Dom eski

The twenty-sixth text, and the first memory. Everything in it happened, and the language has one way to say so: suda in front of the verb, the same mark for a thing that happened once and a thing that went on for years.

It was written to find out what that costs. A memory is made of the difference between what was and what is, and Amadunia can say both — but it cannot say that one thing had already finished when another began, which is the shape most of a memory takes.

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

Mi ingat dom eski.

Dom itu suda es dom familia mi.
Dom itu lebi keci dari dom mi sasa.
Bage itu lebi kabir.

Pohon cang suda hidup in bage.
Anak-anak suda kimbia in bage.
Mama suda tabak corba. Papa suda kanta.

Kamra mi keci aur barid.
Uan pencere. Uan lampu.
Mi suda lala kab luma suda mati.

Sasa dom itu no es dom mi.
Insan-insan baru hidup situ.
Pohon no situ.

Mi suda go tarik itu.
Mi suda kan pencere. Mi no suda kan anak-anak.

Dom mi baru lebi kabir aur lebi safi.
Mi senang in dom baru.
Aur mi sedih kab mi ingat dom eski.

Line by line

What one past marker does

suda is in nine of these twenty sentences and it is the same word every time. Papa suda kanta is one evening; Pohon cang suda hidup in bage is thirty years. The language does not distinguish them and this page does not try: the difference is carried by what is being talked about, which is how Chinese, Indonesian and Malay carry it too.

The comparisons are what make it a memory rather than a list. Dom itu lebi keci dari dom mi sasa puts then beside now in one sentence — and the tense marker is on neither half, because a comparison of an adjective has no verb to mark. The old house is smaller now, in the remembering, which is not quite what the sentence means and is exactly what it says.

Gaps

Nothing can have already happened. Mi suda lala kab luma suda mati is “I slept when the light died”, and the sentence wants had died — one past inside another. Both verbs take the same suda and nothing orders them. The tense page settles that the verb never changes, so this is not a missing word but the price of that decision, and this is the first page to pay it in full.

No before, no after, no until. Each is open and none was invented here. A memory is mostly made of those words, and the page is written round them: every sentence stands on its own and the order they are printed in does the work.

No ago, and no way to say how long. tahun ini is this year and kemarin is yesterday, and between them there is nothing — no ten years ago, no for a long time. The tree lived in the garden and the page cannot say for how long, which is the sentence a memory most wants. Recorded with the other things the writing has asked for.

An adjective predicate has no granted way into the past. Kamra mi keci is “my room is small”, and the sentence this page wanted is my room was small. suda goes in front of a verb and an adjective predicate has none; es before the adjective is refused by the copula rule and by the checker. So the room is described in the present inside a page that is entirely past, and the reader carries the tense across from the sentences around it.

The course has been doing it since Lesson 11 anyway. Written the day after this page, and it corrects what this page first said: Dom suda kabir — the house was big — puts the marker straight in front of the adjective, where the verb would be, and Lesson 11 teaches it, twice more in the future. Five sentences in the material use the shape and no rule grants it. So the language does have a way and this page did not use it, which is the right way round: an open shape is not for new writing until it is settled, and finding it in the lessons is worth more than inventing it here would have been.

Roots used

45 of 300.