The rule
Before a noun, es. Before anything else, nothing.
| Predicate is a… | Amadunia | English |
|---|---|---|
| noun | Mi es doktor. | I am a doctor. |
| noun | Sol es rafiki mi. | Sol is my friend. |
| adjective | Ruma kabir. | The house is big. |
| adjective | Ca garam. | The tea is hot. |
| place word | Mi sini. | I am here. |
| place word | Hotel situ. | The hotel is there. |
es is a verb. It appears when the thing after the subject is a noun, and only then.
Why a noun needs it and an adjective does not
Because of the possession rule. Two nouns side by side already mean something: the second owns the first.
| Rafiki mi doktor. | my friend’s doctor — a thing, not a sentence |
| Rafiki mi es doktor. | My friend is a doctor. — a sentence |
| Nama mi Sol. | Sol’s my-name — nonsense |
| Nama mi es Sol. | My name is Sol. |
Without es, Sol doktor can only be “Sol’s doctor”. With it, “Sol is a doctor”. The two readings never touch.
An adjective cannot own anything, so ruma kabir has no possessive reading to collide with. It needs no es, and it takes none.
Tense
es is a verb, so it takes the tense particles like any verb:
| Mi suda es doktor. | I was a doctor. |
| Ta saufa es rafiki yu. | She will be your friend. |
Adjectives and place words take the tense particle directly — in a sentence, they do the work of a verb:
| Ruma suda kabir. | The house was big. |
| Ca saufa garam. | The tea will be hot. |
| Mi suda sini. | I was here. |
There is no suda es kabir. An adjective is its own verb.
Adjective: sentence or phrase?
ruma kabir standing alone is a sentence: “the house is big”. Inside a longer sentence it is a phrase: Mi kan ruma kabir — “I see a big house”. The difference is whether anything comes before or after it. This is exactly how Indonesian rumah besar works, and it has served three hundred million people without a copula.
In questions
The question word takes the slot of what it asks about, so es stays where it is:
| Nama yu es ke? | What is your name? |
| Yu es kim? | Who are you? |
| Ta-ta es kim? | Who are they? |
| Ruma kabir? | Is the house big? — adjective, no es |
| Hotel nali? | Where is the hotel? — place word, no es |
Sources
es is the oldest and most widely shared verb on Earth. Spanish es, Latin est, Italian è, French est, Portuguese é, German ist, English is, Dutch is, Russian est’, Polish jest, Hindi hai, Persian ast, Greek eínai, Sanskrit asti — every one from the same root, spoken today by some three billion people.
The split — a copula with nouns, none with adjectives — is the Chinese rule (wǒ shì yīshēng but fángzi dà), the Swahili rule (mimi ni daktari but adjective agreement), the Haitian rule (mwen se doktè but kay la gwo). Zero copula with adjectives alone is the majority pattern: Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese.
Why this and not the alternatives
Why not zero everywhere. Arabic, Russian and Hebrew manage it, but they have case, agreement or free word order to tell “X is Y” from “X’s Y”. Amadunia has none of those; it has one word order and a possession rule that makes noun noun possessive. Zero copula with nouns was already producing ambiguous sentences in Lessons 6, 7, 9 and 10 — all corrected in this decision.
Why not es everywhere. It would add a word to every adjective sentence the language has spoken since Lesson 3, for no gain: adjectives were never ambiguous. And the tense rule for adjectives (ruma suda kabir) falls out for free without it.
Why es and not another word:
| Candidate | Source | Reason rejected |
|---|---|---|
| ni | Swahili ni | minimal pair with mi |
| da | Japanese da | d/t pair with ta |
| dir | Turkish -dir | minimal pair with din (day) |
| si | Chinese shì 是 | prefix of sis (6) and sini; and “yes” in Spanish and Italian, colliding in sense with ya |
| se | Haitian se | prefix of sen, sema, seti; recognised by few |
| adala | Indonesian adalah | three syllables for the commonest verb in the language |
| i | Tok Pisin i | one bare vowel; too light to hear |
es has no collision and the widest recognition of any candidate by a factor of ten.
Open questions
- Negation. Mi es doktor — and “I am not a doctor”? How to say not has not been decided; no is so far only the answer word.
- Existence. “There is a hotel” — whether es covers it (Hotel es?) or a separate word is needed.