Decided on September 3, 2026. Both rules are in sentence-types.md: a sentence that begins with a verb and has no subject is a command, and any constituent may stand alone as an utterance. This page is kept as the record of what the decision was made on.
Both were already in use when it was written. Neither had ever been granted, and not one of the sentences counted below needed rewriting once they were.
What is actually in use
The imperative. This read “17 sentences” until September 5, 2026, and the figure added two unlike things. Seven were commands across Lessons 13, 16 and 19 and the phrasebook; the other ten were in text 8, a recipe written deliberately without an imperative to find out what that costs — every step of it says yu where the rest of the world says nothing. Those ten are the sharpest evidence on the page and they are not the imperative in use. They are the places it was needed and unavailable, which is the opposite claim, printed under a heading that says what is actually in use.
Recounted, the two halves are these. Text 8 has 12 sentences that open with yu and a verb, not ten. And over the four files the seven was drawn from, as they stood on the day this page was written, a subject-less verb-initial sentence occurs 10 times and says 8 different things — Anda yamin, Anda tarik ini, Buka ain yu, Funga libro aur otur, Go kiri, Go yamin, Lai kan ta, Sema tena. Seven is neither.
And the block below prints five, under a sentence that called them seven. It has printed five since the day the page was written. The two that are missing cannot be recovered: three of the eight above — Anda yamin, Funga libro aur otur, Go kiri — are absent from it, and nothing says which two of those three were meant. Recorded rather than repaired, and the sentence says five now, because five is what is there:
Anda tarik ini. Walk this road.
Go yamin. Go right.
Buka ain yu! Open your eyes!
Sema tena, plis. Say it again, please.
Lai kan ta. Come and see her.
The form in use is a bare verb with no subject. Lessons have written it that way since Lesson 10 and no rule anywhere permits it.
The fragment — 44 utterances in dialogue and the phrasebook: Ya, ok. No, bas. Corba, plis. Sasa. Besok. Madad! Ke? Harga?
A distinction the count had to be corrected for
Counting fragments naively gives fifty-seven, and most are not fragments at all. A grammar lesson that prints dom mi, tri anak or nama yu in a table is citing a phrase, not claiming it is a sentence — the same way an English grammar prints “the big house”. Only utterances in conversation are the real phenomenon, and there are 44 of them.
That distinction matters for whatever rule is written: it should govern what may be said alone, not what may be printed alone.
What the corpus scan counts that nobody said
This page drew a distinction by hand — a grammar lesson printing dom mi in a table is citing a phrase, not claiming it is a sentence — and the scanner that produces every corpus figure in the repository has never known it. Measured on September 6, 2026: 21 runs come from explanatory prose in the lessons and the phrasebook rather than from a table, a quoted line, a code block or a numbered practice item. They divide three ways.
Six are real — the closing Mi ama dunia. Yu ama dunia. Kita ama dunia. of Lesson 23 and of the phrasebook, three sentences each.
Eleven are citations: Mi kula, yu kula, ta kula in Lesson 02, Pagi hao and Rat mal in Lesson 03, Tri hora in Lesson 16, Buka mulut and No go skola besok in Lesson 26, and three more.
Five are fragments cut by markdown emphasis and not phrases at all: no es comes from a line of English prose about the copula, and kita kula sasa is what is left when a quoted conditional wraps across two lines.
Three rules were tried and all three misclassify. Presented at the head of its line drops the second clause of a legitimate practice item — Din kabir, rat keci loses rat keci — and the second and third sentences of the closing line above. Wrapped in emphasis drops that closing line entirely, since it is italic. Unbalanced asterisks finds 33 runs across the repository and among them the front page’s fourteen-word full-order example, a real sentence whose emphasis merely wraps. A rule that costs real sentences to remove citations is worse than the residue, so none was adopted.
Sixteen things nobody said, in 1799 — under one per cent. Recorded rather than
corrected, and check.py holds the count so it cannot grow
quietly. This record lives on a grammar page because
texts/README.md, where it belongs by subject, is inside
the material the scanner counts: writing these examples out there added ten
more of the thing being measured, and the checker caught it.
The imperative: the slot is free
This is the same shape as two decisions already made.
Existential es works because Amadunia never drops a subject — so a sentence beginning with es can only be existential. Verb chains work because verb-next-to-verb meant nothing before. In both cases the language took an empty slot for nothing.
A sentence beginning with a verb is the same empty slot. Amadunia has no subject-dropping, so a bare initial verb cannot be anything else. Ratifying what is already written would cost no word and create no ambiguity.
The alternatives all cost something:
| Option | Who does it | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Bare verb — what is in use | Chinese, Indonesian, English, Swahili | nothing |
| A particle after the verb | Indonesian -lah, Japanese | a word, and a new position rule |
| Reuse plis as the marker | — | makes every command polite, which is not the same thing |
| A distinct verb form | Spanish, Arabic, Hindi | breaks “no word ever changes shape” |
The last is disqualified outright: a separate imperative form would be the first inflection in the language.
The fragment: what a rule would have to allow
Every language permits fragments; none of the source languages requires a full sentence to answer a question. The options are about how much to permit:
| Option | What it says |
|---|---|
| Any constituent may stand alone as an utterance | Describes what already happens. Costs nothing. |
| Only answers and greetings may | Would make Corba, plis and Harga? illegal, and those are what a phrasebook is |
| Nothing may — full sentences only | Would make the phrasebook impossible and no language does it |
The first is almost certainly right, but it should be written down rather than left to work by accident, because a learner reading the grammar today finds nothing that lets them say Sasa.
What a decision needs to say
For the imperative: the rule in one sentence; that no subject appears; whether a subject may appear for emphasis (Yu go!); how negation works with it (No go — presumably, since no precedes the predicate); and whether plis has any grammatical role or is only polite.
For fragments: which constituents may stand alone; whether a fragment answer inherits the question’s tense (— Yu suda kula? — Ya.); and whether the existing conversations in the lessons need any rewriting, which on this evidence they do not.