Subordination — that, because, if, when

A clause can be an object. Nothing marks it.


Mi fikir yu hao.	I think you are good.
Mi bil ta suda lai.	I know he came.
Mi mau yu kula.	I want you to eat.
Ta sema dom mi kabir.	She says my house is big.

There is no word for “that”. A whole sentence simply stands where an object would stand.

And that is why the rule was mismeasured, twice. Every count of subordination in this repository looked for porke, kab and agar, because those are the words there are to look for. The unmarked clause has none, so half the rule was invisible to the instrument, and the eleven sentences that carry it had never been counted anywhere. The other half of the mistake was counting too much: kab and porke are also the question words when and why, and in a question they stand last, where the answer will stand, marking nothing. Ten sentences in the material are that shape and every one was being read as a subordinate clause. The material holds 50 sentences with a marker and 11 without one. check.py finds them now, by the one shape that cannot be read two ways — a verb, then a pronoun, then a predicate, as in Mi fikir yu hao. A pronoun takes no adjective and heads no phrase, so nothing else can follow it there. It is a floor and not a count: Ta sema dom mi kabir is a clause too, and it is indistinguishable by machine from a noun with an adjective, which is the same ambiguity recorded for Dom merah.

This is the same reasoning that settled verb chains: the slot was empty, so the language took it for nothing. And it answers the question those left open — Mi mau yu kula, “I want you to eat”, is a clause object, not a verb chain.

English drops “that” freely (I think you’re good), and Chinese, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese never had one.

Because is porke


Mi mau ca porke ca hao.	I want tea because tea is good.
Ta no lai porke yamur.	She is not coming because of rain.

No new word. porke has been “why” since Lesson 7, and Spanish separates the two only by a space — por qué asks, porque answers. One word does both jobs here, as it does in most of the world.

When is kab


Mi lai kab yu sema.	I come when you speak.
Kab yamur lai, mi in dom.	When rain comes, I am at home.

No new word. kab has been the question “when” since Lesson 7. English, Spanish, French and Turkish all use one form for both.

If is agar


Mi go market agar yamur no lai.	I’ll go to the market if it doesn’t rain.
Agar yu mau, kita kula sasa.	If you want, we eat now.

The one new word. Persian and Urdu agar, Hindi agar, Turkish eğer — some five hundred million speakers.

Where the clause goes

After the main clause, in the same place as time phrases. It may come first for emphasis, and then a comma marks the break:


Mi in dom kab yamur lai.	I am at home when it rains.
Kab yamur lai, mi in dom.	When it rains, I am at home.

Both are correct. The following form is the one to teach.

Why no word for “that”

Every candidate collided, and none was needed:

Candidate	Source	Reason rejected
ki	Persian, Turkish, Hindi	minimal pair with hi, ke, mi — including ke, the question word it would stand beside
ke	Spanish que, Persian	already “what”
bahwa	Indonesian	one family, and long for the commonest joiner in a language
anna	Arabic	minimal pair risk against nama, nyama families and no reach outside Semitic

Open questions

Reported questions — “I asked where you were” — puts a question word inside a clause. Tested on September 3, 2026 and no rule forbids it: Mi tanya yu nali, Mi bil ta go nali, Ta sema kim lai pass every check in check.py.

The first of those three read Mi tanya yu es nali until September 5, 2026, and it did pass every check — because no check covered it. copula.md says es stands before a noun and before nothing else, and its own illustration is Hotel nali?, “where is the hotel”, marked place word, no es. The check that holds this had a hand-written list of what may not follow es and that list was missing nali, kiri and yamin. It reads the Place group now. The sentence offered as evidence that the composition is unforbidden was the one thing on this page the rules forbid. The two settled rules already compose — a clause stands where an object stands, and a question word stands where the answer will stand — which is the same argument this page used above to resolve Mi mau yu kula. What is left to decide is whether that composition is granted or merely unforbidden, and whether a clause with a question word in it needs anything to keep it from being heard as a question, given that questions are marked by tone alone.
Although, before, after, until — the second tier of joiners. Not yet decided.