Grammar21 topics

The grammar, topic by topic.

One file per decision, each recording what was settled, why, which candidates were rejected and on what ground. The grammar needed for A2 is complete.

At a glance26 rules

Every rule holds. That is the whole design.

26 claims across the 21 pages above — a page can settle more than one thing, as tense.md settles both the particle and the unmarked present. The build fails if a page here is not covered by one of them.

One letter, one sound
No silent letters, none that change value by position, none that can be read two ways. A word is pronounced exactly as written.
dunia world — read exactly as written, every letter sounded.
Syllables stay simple
Never more than two consonants in a row. If you can say "banana" and "taksi", you can say anything in Amadunia.
taksi tak-si — taxi
No two words of one length are a sound apart
Same length, one letter different. A word one sound longer is not a minimal pair, which is what four candidates were once wrongly rejected for — though it can still sit near enough to refuse, the way ese sits one deletion from es. The ban is the narrow one; the distance is measured either way. The rule that kills most candidates, and between l and r it is absolute: telling beli from beri is the hardest contrast on Earth for well over a billion speakers, and a world language cannot rest a distinction on it. It outranks how widely a word travels — dom replaced ruma, after eighty-four uses, because ruma stood against luma.
ruma → dom replaced, because luma is light and the pair differs only in l against r.
The verb never changes
Time is one particle placed before the verb: suda for the past, saufa for the future. Nothing to conjugate, no agreement with the subject.
Mi suda kula pan. I ate bread.
The present is unmarked
The most common tense is the shortest form. Once a time has been set, the particle need not be repeated until the time changes.
Mi kula pan. I eat bread.
To make a plural, say the noun twice
Joined by a hyphen. Nothing is added and nothing inside the word changes, so there is nothing that could become irregular.
anak-anak children
After a number, the noun stays single
The number has already done the work. The unmarked noun is neutral, not singular; doubling is used only when "more than one" actually matters.
tri anak three children
The owner comes right after the thing owned
Nothing is added: no possessive pronouns, no suffix, no "of". The ordinary pronoun or noun takes the slot after the noun, before any adjective, and chains to any depth.
dom rafiki mi my friend's house
A verb with no subject is a command
Nothing is added and nothing moves — the subject is simply absent, which is possible because word order is fixed and a statement always has one. Any constituent may also stand alone: the first conversation in the course is made of fragments.
Buka mulut! Open your mouth. — against Yu buka mulut, you open your mouth.
A question is the answer with one word swapped
Yes/no questions are a statement said with a rising tone and written with a question mark. For what, who, where, when, why, how and how many, the question word sits exactly where the answer would. Word order never changes.
Yu kan ke? What do you see? — Yu kan anak. You see a child.
Pronouns never change
Not for case, not for gender, not for politeness: mi, yu, ta whether acting or acted on, for anyone. Plural by doubling, like every noun. Two ways to say we — kita with you, mi-mi without you.
Mi kan ta. Ta kan mi. I see her. She sees me.
Before a noun, es. Before anything else, nothing
Two nouns side by side already mean possession, so "X is a Y" needs the verb es. An adjective or a place word cannot own anything, so it stands alone as the sentence and takes the tense particle directly.
Mi es doktor. Ruma kabir. I am a doctor. The house is big.
To deny anything, put no in front of it
The same no you answer questions with, placed immediately before the verb, the adjective, the place word or es. With tense the order is always no, then the particle, then the verb.
Mi no suda kula. I did not eat.
One word joins everything: aur
Nouns, adjectives and whole sentences take the same conjunction, because two nouns side by side already mean possession. o is or.
Angin aur yuki lai. Wind and snow came.
This and that come last
ini and itu follow the noun, after any owner and any adjective. The noun phrase order is fixed and complete: noun, owner, adjective, this or that.
dom mi kabir ini this big house of mine
Three small words mark place: in, dari, por
At, from, and to — each before its noun. A verb of motion needs none of them: whatever follows it is the destination.
Mi lai dari market. I come from the market.
Verbs in a row need nothing between them
Want to, can, must: the verbs simply follow one another. Two nouns side by side already meant possession, which is why es and aur had to exist; two verbs side by side meant nothing, so the language took the slot for free.
Mi mau kula pan. I want to eat bread.
Stress falls on the second-to-last syllable, always
Every word, with no exception and nothing to memorise. A vowel pair counts as one syllable, and a hyphen does not join two words into one for this. Until it was settled, two people could read a line of the poem as two different poems.
amadunia a·ma·DU·nia — four syllables, because ia is one vowel group.
Every letter has one named sound
The plain five vowels — the commonest system on Earth, shared by Spanish, Japanese, Swahili, Indonesian, Greek, Hausa and Turkish. The values were not chosen: three hundred sourced etymologies already committed the language to them, and this reads them back off the vocabulary.
ca, dunia, kita, dom from Chinese chá, Arabic dunyā, Indonesian kita, Russian dom — every source reads these letters the same way.
Comparison is two words, and they never change
lebi more, kurang less, paling most — each in front of the adjective, where cok already stood. Than is dari, which has meant from since Lesson 15, as it does in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hindi and Indonesian. No adjective takes an ending, so none can become irregular.
Dom mi lebi kabir dari dom yu. My house is bigger than your house.
There is no word for "that"
A whole sentence simply stands where an object would stand — the slot was empty, so the language took it for nothing, exactly as it did with verb chains. Because, when and if reuse porke, kab and agar, already known as question words.
Mi bil ta suda lai. I know she came.
An adverb is the adjective, unchanged
No suffix, no separate word class. Where English adds -ly, Amadunia adds nothing and lets position do the work.
Ta anda hayai. She walks fast.
There is no word for "a" and none for "the"
A bare noun is neither definite nor indefinite; the situation decides, as it does in Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Indonesian, Chinese and Swahili. More people learn to speak without articles than with them, and those who have them do not agree on how many.
Mi kan dom. I see a house. I see the house. Both, and nothing is added either way.
Two roots join for a number or a plural, and for nothing else
Every hyphen in the language is one or the other; not one compound word has ever been formed. Three hundred roots go further than three hundred words because things can be described with what is already there, not because new words can be built out of old ones.
Mesin ambil foto korpo anak. A machine takes a photo of the child's body — an X-ray, said with no new root and no new word.
Numbers are built, never irregular
Nine digits and three bases — des for ten, sen for a hundred, mila for a thousand — twelve roots in all. Position carries the arithmetic: a digit before a base multiplies it, a digit after it adds. So du-des is twenty and des-du is twelve, and which side the du stands on is the only difference.
du-des · des-du twenty · twelve
No conjugation, no gender, no articles
One pronoun for he and she. No word for "a" or "the". Grammar you can learn in a day.
Ta go dom. She goes home. He goes home.

