Taught in Lesson 02, where the first noun is glossed both ways.
Settled by design rule 3: there are no articles. A bare noun is neither definite nor indefinite, and context decides.
dom is a house or the house. Nothing is added either way, and there is nothing to leave out. Not one of the 300 roots is an article, and none ever will be.
The material has relied on this from the beginning
Forty-one nouns are translated both ways in the lessons, the grammar files and the texts, and no page has ever said why. Seven of them:
| Root | Translated the | Translated a |
|---|---|---|
| din | Din finis. — The day finishes. | Din baru lai. — A new day comes. |
| farasi | Farasi kuat. — The horse is strong. | Farasi lebi kabir dari kanis. — A horse is bigger than a dog. |
| kanis | Kanis kimbia in hutan. — The dog runs in the forest. | Kanis keci lai una ta-ta. — A small dog comes with them. |
| kalima | Kalima-kalima lai dari dunia. — The words come from the world. | Kalima no sakil in lingua ini. — A word is not heavy in this language. |
| ponte | Ponte in sungai. — The bridge is at the river. | — Ponte? — A bridge? |
| rafiki | Rafiki-rafiki suda lai. — The friends came. | Rafiki eski hao. — An old friend is good. |
| insan | Insan-insan hao sini. — The people are good here. | Insan hao. — A good person. |
A learner reading those pages meets the same noun under two English words and is told nothing. That is what this page is for.
The count read seven until September 5, 2026 — the number of rows in the
table, mistaken for the number in the corpus. Forty is the figure, and it makes
the page’s case rather than weakening it: the material has leaned on
articlelessness five times harder than the page claimed.
check.py recounts it, and it counts a noun whose dictionary
gloss is a single word and which some gloss renders “the X” and some “a X”.
Where the world’s languages sit
| No article at all | Russian, Turkish (definite), Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Swahili |
| Definite only | Arabic al-, Hebrew ha- |
| Both | English, French, German, Spanish |
More people learn to speak without articles than with them, and the ones who have them do not agree on how many. Every learner of English has to be taught that it is the sun and a house, and no rule explains it. Leaving them out costs nothing a sentence cannot recover.
Saying it precisely when it matters
Nothing was added for this. Three settled rules already do the work:
| dom ini | this house | demonstratives |
| dom mi | my house | possession |
| uan dom | one house | numbers |
Open questions
- Is anything needed when context does not settle it? Mi kan dom is “I see a house” and “I see the house” and there is no way to force one. Three workarounds exist — ini, an owner, a number — and each says more than “definite”. Whether that is a gap or the point is undecided. Recorded September 3, 2026, after finding seven nouns translated both ways with no page saying why.