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I'm beginning to get the feeling that Ceqli is a sort of mixture of English (and other Indo-European) approaches and Mandarin approaches. Since English has so many foreign influences, especially from French, it already sort of lacks unity of structure. Notice how many things can be said in very different ways, like "the mountain's top" vs. "the top of the mountain". Mandarin, too, has some oddities that appear to come from foreign influences. This really struck me when I noticed that Ceqli has the word "gi" for "during", which works as a progressive aspect particle before a verb. I assume that this is intended to mean "during" when used before a noun. If so, this is very much English word order, and very different from Mandarin, but in other cases, we are using Mandarin word order. Sometimes we seem to be using structures that don't match either English or Mandarin. My real preference would be to first define all word order in the abstract, without any reference to translations into any language. This should permit the development of a consistent internal logic, with minimal influence from any natural language. Of course, we can look at a language like Mandarin and decide on SOV and modifier-head as basics, along with some others. But then the details should arise from the basics, ignoring irregularities in any of the natural languages that we know. Failing that, I'd prefer to start from a single natural language model, and then modify it to make it more regular and internally consistent. At the moment, it's too close to 50-50, and there are all sorts of odd conflicts. It makes me crazy. (No, really. I wasn't already crazy before this.) -- Mike Wright http://www.CoastalFog.net ____________________________________________________________ "The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, however, there is." -- Anonymous