1de1b1 = quote . This often effectively tags a subclause as an informational complement, but what it's actually doing is marking a (potential) change in viewpoint. The default is for reported speech to be “direct”, with the pronouns and evidential markers retained verbatim: speak →quote →own→ stand →infer ↓ ↓ ↓ THE ME FOOD “They said: so the food must be mine [= their own]”. Adding an argument clarifies that it's being rephrased from another point of view – so for instance making it quote→ME above would have made it “They said that the food must be mine [= the speaker's]”. As an unattributed subverb quote also allows for tagging particular modifiers as indirect, so that for instance YOU←go→finish →quote within a narrative is “you had (already) gone” – the completive marking is relative to the time being discussed.

e#213c84 = warn . A modifier indicating that an utterance is cautionary – usually free‐floating, occasionally attached directly to a particular part of the sentence. contain →stand→ BUG ↓ ↓ FOOD BUG warn “Watch out for insects in the food!” (note that there's no claim that there are insects in the food). English has syntactically distinct statements, questions, commands, and exclamations, but Europan has a considerably larger and fuzzier set of sentence types (requests, invitations, instructions, conditionals…) distinguished only by modifiers of this kind.

E#26A313 = FACE . This is more of an analogy than a translation; it really means “tentacle configuration, as used to signal emotions, recognise individuals, and so on” (with various associated metaphorical senses: for instance nearby→FACE→YOU means “in your company”). Non‐verbal communication must have been relied on heavily in situations where direct one‐to‐one interaction was impractical – see also announce .

e#2aab52 = query . A question marker, which can float freely as a sentence‐type modifier ( query perceive→nearby→FOOD , “Is there food here?/Any idea if there's food here?”), or attach to a verb as an evidential tag ( query←nearby→FOOD , “I wonder whether there's food here?”), or even be a descriptor on a noun ( perceive→nearby→FOOD←query , “What food is there here?”). Rhetorical questions, which don't want a reply, or instructional questions, where the speaker already knows the answer, may use additional sentence‐type markers (such as a floating please ).

E#2E20E1 = THAT . A sort of resumptive pronoun. When used as a specifier, it tags its parent noun as the topic, which can be referred back to by another (parallel or subsequent) use of the word as an argument. Thus for instance: own → move → adjust good → feel ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ME FOOD → THAT THAT ME “I was given food, which was tasty” (or “I liked the food I was given”). This is the nearest Europan gets to allowing an argument to be the subject of more than one verb (“They did A and B and C”). Some layer‐three texts allow callbacks to candidates in previous sentences that weren't tagged in the first place.

e#2e4fc2 = before . Human languages tend to use spatial analogies to describe time: we “look back to years gone by”. In Europan, temporal expressions are completely independent of the enormous family of positional constructions – instead it's: ME ←go→ finish ↓ before ↓ YOU ←go→ speak “I went before you (allegedly) did.” (See also finish .) This is just like the way Europan handles abstract comparatives: replacing before with more gives “I went more than you (allegedly) did.”

E#32AED1 = THIS . Europan doesn't divide up its demonstrative pronouns the way we tend to, with a “this” for pointing at nearby items and a “that” for more remote ones ( THAT means something different). Instead there's one generic pointer, THIS , and two common variants: THIS→ME (“my this”) means “the one in front of me” and THIS→YOU (“your this”) means “the one in front of you (so behind me)”. More rarely, THIS can also be used to refer back anaphorically to something within the conversation, in which case the attached pronoun is used to distinguish “the one I mentioned” from “the one you mentioned”.

e#32bd4c = contain , used with another verb such as stand to form positional expressions equivalent to the English prepositions “in/into/at”: ME←BEAK←contain→stand→FOOD , “There is food in my mouth”. The emphatic contain→great is used for “is full of”; lose→contain covers “out of/from”.

e#38d513 = infer . An evidential marker, commonly used to tag a statement as based on circumstantial data: infer←nearby→FOOD , for instance, means “(Then) there must be food here”. While they are never mandatory, and tend to be seen as redundant alongside a personal pronoun (see ME ), a variety of evidential markers are available to help distinguish eyewitness testimony, hearsay, admissions of ignorance, and so on.

