Taught on the front page and in Lesson 01.
What this file fixes
Amadunia’s second design rule is one letter, one sound. Until now the
language had named that sound for exactly two of its twenty letters — c and
y — and left the other eighteen, including all five vowels, to be guessed.
Nothing here is a new decision. Three hundred roots with sourced etymologies already commit the language to these values: ca comes from Chinese chá, dunia from Arabic and Swahili, kita from Indonesian, dom from Russian. Every one of those languages reads these letters the same way, and the README’s own test — “if you can say banana” — pins the vowels. This file reads the values off the vocabulary rather than choosing them.
The one thing the evidence does not settle is at the bottom.
Vowels
The plain five. This is the most common vowel system on Earth — Spanish, Japanese, Swahili, Indonesian, Greek, Hausa and Turkish all use it, and a speaker of any of them already knows these five sounds.
| Sound | As in | Amadunia | |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | /a/ | Spanish casa, Japanese aka, Swahili baba | ama |
| e | /e/ | Spanish peso, Japanese eki, Indonesian desa | beri |
| i | /i/ | Spanish sí, Japanese ichi, Swahili nini | mi |
| o | /o/ | Spanish como, Japanese oto, Indonesian toko | dom |
| u | /u/ | Spanish luna, Japanese uma, Swahili kuku | yu |
They never change. There is no long and short, and no reduced variant away from stress: the a in ama and the a in salam are the same sound, and so are both unstressed a’s in a-ma-DU-nia. Stress makes a syllable louder, not different — the way it works in Indonesian, Swahili and Japanese, and not the way it works in English, Russian or Portuguese, where an unstressed vowel collapses toward a schwa. If it collapsed here, written as spoken would stop being true the moment a word was said aloud.
That rule read “no reduced variant under stress” until September 5, 2026, which names the wrong condition: a vowel that reduces reduces when it is unstressed. As written it promised something no language on Earth breaks, while every example under it — and the whole paragraph it belongs to — is about the unstressed syllable. stress.md, the phrasebook and this page’s own next sentence all had it the right way round. The page that defines the twenty sounds is the one that had it backwards, in the six bold words that state the rule.
Consonants
| Sound | Note | Amadunia | |
|---|---|---|---|
| b | /b/ | bai | |
| c | /tʃ/ | as in chai, church. Never /k/, never /s/ | ca |
| d | /d/ | din | |
| f | /f/ | fai | |
| g | /ɡ/ | always hard — as in go, never as in gem | garam |
| h | /h/ | always pronounced, never silent | hao |
| k | /k/ | kan | |
| l | /l/ | lai | |
| m | /m/ | mi | |
| n | /n/ | no | |
| p | /p/ | pan | |
| r | — | see below | rat |
| s | /s/ | always voiceless — as in sun, never as in rose | sol |
| t | /t/ | ta | |
| y | /j/ | a consonant, as in yes. Never a vowel | yu |
Two that need saying out loud
g never softens. In Italian, Spanish and French a g changes value
before e and i. In Amadunia it does not, because no letter changes value by
position — that is the rule. genc begins like go, not like gem.
s never voices. English turns s into /z/ between vowels — rose,
music. Amadunia does not. pesa, risi and musik all have the s of
sun.
Both follow from “one letter, one sound” and neither is obvious to a speaker whose own language does the opposite, which is exactly why they are written here.
Aspiration, and other things that do not matter
Whether p, t and k are said with a puff of air is not distinguished. pan said the English way and pan said the Spanish way are the same word. The language does not use aspiration to tell any two words apart, and it never will, because that would break the no-minimal-pairs rule.
The same goes for whether t and d are said against the teeth or the ridge behind them. Say them the way your own language does.
Open questions
- How
ris made. A tap (Spanish pero, Japanese, Turkish, Indonesian), a trill (Spanish perro, Italian), or an approximant (English)? The language has never said, and the source words point in several directions at once — rat is Indo-Aryan, rabota Slavic, risi Mediterranean, rafiki Swahili. The tap is the safest of the three: it is what Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Indonesian, Swahili and Hindi speakers already do, and it is easier for everyone else than a trill. But it is a decision and it has not been made. Until it is, any r is understood — nothing in the language distinguishes two words by their r. Where the stress falls— settled in stress.md on September 3, 2026: the second-to-last syllable of every word. It does not change any sound on this page.