Kalima por anak-anak

The twenty-seventh text, and the first notice — a page written to be pinned on a wall and read by everybody, rather than said by somebody to somebody.

It was drafted claiming to be the only page in the corpus with nobody speaking and nobody addressed, and that was not measured and is not true. Four texts use no mi at all: this one, the recipe, and the portraits in text 6 and text 11. The recipe is the nearest thing to a notice already here, and what separates them is who yu is — the recipe’s yu is one cook following one method, and a notice’s yu is whoever happens to be standing in front of the wall. The language spells those the same way, which is the finding this page was written to reach and not the one it set out for.

A notice is made of commands and of the word everyone, and the language has the first and not the second. This page was written to find out how far the first alone gets.

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

Kalima por anak-anak in skola.

Lai in pagi. Buka pintu.
Buka libro yu. Kara.
Dengar mualim.

No kimbia in kamra. Kimbia in bage.
No kula in kamra. Kula in bage.

Leta libro aur kertas. Leta akua.
No leta kanis.

Agar yu no faham, tanya.
Agar yu bimar, sema mualim.

Gasil mano yu. Gasil piring yu.
Funga pintu kab yu go.

Skola buka in pagi. Skola funga in aksam.
Kita studi una.

Line by line

What a notice is made of

Fifteen of the twenty-one sentences are commands, and three of those are negative. A notice is the genre the imperative was granted for, and it did not exist when the imperative was granted: the briefing counted seven commands in the whole material and one text written deliberately without any.

The other six are the title, three statements about the school itself, and the two conditionals. Both conditionals speak to one reader, which no command here does: Agar yu no faham, tanya and Agar yu bimar, sema mualim single out the child who does not understand and the child who is ill, and each is fronted with a comma, which is the one fronting the rules grant.

Gaps

There is no word for everyone, and a notice is addressed to everyone. The page says yu throughout — the same yu that means one person — and only the title, kalima por anak-anak, says who is meant. all, some and none are an open question and none was invented here; without them a public notice cannot say it is public.

No word for late or early. The first line wants do not come late and says come in the morning, which is a different instruction: it tells a punctual child something they already know instead of telling a late one anything. late and early are both missing from the checklist’s time domain.

A notice wants a numbered list and cannot have one. First, second, third have no form — ordinals are open — so the instructions stand in the order they are printed and nothing says that the order matters. For come in the morning before close the door when you go it does.

And there is no word for a rule. legis is law, which is a courtroom, and kalima is a word; neither is what a notice is made of, and a rule now stands on the gap list with the rest. The title says words for the children because rules for the children cannot be said, and a notice that cannot name what it is is relying on the wall it is pinned to.

Roots used

39 of 300.