e#441c5c = underlie . On its own, “be beneath (a surface)”. When it's seen from a different argument's point of view in a positional chain, the effective meaning is “on (top of)”: ME←NEST←underlie→stand→ME is “I am on my nest” (i.e. “at home”). With different verbs it can be “onto” or, as in the following, “off (from on)”: NEST ←lose→ go ↓ ↓ ↓ ME underlie ME

e#4ba174 = become . This can be used to introduce processes where something changes state of its own accord ( elderly→become ). It may also appear in a serial verb chain carrying an argument that in English would be the object of a verb of creation – “speak a word”, “carve a statue”, “tie a knot”.

e#4dc3b2 = go . As a verb of motion this may translate as “come” (among other things) rather than “go”: ME←NEST←send→go→ME is “I come here from my home”. It is also one of the commonest verbs used to construct positional phrases, covering more or less any voluntary change in location.

E#5CC3D3 = TENDRIL . The short tentacles close to the mouth. It's clear enough that having something in one's tendrils equates to being directly occupied with it, but there are a great many other contextually determined or metaphorical uses that are not yet fully understood. The expression function→TENDRIL , when used as a modifier, may mean “carefully”, “personally”, “hungrily”, perhaps even “sensually”!

e#6024e9 = next . Used to divide things into subsets which act in a specified order. Where ME←go→YOU (“I and you go”) suggests that we moved more or less at the same time, or at least that the order doesn't matter, ME←go→next→YOU clarifies that we moved successively (“I and then you go”). After this context has been established it can be used for things like next→ANOTHER , “And then somebody else did too”. Compare GROUP .

e#65184f = perceive , which refers to detection via passive senses (compare witness ): bright← perceive →quote→ great ↓ ↓ ME YOU “I can see that you are imposing” ( bright can just mean “is luminous”, but here might be translated “Something illuminates…” or “Visibly”). As an evidential (see infer ), perceive marks testimony as direct knowledge, or can introduce the “addressee” in a sentence like “I have told them”: finish ←speak→ perceive ↓ ↓ ME THE

E#65294B = ANOTHER . A specifier, as in PERSON→ANOTHER , “a different person/someone else”, or a fourth person pronoun explicitly not referring back to the established topic (cf. THAT ). Repeated uses of ANOTHER denote a different entity each time; narratives where the topic switches back and forth between two entities (“she said… then he said…”) use THAT and OTHER instead.

E#6541C3 = INSTANCE . Bundles up a descriptor clause into a nominalised form referring to a particular event, as in ME←witness←finish→INSTANCE→dance→YOU “I watched your dance/(the complete event of) you dancing”. More abstract nominal­isations can be formed with PHENOMENON ; see also CONTENT .

E#69C8C6 = JUPITER , the first proper noun clearly identified in the astrophysics texts. The full form is E#69C8C6 → E#B6BB4 , with a secondary element (also unique to this compound) which is usually dropped. Specifiers and descriptors attach only to the primary part: rotate → E#69C8C6 → massive ↓ ↓ speak E#B6BB4 “Jupiter, which is massive, is said to rotate” ( rotate is not the same as spin ). Even proper names can be doubled to convey a vague plural sense: JUPITER←massive→JUPITER , “Jupiter and so on (i.e. the gas giants) are massive”.

e#6ddbb6 = pulsate . This is used for things that physically fluctuate in overall size or shape, expanding and contracting on the spot (like, say, a jellyfish), or in one case apparently applied to electrical phenomena. The Europan vocabulary for types of motion is comparable to our vocabulary for colours, and where we can only concatenate colour terms in series (“blue‐green”), Europan has extra options like tacking motion terms on in parallel: PEBBLE→go→pulsate is an object that's propelling itself by pulsating while pulsate←PEBBLE→go is an object that's propelling itself while also pulsating.

e#74a52e = finish . It's common in sentences where we'd use past tense, but strictly speaking it tags an event as completive/retrospective (and there's an equivalent inceptive/prospective start , a continue , and various others). Actual temporal marking often uses before / after and become : ME←go→after→become is “I will (eventually) go”, three←SEASON←become→after→go→ME is “it's three seasons since I went”.

