Mila tahun

The tenth text. Text 9 was written from the frequency list and emptied most of its tail; what stayed behind was all of one kind — amani, arte, historia, legis, natura, numero, sansi, mati, proba, mila. Peace, art, history, law, nature, number, chance, to die, to try, a thousand.

Nine texts about tea, hospitals, letters and errands could not reach a single one of them, and that is not a failure of those texts. Abstract words need an argument, not a scene. This is the second text with an argument in it, after text 3, and the argument is what a language shares with a mountain.

Written at 300 roots, with no grammar beyond Lesson 23.

Insan hidup sen tahun. Insan mati.
Pahar hidup lebi dari insan.
Pahar hidup mila tahun. Natura no mati.

Insan suda katab historia. Historia no mati.
Arte in dom eski. Kalima in libro eski.

Legis lai dari insan. Legis no lai dari natura.
Amani lai dari insan.

Numero no mati. Uan es uan in dunia.
Lingua mati kab insan stop sema.

Mi proba sema. Yu proba sema.
Kita punya sansi.

Line by line

What the text found

Abstraction costs nothing extra. Legis lai dari insan is four words and so is Mi kupi pan in market. There is no register here, no formal vocabulary and no longer forms for weightier things — the same seventeen rules carry a shopping list and a claim about where law comes from. That is not an achievement of this text; it is what having no conjugation and no articles buys, and this is the first page where it can be seen plainly.

Negation does the arguing. Four of the eighteen sentences are no sentences, and they are the spine of it: nature does not die, history does not die, law does not come from nature, number does not die. The language has one negator, it goes in one place, and it turns out to be enough to build a case with.

The last three sentences change person. Mi proba, Yu proba, Kita punya — I, you, we. The pronouns never change shape, so the shift is carried by nothing but the words themselves, and the inclusive kita does the work that in English needs a choice about whether “we” includes the reader.

Gaps

A gap claimed here on the first draft was not one. The draft said the language could not compare durations — that lebi scales adjectives and nouns and nothing scales a verb — and comparison.md has a section headed With verbs saying exactly the opposite: the same words work on a verb, in the adverb slot, Mi kara lebi dari yu. The text now says Pahar hidup lebi dari insan, a mountain lives longer than a person, which is what it wanted in the first place. A gap asserted without reading the rule page is not a gap.

It cannot say “for a thousand years”. mila tahun is a bare time expression, and whether that means a point or a span is the question recorded in place.md about in. Here the span reading is the only sensible one, which is evidence but not a decision.

It said “does not die” four times where one word might have done. The first draft recorded this as a missing word for forever. That was the second wrong claim on this page: daima, always, is in the dictionary, and Natura hidup daima would say nature lives forever. Whether one word should carry both habit and endlessness is a real question and it is now on the list, next to the identical one about cok and “very”. What is not true is that the language had nothing to reach for.

Roots used

37 of 300.