Proposal: marking a name

This is not a rule. Nothing here has been adopted. It is the briefing for the third of the four questions the language is already relying on without permission, after stress and the imperative and the fragment.

The problem, measured

Two dictionary roots are used as people’s names throughout the material: Sol and Luma, which are also the words for sun and light.

This page first said Sol was used as a name 33 times and Luma 18. Those figures cannot be reproduced, and the reason is the problem itself: separating a name-use from a sun-use is a judgement, not a measurement, and it is exactly the judgement no rule currently supports. Counting every occurrence instead gives Sol 51 and Luma 19.

Forty-eight sentences are formally ambiguous. That number is reproducible, and check.py now recounts it: a sentence whose first word is Sol or Luma, where every word in it is a dictionary word and nothing says which reading is meant. Ten are in each of the two stories, four in Lesson 12, three in Lesson 11, and the rest scattered across ten more files.

It was thirty-nine until September 4, 2026, when text 15 was written for Lesson 10 and opened with Sol lai — the sun comes, or Sol comes. The text was not written about this question and reached the ambiguity twice on its own, which is the strongest argument on this page: the collision is not in the old material, it is in the words.

The forty-second arrived the same way. Text 20 had written Hora du, hour two, for noon; the language has no clock, so the line became Sol upar — the sun is up. Avoiding one open question walked straight into another, and no one chose either.

And the same string means different things in different texts. Story 1 writes Sol beri luma four times meaning the sun gives light; Story 2 writes Sol sema meaning a child named Sol says. Nothing in the language distinguishes them.

Why capital letters are not the answer

They are what the material uses today, and they work on a page. But design rule 2 is written as spoken, and a capital letter cannot be spoken. A listener hearing sol hao has nothing at all.

This is the only open question where the status quo contradicts one of the five founding rules directly.

Why it cannot be avoided by choosing better names

The obvious dodge — say a name may not be an existing root — does not survive contact with the world. A world auxiliary language has to carry the name of anyone who has one, and people are called Sol, Luna, Kanta, Mira and Nadia. The dictionary has 300 roots today and will have a thousand; every name will eventually collide with something.

The problem gets worse as the language succeeds.

The options

A personal article — a small word before the name. This is a real and widespread device, not an invention: Tagalog si, Portuguese o/a, Catalan en/na, Māori a, Fijian o, Ancient Greek, southern German. Roughly it would be X Sol hao — “Sol is good” — with X saying that what follows is a name.

Cost: one word, and it must survive the minimal-pair rule, which has killed every two-letter candidate the language has tried. It would probably have to be three or four letters.

Capitals only — keep the status quo and say so. Cost: nothing, but it leaves the language unspeakable at exactly the point where people introduce themselves, and it breaks rule 2.

Nothing — let context do it. Chinese and English manage. But they manage partly because their name stock is recognisable as names, and Amadunia’s is not: Sol is a perfectly ordinary word of the language.

A shape rule for names. Names must end in a sound no root ends in, or take a fixed ending. Cost: it mangles the name, which is the one thing a person will not accept about their own name.

What a decision needs to say

Whether the marker appears with every name or only where ambiguity is possible; whether it also marks place names (Amadunia itself is a name and appears unmarked five times in text 3); whether it is stressed; and what happens to the forty-eight sentences already written — most of which, on inspection, would simply gain one word.

That last number was thirty-six on this page until September 5, 2026, while the paragraph six screens above it said thirty-nine and then forty-two. The page that exists to give the founder one reproducible figure was carrying two, and check.py was holding only the first of them. It now holds every spelled count on the page to the same recount, which is what should have happened the day the headline was fixed.

The other question still waiting

“Want to be” plus an adjective has not been briefed yet. It is the smallest of the four: es is a verb and chains freely, but an adjective is its own predicate and takes no verb, so mau has nothing to attach to and “wants to be the easiest” cannot be built. Both text 3 and Lesson 21 hit it and were rewritten around it. Recorded in copula.md.