Questions

Taught in Lesson 07.

Yes / no questions: rising tone, written with ?

A yes/no question is a statement said with a rising tone and written with a question mark. Nothing is added, nothing moves.

This is what the language has done since its first sentence (Hi! Ok?). It is confirmed, not changed.

Question words: stay where the answer goes

To ask what, who, where, when, why, how, how many, put the question word in the exact slot the answer would occupy. Word order does not change.

Read the question and the answer side by side: they are the same sentence with one word swapped. That is the whole rule.

The seven words

Six families in seven words. Each was chosen to be recognised on sight by the largest possible number of people while no one family supplies more than two.

Two details

berapa behaves like a number. It sits where a number sits — before the noun — and, like a number, leaves the noun single: berapa anak, never berapa anak-anak. This follows from the plural rule; nothing new.

A question word needs no rising tone. Kim lai? is already a question because kim is in it. The question mark is written; the voice may rise or not.

Sources for the two rules

Rising tone for yes/no is the primary or a fully standard method in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hindi, Indonesian, Persian, Hebrew, Greek and every Arabic dialect — most of the world outside East Asia.

Question word in place (no fronting) is how Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Hindi, Indonesian, Tamil, Persian and Swahili ask: ni kan shénme? (you see what?), sen ne gördün? (you what saw?), kamu lihat apa? (you see what?). By speaker count it is the majority pattern on Earth. English, Romance and Arabic move the question word to the front instead; that movement is a rule with its own exceptions in every language that has it, and it is the one thing this design leaves out.

Why this and not the alternatives

Why no yes/no particle. Every particle with real reach collides with a word already settled — and not just one or two of them:

Ten candidates from ten families, ten collisions. As with possession, the language is saying it does not want a word here — and it does not need one, because rising tone is already attested from the first lesson and is standard across most of the world. A tonal-language speaker who finds rising intonation awkward can rely on the question mark in writing and on context in speech, exactly as they do in colloquial Mandarin.

Why in-place, not fronting. Fronting changes word order, and Amadunia has exactly one word order. In-place keeps it. It is also the majority pattern by speakers and the easier one to learn: the learner builds the statement they already know and swaps one word.

Candidates for the seven words that were rejected:

kab and berapa each share a first syllable with a settled word (kabir, beri). Neither is a minimal pair — the words differ in length and stress — and both were kept for their reach.

The collisions were recounted on September 6, 2026

Both tables above were recomputed against the dictionary, one candidate at a time. Two rows were exact — ka against five, and ce against ca and ke. Eight named one collision where there were two, three or five: ne collides with ke as well as no, mai with bai, fai, lai and mal as well as mau, kam with kab and kim as well as kan. Every row names all of them now.

Two of the eight were understated in a way that mattered more than arithmetic. hal was rejected for being “close to hao” and apa for sitting “inside papa” — a resemblance and a substring, neither of which is a rule here. Both are outright minimal pairs, hal with hao and mal both, and apa with ama. The decisive reason was available and a softer one was written down.

And one row’s reason does not hold at all. “kitne begins with kita” — it does not: kitne is k-i-t-n-e and kita is k-i-t-a. kitne has no minimal pair in the dictionary and contains no root, so the page now offers no reason for rejecting it. That is left as a gap in the record rather than filled in: berapa is settled and nothing here reopens it, but the reason a candidate was turned away is the part of a decision worth keeping, and this one was never true.

The most pointed of the corrections is the smallest. The Turkish ne was rejected for colliding with no; it also collides with ke, the word this page chose for the same job. Both are “what”, one letter apart.

It is not only this page. The check written for these two tables was pointed at every rejection table in grammar/, and it found the same habit in six more: ga in tense.md named go and collides with five; ki in subordination.md named ke and collides with three; place.md under-named nine rows of fifteen. Of the 51 such rows in grammar/, 23 across seven pages named one collision where the dictionary held more, and none of them named a collision that was not real — the reasons were true and short, never wrong. Every row is complete now, and the checker requires the whole set rather than a member of it.

Open questions

• May a question word stand in a modifier’s slot? The swap rule produces it without anyone deciding: the answer is Libro ini, this book, the unknown is the ini, and swapping it gives Libro ke? — which Lesson 16 writes and glosses “Which book?”. English does the same with what book, so nothing looks wrong, and the language has no word for which. But this page describes the question word as standing where an answer stands, and ini is a modifier rather than an answer. One sentence in the whole course does it. Found September 5, 2026 while checking that a question word used as a noun predicate takes es; that check exempts the two-word case for exactly this reason, and if the answer is no, Libro ke? has to be rewritten.

• The imperative was never granted. — granted September 3, 2026 in sentence-types.md: a sentence that begins with a verb and has no subject is a command, and that is also what tells it from a statement. Anda tarik ini, Buka ain yu, Otur sini stand unchanged. Found by the fourth text.

• Fragments. — settled the same day in sentence-types.md: any constituent may stand alone as an utterance. Ke? Harga? Ponte? are legal by rule now rather than by accident, and a fragment answer inherits the tense and subject of the question.

• Adverb position — settled in place.md: place first, then time, both at the end. kab, porke, kaifa stay where they are.

• Lesson 6 asked Nama yu? with no question word. That is a yes/no-shaped question that context turns into “what is your name”. The explicit form is Nama yu es ke? Both are allowed; whether the short form should be discouraged in teaching is open.