e#79669e = notable . Seen only as a descriptor or argumentless subverbal modifier, indicating that the part of the sentence it's attached to is a focus of attention and/or (like English “but”) pointing up a contrast: go→ME YOU←go→false→notable is “I go but you don't”. One layer‐three text appears to be using it to mark emotive emphasis (so that ME←go→notable might translate as “I do go”).

e#818838 = speak , the word for normal one‐to‐one communicative behaviour (“say”, “talk together”, etc.; compare announce ). As an unattributed subverb, it is also a very common evidential marker (see infer ) for hearsay: FOOD←nearby→speak , “There is (reportedly) food here”.

E#868F5A = GROUP , used to collect nouns into a set which functions as a single argument and can take shared modifiers: dance →GROUP→ YOU ↓ ↓ finish ME “We danced together” (whereas attaching the pronouns as direct children of the verb might mean “I danced and you danced”). It can also attach as a pluralising specifier ( go→PERSON→GROUP , “The people are going”), though the more normal way of forming a plural is simply to double the argument ( PERSON←go→PERSON ).

e#8c1188 = announce . For Europans, communicating over a distance wasn't just a matter of shouting louder; it required the message to be drastically simplified. The closest terrestrial analogy may be the way “talking drums” can be used to convey messages over extended distances, leaving out the particular consonant and vowel sounds and just transmitting the tone contours. However, announce was also conventionally used to mean any form of linguistic expression other than speech, so “I have written a word” is: finish← announce →function→ become ↓ ↓ ↓ ME STYLUS GLYPH

e#9000a0 = stimulate . On its own this means “be interesting, draw one's attention”, but it is also the standard verb used to express emotional reactions: YOU←stimulate→soft→FACE→ME is “You stimulate me to adopt a posture with limp tentacles”, or in other words “You depress me”.

e#9898e9 = obstruct , which can be used in positional constructions to mean something like “be in the way”, but is mainly used as a modal verb: ME←go→obstruct is “Something prevents me from (fully) going/I can't go”, while ME←go→obstruct→false is equivalent to “I can go”. Attaching things differently, ME←go→false→obstruct is “I can't not go”, while obstruct ←go→ false ↓ ME translates roughly as “I can't go, and I'm not going”.

E#99473E = ALL , used as a specifier meaning “all of/every” or as an independent argument meaning “everyone/everything, the whole lot”. Used in combination with a number, usually one , it can have a distributive sense: go→ALL→one “They each go”. With negation on the noun, nearby→ALL→false means “Only some of them (not all) are here”, while false→nearby→ALL with a negated verb (more literally “Everything is not nearby”) means “There is nothing here”.

e#a510aa = witness , used for intentional, active observation by means of sonar or electro­location. It occurs most often as the highest rank of evidential marker (compare infer , perceive ) – thus for instance witness←nearby→FOOD , “(I can vouch for the fact that) there is food here”. Many Europan idiomatic expressions apparently refer to echolocatory jamming, subtly differentiated kinds of “chirps” and “sweeps”, and so on, but the details are little understood.

e#a524a5 = schedule . An evidential marker (see infer ) used where we would expect a tense marker: it flags a situation as being reliably predictable but not yet established fact. For instance, ME←go→schedule is something like “I am to go”. Future reference can also be implied by modal verbs ( want , responsible ), or stated more directly (see finish ), and there's a sentence‐type marker declare that can announce a newly made policy or resolution and often substitutes for “will” as in “I'll do it!”

e#baa55d = stand . Of course, it doesn't literally mean “balance on one's legs”, though it can have the equivalent sense of “adopt a neutral stationary posture”. In serial verb chains, it is one of the several Europan words that might stake a claim to the meaning “be” (compare equal ): it carries the argument whose state is described by the other verbs in the construction. See move , go for the verbs used in less static cases.

