This is not a rule. Nothing here has been adopted. It is the fourth of the briefings, after stress, the imperative and the fragment and marking a name. With it, all four of the questions the language was already relying on are prepared.
It was called the smallest of the four, on the strength of two pages having tripped over it. Measured, it is not small.
Counted across the material — the twenty-six lessons, the thirty texts and the phrasebook — which is the scope every other count in this repository uses, and not this page, whose illustrations are the only modal + adjective strings in existence.
| Amadunia sentences in the material | 1895 |
| of those, verbless adjective predicates | 405 — one in five |
| modal followed by a verb, working normally | 59 |
| modal followed by an adjective | 0, and none is possible |
| combinations with no legal form | 111 — three modals against 37 adjectives |
The construction is not rare and the modals are not rare. They simply cannot
meet. check.py recounts every row from the material and the
dictionary, so the figures follow the language rather than this page.
The first three read 1481, 291 and 61 until September 5, 2026, and the fourth said “in any file” — which, read literally, is four, because this page prints Ca mau garam and Mi mau senang to argue that they cannot exist. Only the 111 was ever recounted.
The gap
es is a verb and chains like any other, so a noun predicate works:
Mi mau es doktor. I want to be a doctor.
Ta saufa es rafiki yu. She will be your friend.
An adjective is its own predicate and takes no verb at all, so a modal has nothing to attach to:
Ca garam. The tea is hot.
Ca mau garam. ✗ reads as "the tea wants heat"
“Wants to be hot” cannot be built.
The asymmetry that explains it
Tense works with adjectives. Modals do not.
| Ca suda garam. | The tea was hot. ✓ |
| Ca saufa garam. | The tea will be hot. ✓ |
| Ca mau garam. | ✗ |
suda and saufa are particles: they attach to whatever the predicate is, verb or adjective or place word. mau, bisa and lasim are verbs, and a verb needs a verb to chain to. That is the whole of the problem, and it is worth noticing that the language already contains the shape that solves it.
Where it bit
Twice, and both were written around rather than fixed:
- Text 3 wanted Amadunia mau es paling asan, “wants to be the easiest”. It was rewritten as mau es lingua paling asan — a noun was supplied so es had something legal to take.
- Lesson 21 wanted Legis lasim es benar, “the law must be true”. The modal was dropped: Legis benar.
Both original forms put es in front of an adjective, which copula.md forbids, and both were caught when every sentence in the repository was checked against that rule.
The options
1. Allow es before an adjective inside a verb chain. Mi mau es senang. Cost: an exception. “es never precedes an adjective” would become “es never precedes an adjective except after a modal”, and design rule 1 is zero exceptions. It is the cheapest fix and the most expensive principle.
2. Supply a noun. What text 3 does. Cost: nothing, but it only works when a suitable noun exists, and “wants to be happy” has none.
3. Let a modal take an adjective directly. Mi mau senang. Cost: nothing structurally — the modal’s complement becomes “a verb or an adjective”. The risk is that mau senang also reads as “wants happiness”, since an adjective can head a phrase.
4. Make bisa and lasim particles rather than verbs. They would then sit where suda and saufa sit and attach to anything: Ca lasim garam, “the tea must be hot”. Neither ever takes a noun object — they are pure modals — so nothing is lost. mau cannot join them, because Mi mau pan is real and must keep working.
Cost: the language gains a second particle slot but no new word, and the verb-chain rule shrinks to cover mau alone.
5. A separate verb meaning “to become”. Turkish olmak, German werden, Spanish ponerse all do this and all take adjectives. Cost: a word, and a second thing that means nearly what es means.
What a decision needs to say
Which of the five; whether the answer also covers no mau senang (not wanting to be happy) and questions (Yu mau senang?); whether text 3 and Lesson 21 should be restored to what they were trying to say; and whether punya, which is a verb taking a noun, is affected at all.
All the briefings are now written — four then, eight now. None decides anything. Together with the ordering they are what the founder needs to settle the four places where Amadunia has been using something it never granted itself.