Kaifa suru ca

The eighth text, and the first that tries to tell someone how to do something. Three stories, an argument, a dialogue, a poem and a letter came before it. This is the genre the language cannot yet write, and it was written anyway, to find out exactly what that costs.

Written at 300 roots, with no grammar beyond Lesson 23, and with no imperative, because on the day it was written there was none. There is one now — a verb with no subject is a command — and this text is what decided it. It is left in its original form on purpose; see Gaps for what its opening would be today.

Yu ambil akua. Yu pone akua in gelas.
Akua barid sasa.

Yu pone gelas in ates. Yu espera.
Akua garam sasa.

Yu ambil ca. Yu pone ca in akua garam.
Yu espera tri momen.

Ca garam. Ca hao.
Yu mau sukar? Yu pone sukar.
Yu mau halib? Yu pone halib.

Yu nomu ca sasa.

Line by line

What it cost

Sixteen sentences, twelve of them starting with yu. Ten are instructions that would drop the subject in any language that has an imperative — English says take water, put it in a glass, wait and needs the word once; Turkish, Spanish, Indonesian, Swahili and Chinese each do the same in their own way. Amadunia says yu ten times, because a sentence without a subject would be an imperative, and there is no rule granting one.

It is not unreadable. Recipes written as you take, you put, you wait exist in English cookbooks and are ordinary in spoken instruction. But it is the language’s first genre that comes out visibly worse than the rest, and every line of this page is evidence for a decision that is already waiting.

A statement and a command looked identical, and that is what the rule fixed. When this was written, Yu pone sukar was “you put sugar” — a description of what you do, or an instruction to do it, with nothing to tell them apart, and in a recipe that ambiguity is the whole text. The rule settled it by making the subject the difference: Yu pone sukar is the statement, Pone sukar is the command. This paragraph is the argument that decided it and is left standing as one.

Gaps

There is no imperative. Granted on September 3, 2026, and this page is what decided it: it more than doubled the count of places one was wanted, from seven to seventeen. The rule — a verb with no subject is a command, no word added.

The text is left exactly as written, because it is the record of what the absence cost. What its opening would now be:

Ambil akua. Pone akua in gelas.
Pone gelas in ates. Espera.

Four sentences, four subjects gone.

There is no word for then. The steps of a recipe are a sequence, and the language can only set them side by side. tena is “again”, not “next”. Nothing here says which step follows which — the order on the page is doing work that the grammar is not. Recorded as a vocabulary gap alongside the others found by writing.

It cannot say “wait until it is hot”. (subordination.md.) until is on the open list, so the text says Yu espera and then, separately, Akua garam sasa — the water is hot now. Two sentences where every language on Earth uses one.

Roots used

19 of 300.