Lingua ini

The third text, and the first that is not a story. Stories exercise narrative — one thing after another. This one argues, compares and supposes, which the grammar had never been tested on.

Written at 300 roots, with no grammar beyond Lesson 23. It uses 43 of them.

Amadunia es lingua baru.
Ta punya tri-sen kalima.

Kalima-kalima lai dari dunia.
Ta-ta no lai dari uan tempat.
Cok insan lihat kalima aur ta-ta ingat:
"Mi bil kalima ini."

Kalima no sakil in lingua ini.
Yu kula. Mi kula. Ta kula. Kita kula.
Mi suda kula. Mi saufa kula. Mi no kula.
Ini es lingua asan.

Es lingua-lingua lebi kabir dari Amadunia.
Es lingua-lingua lebi eski.
Amadunia no mau es lingua paling kabir.
Amadunia mau es lingua paling asan.

Agar yu bil des kalima, yu bisa sema.
Agar yu bil sen kalima, yu bisa sema masal.
Agar yu bil tri-sen kalima, yu bisa sema umur yu.

Lingua no por uan insan.
Lingua por dunia.

Mi ama dunia. Yu ama dunia. Kita ama dunia.

Line by line

What this text tested that the stories did not

Existence. Es lingua-lingua lebi kabir — “there are languages bigger” — puts the existential es in front of a plural in front of a comparison. Three rules stacked, and the sentence stays flat.

Supposition. The three agar lines are the first conditionals written outside a lesson. Putting the clause first and the main clause second, with a comma, reads naturally.

A verb chain across the copula. Amadunia no mau es paling asan runs negation, then a verb, then es, then a superlative. Nothing needed adding.

A paradigm. Yu kula. Mi kula. Ta kula. Kita kula. The point of those four lines is that they are boring, and the language has to be able to be boring on purpose.

What the language still could not say

Four new gaps, none of them small:

1. No word for “change”. The central claim of the whole language — the word never changes — cannot be said in it. The text had to show the paradigm and let the reader conclude it. This is the most striking absence found so far.

2. No name for any country or people. The text wanted to say the words come from Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Swahili. It could only say dari dunia, “from the world”. Amadunia has no way to name a place on Earth.

3. No word for a letter of the alphabet. Twenty letters, one sound each is on the front page of the project and is unsayable in the language it describes. surat is a letter you post, which is a different thing.

4. No word for a part of speech — no “verb”, no “noun”, no “word class”. A language cannot yet teach itself.

Gap 1 also touches the still-open question of proper nouns: Amadunia appears five times here as a name, with nothing marking it as one. A reader manages; a listener is guessing.

Roots used

43 of 300.