The fable

There is a door at the end of the primer, but the rest of the language is not already behind you.

Behind it is The North Wind and the Sun. Its close translation comes first: this is the story told in a thousand languages to show what each one sounds like. A transmutation follows and asks what Phi changes when it answers Aesop. Each block has four lines: a Phi sentence, its exact gloss, a natural English reading, and Aesop's source line.

The household has prepared more than you may expect: past to, coordination with nela, the relative announcer whu, and every particle in the language, comparative mo and causative ka and passive se and optative su among them. What the fable still sets in front of you is a handful of relators and discourse words, and a vocabulary wider than one village. The glosses belong to the reading; they are not an answer key you were supposed to outgrow.

A useful first pass stays with the close translation until a sentence resists. The gloss identifies its pieces, the back-translation confirms the whole, and the source line shows what the sentence owes Aesop. Then read the transmutation and its comparison. On a second pass, you may reach for the back-translation one sentence later than before. That is the change this page is meant to make.

After the fable

Three roads leave the fable, in whatever order calls to you.

The Metta Sutta is a close translation of the loving-kindness meditation. It is harder than the fable, and a few lines at a time may be enough. Chapter twenty-seven introduced optative su over a garden and a parting; here the particle carries a whole practice of wishes and blessings.

The three-line journal from chapter twelve remains available without becoming a daily quota. A time phrase such as ha philo can open whatever few sentences the day has given you. This is one place where the language can move from the page into ordinary thought.

The manual is where every "machinery" pointer in this book leads. It holds the grammar and practices the primer deliberately leaves out. You enter it as a reader checking the reference, which is what it was written for.