Agar yamur lai

The twenty-second text, and the first written for subordination. Of the fifteen rules a scanner can find in a sentence, it stood in the fewest texts — five, against place’s nineteen — and the two rules that were thin before it, the adverb rule and commands, each got a page of their own and stopped being thin. This is the same remedy applied to the third.

The premise turned out to be an artefact, and this page is what exposed it. Writing the four shapes out made it plain that one of them has no word in it, so the scan that called subordination thinnest had been counting only the marked half. Counting both, the rule stands in seven texts and comparison is the thinnest at six. The page is still worth its place — the eleven unmarked clauses in the material were being counted nowhere, and three of them are here — but the reason it was written did not survive being written.

The rule has three marked shapes and one unmarked one. porke, kab and agar each open a clause; a clause that is simply the object of a verb opens with nothing at all. A whole story of deciding, waiting and changing one’s mind is made of little else, which is why the subject is a journey that may not happen.

Written at 300 roots, with no grammar beyond Lesson 26.

Pagi. Mi kara surat dari rafiki mi.

Rafiki mi katab ta mau kan mi.
Ta hidup in madina baid.
Mi fikir safari muskil porke tarik cang.

Mama tanya: "Yu saufa go kab?"
Mi respon: "Mi saufa go besok agar yamur no lai."

Kab yamur lai, tarik kotor aur tren stop.
Kab sol upar, safari asan.

Aksam. Angin kuat in bage.
Mi lihat asman. Es badal cok upar.
Mi fikir yamur saufa lai.

Mi katab surat por rafiki mi:
"Mi saufa lai agar sol upar.
Mi saufa espera agar yamur kuat.
Mi mau yu bil mi mau lai."

Mi kirim surat kab mi finis.

Rat. Mi lala porke din cang.
Mi ingat rafiki mi.

Pagi tena. Yamur no lai. Sol upar.
Mi ambil kertas mi aur go tren.
Mi senang porke safari start.

Line by line

What subordination did

Eleven of the twenty-six sentences carry a clause, and between them they cover all four shapes:

The last row is the one the scanner cannot see. A clause object opens with no word at all, so nothing in check.py can count it — the detector looks for porke, kab and agar, and an unmarked clause is invisible to it by construction. This page uses three, and the table above is the only record of them. A rule with no marker cannot be measured by a scanner that reads markers, which is worth saying plainly on the page that was written to exercise it.

Mi mau yu bil mi mau lai puts one clause inside another: the object of bil is itself a sentence, and bil is the object of mau. Nothing in the rule forbids the nesting and nothing in the corpus had tried it before.

Gaps

“If it does not rain” needs a subject the language will not give it. English says it rains; Amadunia has no dummy subject, so the sentence is yamur no lai — “rain does not come” — and the weather is always a thing that arrives. That works for rain and snow and wind, which are nouns here, and it has no way at all to say it is cold today: barid is an adjective with nothing to attach to. The line was written round rather than through, and the missing weather predicate is on the list of words the writing has asked for.

No word for “then”, again (the list). The letter is written, then sent, then the night passes. Every one of those is a separate sentence in the order it happened, and the order on the page is doing the work a word would do.

“Whether” is not available and was not used. The natural sentence at the window is I do not know whether the rain will come, which is an indirect question — an open question, and not to be invented. The page says Mi fikir yamur saufa lai, “I think rain will come”, which is a different sentence: a guess instead of an admission of not knowing. That is a loss the reader cannot see, which is the kind worth recording.

Roots used

62 of 300.