Tense — Amadunia

The rule

The verb never changes. Time is shown by one invariant particle placed directly before the verb. The present is unmarked.

Time	Particle	Example	English
present	—	Mi kula pan.	I eat bread.
past	suda	Mi suda kula pan.	I ate bread.
future	saufa	Mi saufa kula pan.	I will eat bread.

That is the whole system. There is nothing to conjugate, no irregular verbs, and no agreement with the subject: mi suda kula, yu suda kula, ta suda kula, kita suda kula — the verb kula is the same word every time.

Where the particle goes

Always immediately before the verb, after the subject.

Ta suda lai dom. — She came home.
Rafiki saufa nomu ca. — The friend will drink tea.
Anak suda kan sol. — The child saw the sun.

Never after the verb, never at the end of the sentence.

When the particle may be left out

Once the time is clear, it does not need to be repeated. If a sentence has already been placed in the past, the sentences that follow may drop suda until the time changes.

Mi suda go dom. Mi kula pan. Mi nomu ca. — I went home. I ate bread. I drank tea.

Including the particle in every sentence is never wrong. Leaving it out is allowed only when the time has already been set.

Sources

Particle	Source	Meaning there
suda	Indonesian/Malay sudah	already, done — used exactly this way to mark completed action
saufa	Arabic sawfa (سوف)	the standard future particle in Modern Standard Arabic

Two different families, neither already dominant in the vocabulary. Both are semantically transparent in their source: suda literally says “already”, saufa literally says “will”.

Why this and not the alternatives

Why particles, not endings. Design rule 3 forbids conjugation. A particle is a separate word that never changes; an ending would attach to the verb and, in every natural language that has them, eventually breeds irregulars.

Why an unmarked present. It is the most common tense in speech and the one a beginner needs first. Making the default the shortest form is what Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, Thai and Vietnamese all do, and it is the single feature that makes those languages easy to start.

Why two particles, not one. Some languages mark only “not-present” and let context sort past from future. That saves a word but costs clarity, and clarity is cheaper.

Candidates rejected, and why:

Candidate	Source	Reason rejected
akan (future)	Indonesian akan	metathesis pair with anak (child) — a-k-a-n vs a-n-a-k
ta (future)	Swahili -ta-	ta is already he/she
ga (future)	Hindi -gā	minimal pair with ba, ca, go, ta, ya — and go is the verb it would most often stand next to
hui (future)	Chinese huì	introduces the vowel sequence ui, not yet attested in the language
le (past)	Chinese le	one light syllable, easy to miss in speech; and Chinese le is post-verbal, so the borrowing would misrepresent the source
mau (future)	Indonesian colloquial	mau is already “to want”; using it for both breeds ambiguity
go (future)	English “going to”	same problem: go is already “to go”

Open questions

Whether suda also covers the perfect (“I have eaten”) or whether that needs its own marker.
Whether a habitual (“I eat every day”) ever needs marking, or whether the unmarked present carries it.

What tenses an adjective predicate. This rule puts the marker in front of the verb; the copula rule puts nothing in front of an adjective, so Dom kabir — the house is big — has no verb to mark and no way to say was. The material has been answering it since Lesson 11 without a rule: the marker goes straight in front of the adjective, where the verb would stand.

Where	Sentence
Lesson 11	Dom suda kabir	the house was big
Lesson 11	Ca saufa garam	the tea will be hot
Lesson 11	Din saufa garam	the day will be hot
Lesson 20	Ta suda bimar	she was sick
text 16	Mi fikir samaki saufa hao	I think the fish will be good

Five sentences, and the lesson that teaches the copula teaches three of them. Nothing grants the shape: this page says before the verb and there is no verb, and copula.md says nothing before an adjective and this is something. It is the same kind of thing as the imperative before September 3 — a rule the writing settled by using it, waiting for somebody to say so — and it is the founder’s to grant or refuse. Found September 6, 2026 by text 26, which is a memory, needed it in its second sentence, and worked round it because an open shape is not for new writing. check.py holds the count at five so the shape cannot spread while the question is open.