Briefings6 undecided

Questions with a briefing, waiting on a decision.

Each lays out one question — what the gap costs, what the candidates are, and what each would break — so it can be settled in one sitting. None of them is a rule; a decided one is kept as the record of what the decision was made on.

Still open40 questions

Loose ends inside settled rules.

Details a settled rule has not had to answer yet — very, never, the superlative of a named group. Each is recorded at the foot of the rule it would belong to.

Which of them the writing has asked for

A narrow measure, and the useful one: a page that tried to say something and stopped, recorded at the time in a text's gaps or the phrasebook. One has since been settled and left this list. 2 of the questions have never been reached for by anything anyone wrote — an argument about order, not about dropping them.

a word for then6 pagestext 8, text 12, text 13, text 14, text 21, text 22
although, before, after, until3 pagestext 7, text 8, text 26
ordinal numbers3 pagestext 6, story 2, text 27
very2 pagesthe phrasebook, recorded with the gaps
all, some, none, every2 pagestext 19, text 27
whether daima covers forever1 pagetext 10
whether a time noun takes in1 pagetext 7
never1 pagestory 2
reflexives1 pagestory 2
superlative within a named group1 pagetext 23

Counted upstream. The ordering is held bythe checker, which counts the pages for the rows whose claim is written the same way everywhere; the rest are worded differently on each page, so the table names its sources and a reader can follow them. A question absent from it was not blocked while writing; that is not the same as being small.

Decisions are made in the open, in thelanguage repository, and the six with a briefing are listed above.