Decided on September 3, 2026. The rule is in stress.md: the second-to-last syllable of every word, and a vowel pair is one syllable. This page is kept as the record of what the decision was made on.
One figure in it was understated. It says penultimate and initial agree on 209 of the 300 roots; they agree on 266 — 89% — because the 57 one-syllable roots agree trivially and were left out of the count.
Why this is first
The poem showed what the absence costs. Read its opening line stressing DIN lai, then din LAI: both are correct Amadunia and they are different poems. Two people cannot agree on the metre of a single line, so nothing can be sung, scanned, or taught by ear. Every other open question limits what can be said; this one limits what can be spoken.
A prior question that has to go first
You cannot say “stress the second-to-last syllable” until you have said what a syllable is. In 28 of the 300 roots — 9% — the count depends on whether an attested vowel pair is one nucleus or two:
| one nucleus | two | |
|---|---|---|
| dunia | du-nia (2) | du-ni-a (3) |
| akua | a-kua (2) | a-ku-a (3) |
| mausim | mau-sim (2) | ma-u-sim (3) |
| familia | fa-mi-lia (3) | fa-mi-li-a (4) |
The affected roots are the ones containing ai, ao, au, ia, ua: ain, akua, auto, bai, dunia, familia, fai, kimbia, lai, mau, mausim, mualim, naiti, nau, sungai, tair and twelve others.
This is now recorded as an open question in phonology.md. It has to be settled first, or settled at the same time.
What the dictionary looks like
| Syllables | Roots |
|---|---|
| 1 | 57 |
| 2 | 209 |
| 3 | 34 |
Counting vowel pairs as one nucleus. Seven in ten roots are two syllables.
The options
Penultimate — the second-to-last syllable. Esperanto, Swahili, Indonesian and Malay, Polish, Quechua. Two of Amadunia’s three largest source families already do this, and so does the one constructed language that has actually been spoken for a century.
Initial — always the first. Czech, Hungarian, Finnish, Icelandic, Latvian.
Final — always the last. Turkish, Persian, French, Armenian, Hebrew.
None — leave it free. What the language does today. It is why the poem has no metre.
The finding that makes this easier than it looks
For 209 of the 300 roots, penultimate and initial are the same syllable. A two-syllable word has its first syllable as its penultimate one. The two options can only disagree on the 34 three-syllable roots — bahari, habari, kalima, kamisa, kemarin, madina, negara, numero, polisi, problema, restoran, safari, samaki, sapatu, telinga, uhuru and the other eighteen.
So the practical choice is between penultimate-or-initial on one side and final on the other, and that separates 243 of the 300 roots — every word of more than one syllable, 81%.
Two corrections, September 5, 2026. The list above named kucing and muskil among the three-syllable roots and both have two syllables — ku-cing, mus-kil — by the definition this same page spends a section establishing. They are replaced by kemarin and problema, which are three. And the last sentence read even that separates only a third of the vocabulary: the choice between penultimate and final separates every root of two syllables or more, which is 81% of the dictionary and not a third. A third is nobody’s count of anything here — the number beside it in the paragraph is 34, and 34 of 300 is a ninth. The sentence was the one that made the decision look cheap, and it was the one nobody checked.
And it is free
No two words in Amadunia are told apart by stress, and none ever can be — that would be a minimal pair, which the language forbids. Whatever is chosen, no existing word changes meaning and no text has to be rewritten. Nothing is at risk.
That is exactly why it has been easy to defer for a day, and exactly why it should be settled now: the cost of choosing is nil and the cost of not choosing is that the language cannot be spoken in metre.
What a decision needs to say
Following the shape of the other files in this directory: the rule in one sentence; whether a vowel pair is one syllable or two; which languages already do it and how many people that is; the options rejected and why; and what it leaves open — clitics, whether mi-mi is stressed once or twice, and whether the grammar particles es, no, aur, o, in, dari, por carry stress at all.