Din mi

The twenty-eighth text, and the new lowest rung on the reading ladder: it uses only the roots the lessons have taught by Lesson 06, and no rule beyond that lesson.

Until it was written the ladder began at Lesson 10, which meant nine lessons of teaching before there was anything to read. This page was written for those nine.

Six lessons in, there is no aur, no no, no question word, no es, no preposition, no ini or itu, no adverb, no comparison and no clause inside a clause. What is there is a subject, a verb, an object, an adjective after its noun, an adjective standing as the whole predicate, the plural, possession, the two tense markers and the numbers. Everything below is made of that.

Sol lai. Pagi hao.

Mama mi lai. Mama mi beri ca.
Mi nomu ca. Ca hao.

Papa mi kula pan.
Anak keci nomu akua.

Sol kabir. Din kabir.
Mi go. Rafiki mi go.
Kita kan dunia. Dunia kabir.

Rafiki mi sema. Mi sema.

Aksam lai. Sol keci.
Papa mi lai dom.
Kita kula pan. Kita nomu ca.

Rat lai. Dom mi keci.
Anak-anak keci. Mi ama anak-anak.

Mi ama mama mi. Mi ama papa mi.
Mi ama rafiki-rafiki mi.

Sol suda go. Sol saufa lai besok.
Din hao.

Line by line

What six lessons buy

Every sentence here is two or three words, and that is not a style. No sentence can be joined to another, because aur arrives in Lesson 14, so Mi nomu ca. Ca hao. is two sentences where one was meant. Nothing can be denied, because no before a predicate is Lesson 14 as well: the day in this text is good throughout, and it could not have been otherwise. Nothing can be asked, because the question words arrive in Lesson 07. And nothing is anywhere: in, dari and por are Lesson 15, so the father comes home and the family is never in the house.

What is left turns out to be a day. The three time words — pagi, aksam, rat — carry the whole shape of it without a preposition or a marker between them, standing as the subject of a sentence of their own: Aksam lai, evening comes.

The sun does the work a conjunction would. Sol lai opens it, Sol kabir is the middle of the day, Sol keci is the evening and Sol suda go is the end. A reader six lessons in has no word that means then, so the sun is the only thing that can say it.

Gaps

Five adjectives, and the tea cannot be hot. Everything describable by Lesson 06 is describable as hao, mal, kabir, keci or cok — good, bad, big, small, many. garam, hot, is Lesson 08. The first draft of this page wrote Pagi luma for the morning is bright three times, and check.py rejected all three: luma is the noun light, so the line said morning light and had no predicate in it at all. There is no adjective for bright at any lesson, so the line is Pagi hao now — which is the greeting, and the next gap is about that.

A noun cannot be a predicate here. My mother is a doctor needs es, and es arrives in Lesson 11 — the word is met earlier and the sentence pattern is not. The one thing a person most wants to say when introducing a family is the one thing this rung cannot say.

And Pagi hao is both a sentence and a greeting. The morning is good and Good morning! are the same three syllables with nothing to tell them apart; copula.md records it as a decision the language has not made. A page at this rung cannot write around it, because the only other bright-morning adjective is kabir.

Roots used

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