Nothing here is adopted. The dictionary is closed at 300 roots and this page does not open it. It sets out the evidence, the candidates and the costs for a decision that is the founder’s.
aur joins and o chooses. Nothing contrasts, and conjunction.md records that as open, with the honest possibility that the language may not need one.
The evidence is six pages, and it is the strongest on the open list
Every one of these is a sentence that stopped, not a line on a wordlist.
| Page | The sentence | What it wanted |
|---|---|---|
| Lesson 12 | — No, eski. Hao! | no, old, but good |
| Text 14 | Ca garam. | the tea is hot but the night is cold |
| Text 16 | Nyama lebi eski. | the meat is cheaper but older |
| Text 17 | Tarik duan aur safari no muskil. | the road is short but the journey is not easy |
| Text 18 | Tarik baru duan. | the new road is short but slow |
| Text 21 | Pesa keci. | the money is little but the bread is good — written as lakin twice in draft, by reflex |
Lesson 12 is the one that matters most. It did not work around the gap — it invented a word, ma, and that word sat in the course unnoticed until September 4, 2026. A gap that makes a careful writer invent is a different kind of gap from one that makes a writer rephrase.
Four of the six are a bargain, a meal or a road: ordinary speech, not argument. The sixth is the one that matters most after Lesson 12’s: writing the longest text in the language, I typed lakin twice without deciding to, and the checker refused it both times. This paragraph said five of seven, and the seventh, until September 5, 2026 — the day one row was withdrawn from the table above it and the sentence reading that table was not. The contrast is not a literary device here. It is what people say about weather and prices.
Candidates, run through the rules
Every shape below was put through check.py’s own tests —
alphabet, four-letter minimum, consonant runs, attested vowel pairs, minimal
pairs against all 300 roots, and the l/r ban.
| Shape | Source | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| lakin | Arabic lākin, Persian, Turkish lakin, Urdu/Hindi lekin, and Swahili lakini | passes everything |
| lakini | the Swahili form of the same word | passes; one syllable and two letters longer |
| tapi | Indonesian, Malay | passes; reaches one family |
| tetapi | the formal Indonesian form | passes; six letters for one family |
| ancak | Turkish | passes; reaches one family |
| pero | Spanish, Portuguese | passes the rules, but stands one sound from por, which is a preposition in constant use |
| demo | Japanese | passes the rules; rejected as a false friend — demo is an English word worldwide |
| amma | Persian, Arabic | passes the rules; rejected — ama is the verb “to love”, and a listener would have to hear a doubled consonant to tell a conjunction from a verb |
| bali | invented shape, for comparison | fails: minimal pair with nali, “where” |
lakin reaches five families with one word — Semitic, Iranian, Turkic, Indo-Aryan and, through lakini, Bantu. Nothing else on the list reaches more than one. That is unusual enough to be the whole argument.
Two costs come with it, and both should be said plainly:
- The balance rule would count it as Semitic. Origin is assigned by the first language named in the entry, so a word that actually reaches five families would be scored for one. That is a flaw in the measure, not in the word, and balance.md would misreport it.
- It would be the longest word in its class. aur is three letters and o is one; the four-letter minimum for new roots makes any new conjunction the odd one out. The rule exists because the short space is full, and this is the first case where it visibly costs something.
What the rule would be
Nothing new. aur stands between what it joins, and a contrast word would stand in the same place:
| Tarik duan aur safari asan. | The road is short and the journey easy. |
| Tarik duan lakin safari muskil. | The road is short but the journey hard. |
No position rule, no new class, no change to any sentence already written. The whole cost is one root.
The case for doing nothing
conjunction.md raises it and it deserves a fair hearing. Plenty of speech gets by with juxtaposition — the road was short; the journey was hard — and the six sentences above are all readable as they stand. A language that adds a word for every shade of English risks becoming a relexed English, which is the thing this project has refused from the start.
Against that: the invented ma in Lesson 12. The other five pages rephrased; that one reached for a word that did not exist and put it in a lesson. That is what a real gap does.
What is measured and what is judgement
Measured: the six pages and their sentences, which check.py recounts; the
candidates’ pass or failure against the phonotactic rules; the family reach.
Judgement, and the founder’s: whether the language takes a contrast word at all, whether lakin is the shape, and whether it belongs in A1 as root 301 or waits for A2.