Commands and fragments

Fragments are taught in Lesson 01, where the first conversation is made of them; commands in Lesson 10, where the first one appears.

Two rules, decided together because they are the same question asked twice: what counts as a sentence when it is not a statement.

A command is a verb with no subject

A sentence that begins with a verb and has no subject is a command.

No word was added and no word changed shape. The slot was empty and the language took it, exactly as it did with the existential es and with verb chains. Amadunia never drops a subject, so a sentence starting with a verb could not have been anything else. Fourteen sentences in the lessons, the phrasebook and text 4 were already written this way, since Lesson 10, and not one of them needs rewriting.

No subject, ever

Yu go is “you go” — a statement, however forcefully it is said. A command has no subject and that is what makes it one. Emphasis is carried by the voice and the exclamation mark, not by putting the pronoun back:

This is the line that keeps the rule free of exceptions. Letting a subject appear “for emphasis” would make Yu go two sentences at once, and the language has spent three hundred roots avoiding exactly that.

The one verb it does not apply to

es is a verb — copula.md says so, and it takes the tense particles like any other. So Es doktor is a sentence beginning with a verb and no subject, and by the rule above it should be a command: be a doctor.

It is not. A sentence-initial es is the existential, settled first and standing in 44 sentences: Es hotel in madina, there is a hotel in the city. That read thirty until September 5, 2026, counted the day the rule was made and not since; check.py counts it now, over the lessons, the texts and the phrasebook. The narrower rule wins over the broader one, which is how any two rules that overlap have to be ordered, and it is not an exception carved out for a word — es is simply already spoken for in that position.

The cost is named in the open questions below: there is no way to tell someone to be something.

Negation needs no new rule

no goes in front of what it denies, which in a command is the verb.

plis is politeness, not grammar

Kula, plis is a polite command; Kula is a command. plis adds nothing grammatical, marks nothing, and may be left out of any command without changing what the sentence is.

Any constituent may stand alone

A phrase may be a whole utterance when what it answers is clear.

Forty-four of these are already in the lessons and the phrasebook. The rule describes them; it does not change one.

Said alone, not printed alone. A grammar table that prints dom mi or tri anak is citing a phrase, the way an English grammar prints “the big house”. It is not claiming that a phrase is a sentence, and this rule has nothing to say about it. Counting naively gives fifty-seven fragments; forty-four is the count of things anybody actually said.

Those two numbers cannot be reproduced, and the reason is the distinction itself. Separating a phrase somebody said from a phrase a table cites is a judgement about the page it sits on, and no rule stated here makes it mechanical — which is why the sentence needs two numbers at all. A scan of utterances with no predicate, taking a quoted turn or a phrasebook row as “said”, gives 74 and 30 rather than 57 and 44. That is a different method, not a correction, and it is recorded rather than substituted: replacing a figure with one from a definition invented to check it is how a page ends up with a number no method produces. The existential count above is mechanical — a sentence whose first word is es — and is checked.

A fragment answer inherits the question. — Yu suda kula? — Ya. means yes, I ate. The tense, the subject and the verb all come from the question, and nothing needs to be repeated or marked.

Where the two rules touch

A bare verb is a command. A fragment may be any constituent, and a verb is one. So Kula alone is a command at the start of an exchange and an answer in the middle of one:

— Yu mau suru ke? — Kula.

That is context doing the work, and it is what English does with Eat. too. It is the one place these two rules overlap, and it is written here rather than left to be discovered.

Sources

Bare-verb commands: Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, English, Swahili, Turkish (git), Persian. It is the majority pattern on Earth and the one that costs nothing.

Fragments: every language. None of the source languages requires a full sentence to answer a question.

Rejected

A particle after the verb — Indonesian -lah, Japanese. Costs a word and a new position rule to say what word order already says.

Reusing plis as the marker. It would make every command polite, and a warning is not a request.

A distinct verb form — Spanish come, Arabic, Hindi. Disqualified outright: it would be the first inflection in a language whose second design rule is that no word ever changes shape.

Requiring a full sentence — no fragments. No language does this, and it would make the phrasebook impossible to write.

Open questions

• Whether a command can be softened or strengthened by grammar. English has do sit down and just go; Amadunia has the voice, the exclamation mark and plis, and nothing else. Whether that is enough is untested.
• There is no way to command someone to be something. Es doktor is taken by the existential — there is a doctor — so be a doctor, be quick, be careful have no form. Every language has these and they are among the commonest things anyone says. Found on September 3, 2026 by asking what the command rule does to es, the day the command rule was made. Evidenced by writing on September 4: text 12, a mother walking a child to a road, wanted it three times on one page — be careful, be quick, do not be afraid — and wrote two commands, a time word, and nothing at all in their places. Do not be afraid fails twice over, because korku is a noun as well.