E#BCB2DD = ME , which along with (singular) YOU makes up the complete set of true personal pronouns available in the language, though they can also be put together in combinations: ME ←go→ ME ↓ YOU “We are going”, or to be more accurate “I and mine plus just you, not necessarily together” (see GROUP ). In informational complements (see quote ), ME tends confusingly to mean “the speaker”. As a specifier, ME functions as an inalienable‐associative marker, “my”, used of body parts, interpersonal relationships, and the like.

e#cae75c = equal . Where we use the one verb “be” in multiple senses (“exist”, “have a property”, and so on), Europan factors them out. The verb equal can express the idea that its subject nouns are one and the same, or (by way of a quasi‐positional chain) that they form a set that other things might be members of: PERSON←equal→stand→ME , “I am a person”. A related construction can be used to derive a verbal/adjectival sense from a noun: PARENT←equal→behave→ME , “I habitually act as a parent, I am parental”.

E#CB5168 = BUG . Any member of a Europan phylum analogous to terrestrial arthropods. The gloss reflects the apparently casual way words like BUG , WORM , or SLUG were used, each one covering a diverse range of creatures. Terms like this in human cultures tend to group creatures by their superficial features, traditionally classing dolphins as fish, bats as birds, and all manner of creepy‐crawlies as bugs. The Europan system on the other hand is a suspiciously neat fit for the tree of life described in their zoology texts.

e#d6006b = three . Like all Europan number words this is an adjectivelike verb rather than a noun: three→YEAR→ME , “My years are three in number” (i.e. “I am three jovian orbits old”). All nouns seem to have been regarded as countable; FOOD→three is “three lots of food” in whatever sense is relevant in a given context. Numbers attached as subverbs indicate repetition, so go→three is “go three times”. Compound numbers involve a word glossed as tally : go →PERSON →tally→ sixteen ↓ ↓ ↓ finish three four “43₁₆ (=67) people went”. However, low multiples are often expressed by repetition – sixteen←tally→sixteen , “20₁₆ (=32)”. Ordinal numbers are confusingly off by one: finish←go→PERSON→after→three is “The fourth person (someone preceded by three) went”. It is unclear how ideas such as “three is prime” were handled; the only texts referencing mathematics are the layer‐one plaques, which rely on special notation rather than using Europan words.

E#DACB3C = PERSON ; usually in the sense of “a (specific) sapient being”, but occasionally taken to exclude children. Many expressions formed from this word with a descriptor verb are fixed idioms equivalent to agentive nouns: so for instance a PERSON→announce is a “signaller” (a traditional specialist in ranged communication).

e#db416d = false . As a modifying subverb indicating that its complement/parent is “not true”, this is effectively a negative marker: ME←speak→false is “I don't speak”. (There's also a true which is used where we might say “indeed”.) However, this negative construction is often avoided in favour of one applying the numeric subverb zero (compare three ) to convey “a total of no times”: ME←speak→zero , “I never say anything”.

E#E92AD3 = SEASON . A unit of time of unclear length (50 < x < 250 Earth days), based on a biological rather than astronomical cycle. Often used along with become in the sense of “occur, pass”: ME←go→three→become→SEASON is “I take a season to go three times”.

e#f0251f = believe , often used where we might expect “know”; but in Europan the question of whether the speaker vouches for a statement as true is usually split out into evidential markers: infer ←believe→ quote→ nearby ↓ ↓ BUG FOOD “The insect must know that there is food there.”

e#f50040 = spin . A movement modifier indicating that something is rotating around its axis of displacement, like a spinning arrow. The system used to specify direction of rotation depends on the convention that I default to turning left/anticlockwise, and my addressee is facing the other way, so “your” directions are reversed (compare THIS ): witness ←move→ spin →query ↓ ↓ STICK YOU “Can you tell whether it (that long thin thing) is spinning clockwise (‘your way’) as it goes?”

e#f8c31f = move is an element in a great many serial verb compounds equivalent to single words in English, indicating involuntary motion (compare go ) or very often just a change of state ( ME←own→ move→FOOD , “I get food”). In contexts where English would actually talk about something moving, Europan tends to be far more specific, distinguishing many different kinds of motion: “approach, decelerating”, “progress jerkily, but without obvious moving parts”, “thrash, with one point held still”, and so on – see spin , pulsate .