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--- In txeqli@y..., "John Schilke" <doc@c...> wrote: > Glosa has this business of "fu," "du," "pa" for tenses (only > if needed) and often it remains unused. As a semi-fluent Glosa speaker, I have to chime in here. On a side note, there is some substantial disagreement on the Glosa list right now about tense, aspect, etc. It seems that the Glosa system isn't quite complete. Anyway, the real point I wanted to make is that in Glosa, these tense markers (plus "nu" [now]) double as verb phrase markers. When you encounter one, you know you have left the subject and are entering the verb. Similarly, "u" and "plu" are the main noun phrase markers that let you know the verb is finished. There seem to be others, like "mi", but there is no concrete list so it is open to interpretation. Unfortunately, because these markers are optional, it is often difficult to parse sentences correctly. Generally it is possible by context, but often it requires one or more restarts because you hit a dead end. One example was when I recently said "mi volu auxi". I intended the meaning as "I want to-help", but it can equally be interpreted as "I want assistance". Even if I had said "mi nu volu auxi", it wouldn't have helped. The only way my meaning would be clear would be if the NP marker was required instead of being optional. Then, because I didn't say "mi nu volu u auxi", readers would KNOW that auxi was still part of the verb phrase. I hope Ceqli is able to avoid this confusion. I strongly believe that you should be able to parse almost any sentence in one try. It may take some context to grasp the intended meaning, but not the intended structure. In a language like Glosa, where any word can be used as (almost) any part of speech, and where you don't know a word's part of speech by the way it is spelled, I think the best way is to have mandatory markers between the subject, the verb, and the object. This could be a single marker, or it could be a specific list of types of words that can serve that purpose. Just my opinion, based on real-world Glosa experience. Kevin