Pronouns

Taught in Lesson 09.

The set

Six forms. Four of them you already had; the other two are the plural rule doing its ordinary job.

Four things a pronoun never does here

It never changes for case. Mi kan ta. Ta kan mi. — I see her; she sees me. The same word whether it acts or is acted on. (English I/me, she/her; Amadunia mi, ta.)

It never changes for gender. ta is he, she and it. Whether the tea, the doctor or the child — ta.

The English translations cannot say that, and every one of them has to choose. 159 glossed sentences in the repository contain ta, and 144 of them assign a gender the sentence does not have — 85 she, 56 he, 3 both, 12 it. That is the shape of a language with no gender being read in one that has it, and it is not a fault in any single line. The split was 69 she to 41 he until September 5, 2026, when twelve glosses were changed for the reason below.

It was a fault in seven pages. On September 5, 2026 the material was counted and Lesson 06, Lesson 17, Lesson 18, Lesson 22, Lesson 25, subordination.md and verb-chains.md each glossed ta three to five times and only ever as a woman. A learner reading any of them in order met ta as feminine and nothing else — which is the one thing this rule says it is not. possession.md had been doing it correctly all along, glossing anak ta as “her child, his child”; Lesson 06, which teaches the same phrase, said “her child” and then said her four more times. Every one of those pages shows both now, and check.py holds them to it.

The texts are exempt and stay as they are: a character in a story keeps one gender, and text 18 has a driver, a police officer and a child taking he, she and he in nine lines, which is the point rather than an inconsistency.

Whether the glosses should instead use singular they everywhere is a real question and nobody has decided it. It would say what the language says, at the cost of 112 rewrites and of English prose that reads oddly in a beginner’s lesson. Recorded, not decided.

It never changes for politeness. One yu for a friend, a stranger, a child, a president. (Spanish tú/usted, Hindi tu/tum/aap, Indonesian kamu/anda — Amadunia yu.)

It pluralises like everything else. Say it twice: yu-yu, ta-ta, mi-mi. The rule from plural.md, applied without exception.

Two ways to say “we”

This is the one place the pronoun set has more than the bare minimum, and it is there because the founder’s first word list already contained it: kita — we, including you.

The form tells you the meaning. mi-mi is made only of mi, so it cannot contain yu. kita is the word for the group that has both of us in it.

In use

With possession, nothing new: dom mi-mi (our house), anak yu-yu (your children — all of yours), nama ta-ta (their names).

Sources

The inclusive / exclusive split (kita / mi-mi) is shared by Indonesian, Tagalog, Tamil (nām / nāṅkaḷ), Vietnamese (chúng ta / chúng tôi), northern Mandarin (zánmen / wǒmen), Hausa, Quechua and most of the Pacific. A single genderless third person (ta) is how Turkish, Persian, Hindi, Finnish, Hungarian, Yoruba, Swahili and spoken Chinese all work.

Why this and not the alternatives

Why doubled pronouns, not new words. Every big language with a regular pronoun plural does it with a marker on the singular: Chinese wǒ → wǒ-men, Japanese watashi → watashi-tachi, Vietnamese tôi → chúng tôi. Amadunia’s plural marker is doubling, so doubling it is. It costs no new words, and a learner who knows ta and the plural rule already knows ta-ta.

Why keep the two “we”s. Because kita was glossed “we, including you” from the first day; a contrast that is named must have a partner. And the partner comes free: mi-mi is what the plural rule produces anyway. Dropping the distinction would have meant either changing the founder’s gloss or leaving mi-mi meaning the same as kita — a synonym with no job.

Why ta covers “it”. One third person for everything is the majority pattern by speakers and the only one with no exception. Adding a separate “it” would reintroduce a human / non-human split — a gender by another name.

Why no formal “you”. Politeness levels are the single most common thing learners get wrong in languages that have them, and the most-learned language on Earth does without them entirely.

Candidates rejected, and why:

Open questions

• Demonstratives and there — settled: ini and itu in demonstratives.md, situ in Lesson 10.
• Reflexives (myself) and reciprocals (each other) are not yet designed.
• Whether mi-mi and ta-ta may ever be shortened in fast speech is a question for later, once there is speech.